Takeover - Lisa Black [20]
“He’s a bank examiner, division of consumer affairs. He monitors banks’ operations regarding credit, truth-in-lending laws, interest rates.”
“So maybe he found out something about a bank that they wanted to hide,” Cavanaugh suggested.
“No,” Kessler said immediately. “Ludlow would have shared any information with the division head. He just got here—Ludlow, I mean. He transferred from the Atlanta bank, not a month ago, so he’s still learning our idiosyncratic little ways of doing things. Any officer at the banks we govern would know that killing Ludlow wouldn’t hide damaging information, and besides, banks don’t do things like that.”
Theresa caught a grin before it made it to her lips. She couldn’t smile. Paul might end up dead.
Jason worked on a different theory. “They must have tried to make Ludlow tell them how to break into the bank.”
Cavanaugh drummed his fingers along the phone receiver, frowning in thought. “But why pick a guy who’s only been there a month?”
“There weren’t any signs of torture on the body,” Theresa said. “The killer hit Ludlow in the head a few times, and that was that.”
Frank took out a cigarette but refrained, under Ms. Elliott’s wary eye, from lighting up. “Maybe he had enemies in Atlanta and they followed him here. But then why rob the bank? Some sort of afterthought?”
“He told them something before he died,” Jason said. “Something worth breaking into a Federal Reserve for.”
“What’s happening over there today?” Cavanaugh asked Kessler. “What’s special?”
The man shrugged. “Nothing. The daily routine: financial analyses, a meeting or two. Banks might come in for some cash transactions, but nothing all that big, except—” He stared at the portrait of Clio, but the muse seemed to make him uneasy and he turned to Apollo and Hyacinthus instead.
“Except?”
“The money shred.”
The room’s occupants waited for the man to explain about destroying what they all worked so hard to accumulate.
“We handle sending out new currency from the Bureau of Engraving in D.C., and the worn-out bills come to us to be destroyed, shredded. We exchanged old notes for new for the Bank One system yesterday. The old money will be shredded this afternoon—or would have been.”
“How much money are we talking?”
“In addition to what we usually have sitting around, probably about seven or eight million dollars.”
The room grew even more hushed, no doubt as people tried to picture $8 million. Just sitting around.
“Would Ludlow have overseen this?” Frank asked.
“No. It’s got nothing to do with him. He probably couldn’t even find that area of the tunnels if he went looking for it. Besides, most of the process is done by robots.”
“Robots?” Frank tapped his unlit cigarette on the table. “Like R2-D2?”
“More like forklifts without drivers.”
Cavanaugh leaned forward. “And old money wouldn’t have sequential numbers, would be nice and innocuous-looking to use. Let’s assume that’s what these guys are after. What route would they need to take to get to the money?”
“From the lobby? There isn’t one. They’d have to take an elevator from the employee lobby, and I thought you said security had that blocked off.”
“They have it covered,” the negotiator clarified. That, Theresa thought, must be the hallway and elevator bank behind the hostages, past the information desk.
“Then, from the elevator, they’d need a key card to get past the double doors on Sublevel One, and then another to get into the shredding room without setting off the alarm. Not to mention the fact that all these areas have cameras.”
“They can’t be too concerned about that.” Cavanaugh gestured toward the television monitor. “We already have them on camera.”
The vice president turned to stare at the sight of his employees crouched on the floor, hands behind their heads. He half stood, then sank back into the hard wooden chair like a deflating balloon. He’s getting it now, Theresa thought. The futility. The helplessness.
Maybe not. “How are you picking up this video?”
“Streaming Internet link,