fingerprints, so get your gloves on.’
There was a ladder, but PT was light enough for his father to give him a boost. PT placed his hands flat against thick marble tiles and hauled his body into the brightly lit basement.
After the tunnel it took a moment for his eyes to adjust. Apart from the hole in the floor and his father’s muddy boot prints, PT found an orderly, wood-panelled space the size of two cars parked abreast. A staircase wound its way around a doorless cargo lift. At the opposite end of the room were huge metal doors, labelled and cage 1 cage 2. They weren’t cages at all, but basement vaults protected top, bottom and sides with thirty centimetres of battleship-grade armour plate.
The Federal Reserve supplied all currency in the United States and the cages existed because paper money wears out every few months and needs to be exchanged. When money gets tatty, banks send it to the Federal Reserve, who swap it for new bills.
If Miles Bivott’s information was correct, cage one contained several million dollars in crisp new bills. More importantly, cage two contained a similar amount of dilapidated bills, which would be impossible to track down through serial numbers.
Every Monday the money in cage two was taken out and spoiled with pink dye before being driven upstate to an incineration plant. But right now it was Sunday night and the cage might contain anything up to six million dollars.
There was no way through the armoured wall or floor, barring an explosion that would set half of Manhattan Island trembling, so Miles intended to destroy the locking mechanism inside the safe door with four expertly placed tubes of gelignite. The trouble was, the tube-holes had to be the exact same diameter as the sticks of explosive for the blast to create the correct shockwave, and he’d snapped the drill bit while making the final hole in the metal door.
‘I managed to get all the broken metal out of the hole while you went on your little errand,’ Miles explained. ‘It shouldn’t take more than five minutes to finish the drilling now.’
PT stuffed in some wax earplugs as his father unboxed a replacement bit and clamped it inside a hydraulic drill, powered from a compressed air cylinder in the chamber below. Miles aligned the bit inside the part-bored hole and used his entire bodyweight to brace the hammer action.
Drilling through toughened metal causes huge friction and the bit can easily expand and jam, so PT stood over the drill head with a jug of water. After each deafening ten-second drill burst, Miles would pull the bit out of the hole and PT would douse both the hole and the drill head with water, the first drops spitting and turning to steam as they hit.
‘That’s two hundred dollars’ worth of drill,’ Miles said, when he was satisfied with the depth of the hole. ‘I’ll drop in the explosives and wire up; you make up the train and get your brothers to pull all the equipment we don’t need back to the Unicorn.’
‘Gotcha, Dad.’
PT lowered himself through the hole in the floor and linked a pair of extra carts on to the train. Two were enough to take the drill and the last of the digging equipment. The oxygen cylinder had to be strapped to the third using a pair of leather belts.
‘Ready when you are,’ Miles said, lifting PT out of the hole as the three-cart train was hauled off by Leon at the other end.
Miles knew how to set gelignite and expected his tunnel to remain intact, but just in case, the pair retreated up the staircase and behind the lift shaft, with two lengths of wire trailing behind them. Detonation was a matter of bringing two bare ends together and Miles passed them across.
‘You do the honours, son.’
PT trembled with a wire in each hand, not because he doubted his dad’s proficiency with explosives, but because this was a moment they’d built to over more than three months’ planning and gruelling labour.
On contact there was a shudder, followed by a metallic boom and flash of light. Finally a sharp breeze wafted up the stairs and glass crashed as a picture of George Washington blew off the wall.
After giving a moment for dust to settle and their ears to stop ringing, PT and Miles took out their earplugs and hurried down the stairs.
Miles leaned anxiously into the hole to check that the blast hadn’t damaged the tunnel. There