The lead slug missed my left hip by three inches, striking the reinforced concrete floor and gouging a deep, smoking furrow in the aggregate before ricocheting into the underside of the steel currency cage. The percussion left my ears ringing with a high, sustained whistle, but the impact of the clipboard had done its work; the revolver slipped from Ray’s oily fingers, skittering across the slick floor until it slid under the bottom rail of the locked security fence, completely out of reach.
Ray lunged across the floor on his hands and knees, clawing at my pant leg, his fingernails digging through the heavy canvas. "Nathan! You don't know what you’re pulling down! If that alarm logs at regional, Vance won't just bury the shortage—he'll burn everything down to the foundation!"
I tore my leg free from his grip, kicking backward until my heel struck his collarbone, shoving him flat onto his chest in the pool of oil. With my left hand, I seized the four-ply Form 402-A from the dented clipboard, folding the thick carbon-copy packet twice and jamming it into the chest pocket of my uniform coat alongside my company pen.
"The alarm isn't logging at regional, Ray," I yelled over the rhythmic hammer of the mechanical bell. "You told me yourself. Vance cut the digital multiplexer. That pneumatic drop only trips one physical circuit in this entire building."
Fifty yards down the dark subterranean corridor, behind two inches of ballistic polycarbonate, Bobby Torres was sitting in the front vestibule with an analog hammer rattling the frame of his desk.
I spun away from the fallen guard and sprinted out of the currency pen into the main corridor.
My boots slipped on the oil-slick runner at the threshold before catching traction on the dry, grooved concrete of the hallway. Overhead, the primary fluorescent tubes had cut out, replaced by the synchronized, sweeping flash of amber and red emergency beacons spaced every thirty feet along the ceiling. The corridor looked endless in the crimson gloom, walled in by high-voltage conduits, heavy air ducts, and six-ton blast gates that had dropped half an inch into their mechanical safety catches when the hydraulic pressure fell to zero.
Behind me, the sound of labored, dragging footsteps echoed against the bare walls. Ray was back on his feet, limping heavily, his shoulder grinding against the conduit pipes as he pulled himself forward. "Bobby!" his voice boomed down the concrete tunnel, amplified into a terrifying, distorted roar by the low ceiling. "Torres! Secure the vestibule! Lock the inner gates! He’s armed!"
I pushed my legs harder, my lungs burning against the cold, stagnant air. The paper ribbon from the dot-matrix printer dug into the raw flesh of my left wrist beneath my canvas glove, while the plastic inspection tag bounced against my pulse. If Bobby panicked and struck the emergency isolation dog on his desk console, two heavy steel grilles would drop between the hallway and the glass booth, sealing me in the dark with an unhinged, two-hundred-pound guard who had nothing left to lose.
I rounded the final dogleg turn sixty feet from the exit checkpoint.
The security vestibule sat at the terminus of the corridor like a reinforced bunker. Framed in heavy structural steel, the bulletproof observation window stood illuminated from within by the sterile white glow of the desk lamps. Through the thick glass, I could see my nephew.
Bobby had backed away from his desk. His headset hung crooked across his neck, his face drained of all color under the fluorescent tubes. His eyes were wide, staring in paralyzed horror at the cast-iron warning bell mounted to the wall above his head, where an external brass striker was physically pounding against the gong at ninety beats a minute. On his desk, the auxiliary monitors continued to display their smooth, silent feeds: the outer parking lot, the loading ramp, the perimeter fence, and monitor four—which still showed the primary vault corridor completely empty, quiet, and pristine.
I hit the outer security glass with both open palms, the impact producing a heavy, deadened thud that barely penetrated the soundproofing.
"Bobby!" I shouted, pressing my face close to the speak-through grille set into the lower steel frame. "Bobby, hit the manual release on the inner hatch! Look at me! Look through the glass!"
The kid flinched, his boots stumbling over his swivel chair as he spun toward the window. For a second, his brain couldn't reconcile what he was seeing. On the screen three feet to his right, monitor four showed a clean, brightly lit, empty hallway without a soul in sight. But through the actual window, twelve inches in front of his face, his uncle was standing in the red-strobed gloom, spattered from neck to knee in gray hydraulic oil, his breathing ragged and his face bruised.