Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld [96]
They entered a sub-basement and came eventually to a narrow arched stone door, so low they had to stoop passing through it. On the other side, Houston threw a switch; dim electric lights flickered on. They were in a large chamber with a low vaulted ceiling, filled with endless stacks of neatly arranged, crisscrossing bricks, glinting darkly yellow.
Houston led Littlemore on a tour through these stacks of bricks, which, like the shelves in an overfull library, left just enough space for persons to pass between them in single file. There seemed to be miles of them.
It was gold, all gold, as far as the eye could see.
“Pick one up, Captain,” said Houston.
Littlemore removed a bar from the top of the nearest pile. It was inordinately heavy for its size.
“Twenty pounds,” said Houston. “There is no larger store of gold anywhere on earth. There never has been. Not in the Bank of England, not in the palaces of the Turk, not in the tomb of the Inca. You are looking at the metal reserves of the United States of America, on which the credit of your government, the value of the dollars in your pocket, and ultimately the liquidity of every bank in this country depend. Have you any idea how much gold is here, Captain?”
“Less than there was on the morning of September sixteenth.”
“Most astute. How long have you known?”
“I saw one of your guards lying dead outside the Treasury with a piece of gold in his hands,” said Littlemore. “I knew you’d been robbed when I found out you tried to erase his name from the casualty list.”
“Yes, a bit heavy-handed, that,” said Houston. He took a deep breath. “The gold in these vaults is worth approximately nine hundred million dollars. Just think. The bomb, the deaths, the incalculable misery—all that for a bank robbery.”
“That’s why Flynn called in the army.”
“It wasn’t Flynn,” said Houston dismissively. “The man is a blowhard. I ordered the soldiers here, and I’m well aware it was against the law to do so. But it would have been criminal not to. I tried to get Wilson’s authorization. The President, however, is not—fully active, you know.”
“Why am I here, Mr. Houston?” asked the detective.
“We couldn’t have you telling the press the Treasury’s been robbed, could we?”
“How much did they get?”
“Oh, it’s not the dollar value of the loss that counts. Gold doesn’t have value because someone will give you dollars for it, Captain. Dollars have value because the United States will give you gold for them. The real value of gold is psychical. It is valuable because men believe it to be valuable. And because they do, gold gives men faith in the government that possesses it—or is believed to possess it. We could lose every ounce of gold in these vaults, and so long as people didn’t know of the loss, they would continue to invest in our bonds, trade in our dollars, leave their money in our banks, and so forth. Conversely, we could hold on to every brick, but if people believed the gold reserves of this country were insecure, we could have a panic making 1907 look like a baby’s fretting.”
“How’d they do it?”
“You’ve seen the new building adjacent to this one, Captain—the Assay Office? Deep within it we’ve built new secure treasure vaults, much more suitable than this musty old basement. The gold is being transferred to the new vaults. We had devised a way to make that transfer without ever having an ounce of gold leave our property.”
“A tunnel?” asked Littlemore.
“No—a bridge. An overhead bridge.”
Littlemore nodded: “In the alley between the buildings. I saw the doors.”
“Exactly. The bridge connected their second floors. It was built specially to move this gold. Triply reinforced to carry the weight. A moving automatic belt to make the conveyance of so much metal feasible. All without ever exposing a single brick to the outside world. Or so we thought.”
“You were moving the gold on the sixteenth?” asked Littlemore.
“Yes, we were. It was a carefully guarded secret. Or supposed to be. Evidently someone knew. The workmen inside reacted quite well, by the