Orchid Beach

CHAPTER

61

Holly waited for Hurd Wallace to arrive and take over the scene, then she drove Barney Noble to the station and booked him on three counts of homicide. Jane Grey was dead, and Holly was the eyewitness to her murder. She had never cared much for the death penalty, but now, in the case of Barney Noble, she had become enthusiastic.

When her work was done, she drove home, showered and tried to go to sleep. It couldn’t be done. She dressed in a fresh uniform and drove out to Palmetto Gardens. An FBI agent was manning the front gate.

“Where’s Harry Crisp?” she asked the man.

“At the com center, I think. I just let in some guy from the safe company.”

Holly drove into the compound and out to the com center. Federal agents, still in their black clothes and heavily armed, stood around the front door, looking bored.

“Harry inside?” she asked a man she knew.

“Yeah, Holly, go on in.”

Holly went into the building and downstairs to the vault room. Harry and a group of agents stood around watching a middle-aged man in a nerd outfit—polyester trousers, short-sleeved dress shirt, tie, pocket protector—open a briefcase, take out a sheet of paper and start to turn the dial on the door of the vault. He turned a large wheel, and the door swung open a few inches.

“Jesus,” Harry said, “how’d you do that so fast?”

“It was easy,” the man replied. “I had the combination.”

“Oh.”

“We keep the combinations of all our safes, just in case.”

Harry stepped forward, took hold of the door and swung it slowly open. “Okay,” he said, “let’s see what we’ve got here.”

Holly followed him inside the vault room, which was, she reckoned, about eighteen by twenty-four feet. She stopped and stared. The room was filled with steel shelving and crisscrossed by aisles. On many of the shelves, stacked from floor to ceiling, were shrink-wrapped blocks of currency.

Harry took a block off a shelf and cut through the plastic wrapping. “Twenties, fifties and hundreds,” he said. He read a label. “There’s half a million dollars in this one package.”

There were some whistles, then silence, as the group toured the room.

“Bearer bonds,” Harry said, thumbing through a stack of certificates. “Hundreds, thousands of them.”

At the rear of the room were two steel cabinets with shallow drawers. Harry opened them to reveal trays of cut diamonds. In other drawers were rows of gold coins, mostly Krugerrands.

Holly finally managed to speak. “This is breathtaking,” she said. “Is there this much cash anywhere else in the world?”

“Maybe at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York,” Harry said. “Hardly anyplace else.”

“Why is it here?” she asked.

“I don’t know, but I expect the computer data will tell us.” He turned to his men. “All right, I want an inventory, and I want it fast. The currency will be easy, since the packages are labeled. Count the Krugerrands and the diamonds; estimate the weight of each stone. There are gold bars over there. I want this done pronto!”

Holly followed Harry out of the vault and upstairs.

“Let’s go up another floor and see how our guys are doing with the computers,” he said.

Holly followed him to the top floor, where she was introduced to the head computer man.

“What have you got so far?” Harry asked.

“What we seem to have here are two things: one, a scheduling operation for drug shipments all over the world, from the poppy fields and jungles to the streets of American cities; and two, a collection point for cash from every corner of the United States.”

“We found a hell of a lot of that downstairs in the vault,” Harry said.

“They were shipping it out of here to points in South America and Europe,” the computer man said.

“How?”

“Apparently, in the corporate jets that brought people into the complex. Customs did their usual searches when the planes came in, but nobody searches departing aircraft. They brought in passengers and took out passengers and money.”

“We’ve already found half a dozen drug lords in residence,” Harry said. “They come here for R and R and to collect their revenues and take them home. We’re doing an analysis of the flight plans in and out of here that isn’t complete yet, but when we’re finished, we’ll know where the money was going.”

“Any idea how much money is down there?” the computer man asked.

“Not yet. Soon.”

Holly sat in the Palmetto Gardens Country Club dining room over lunch with Harry Crisp and some of his men. An FBI agent came into the room, walking fast, looking around. He spied Harry, came over to the table and handed him a sheet of paper.

Harry looked at it for about a minute, while everyone else waited to find out what was going on. Finally, he spoke. “The estimated value of the contents of the vault is a little over two billion dollars,” he said.

There was the sound of people sucking in breath, then a long silence.

“Harry,” Holly asked, “since you’re confiscating all this money on what is, after all, my turf, do you think I might be able to get a helicopter for my department?”

“Holly, I’ll get you a squadron of jet fighters, if you like, and anything else your little heart desires.”

“The helicopter will do for starters,” Holly said. “Then I’ll see what else I can think of.”