The Rescue Artist

33

“Hands Up!”

The Norwegian cops, in the meantime, had their own trouble sleeping. “The thing keeping me up at night,” said Leif Lier, the Norwegian detective, “was worrying that the undercover agents would be hurt or killed, because we didn’t know who the criminals were.”

Charley Hill had more regard for Lier than he did for most cops, but he didn’t share Lier’s concern. Though Hill was the least laid-back of men, his own well-being was not a subject that engaged him. Let someone venture a foolish opinion on, say, the French Revolution, and Hill would scowl and leap to correct the record. If the conversation turned to his own safety, he would drift off.

Before 1994, Hill’s closest call had come in a counterfeit money case. In autumn 1988, Hill was undercover as a crooked American businessman named Charles Gray. He had heard rumors about someone looking to sell serious quantities of counterfeit hundred-dollar bills. Hill, as Gray, put out word that he might be interested. Soon a shady used-car dealer outside London made an approach. The dealer handed over a few of the counterfeit hundreds.

Hill took them to a friend at the U.S. embassy, a Secret Service man with a plum posting in London. Hill’s friend oohed and ahhed. Franklin’s portrait, the shading—these bills were superb. The Secret Service had picked up whispers about a giant shipment of counterfeit money coming into Britain from Italy. These were thieves worth going after. Scotland Yard agreed. Anything to help their American colleagues. Charles Gray met with the car dealer contact to work out a deal. A bit of haggling and then a handshake—Gray would pay £60,000 for a cool $1 million in phony but virtually undetectable hundred-dollar bills.

Hill booked a ground-floor room at a Holiday Inn near Heathrow Airport for the handover. Though he liked to freelance, this job was not to be an improvised solo act. The Counterfeit Currency Squad was in charge, and the Regional Crime Squad was on hand, too. Hill’s hotel room was bugged, to obtain evidence for an eventual trial, and a surveillance team was in place. The Counterfeit Squad gave Hill a briefcase with £60,000 in cash.

Hill met the car dealer at the Holiday Inn. The counterfeit hundreds, the man said, were in a valise in his car, in the parking lot. Hill and the dealer walked to the car, and Hill picked up the case with the phony bills. Immediately, he knew there was trouble. A million bucks in hundreds should have weighed about twenty pounds. This case was far too light.

Hill played along. Carrying the valise with the counterfeit bills, he walked back inside and turned down the hotel corridor to his room, where he had left his briefcase and its £60,000. The car dealer was by his side. Suddenly two men in stocking masks leapt out.

One robber jammed a sawed-off shotgun into Hill’s back. The two masked men hustled Hill and the car dealer down the hall and into Hill’s room. Shoving Hill toward the middle of the room, one robber forced him face-down on the bed. He pressed the shotgun hard into the back of Hill’s neck, below his right ear, and yanked his arms behind his back. Zzzzpppff! Duct tape. For criminals, tape was more convenient than handcuffs or rope. First the hands, then the ankles. In moments Hill was trussed and helpless.

With his face mashed into the bedspread, Hill found that his glasses reflected glimpses of the room behind him. He occupied himself by trying to memorize his captors’ clothing, in case he ever had a chance to testify in court.

The robbers tied up the car dealer, too, but—though Hill had no way of knowing this—not as tightly. The robbers and the car dealer were in cahoots, it would turn out later, and they had cooked up a simple scheme: the robbers would flee with their £60,000 profit and with the counterfeit money, too, to use another day. The car dealer would eventually work himself free and would then free Gray. The duped buyer would slink away—he could hardly go to the police to tell them he’d been robbed—and the thieves would live happily ever after.

The police plan had gone ludicrously wrong. When Hill had left the hotel to pick up the counterfeit money in the parking lot, a team of cops had tailed him. When Hill returned to the hotel, the backup team found that they had locked themselves out of the fire escape door.

In the meantime, the surveillance cops holed up in the hotel room next to Hill’s were preparing their recording gear. They had no idea that Hill had been mugged in the hallway. When the scene finally shifted to Hill’s room, they found themselves eavesdropping on a robbery. Convinced that Hill was about to be killed, they called in the troops. In came the nearest armed police, with machine guns, from nearby Heathrow. In came a police helicopter, hovering low over the hotel, rotor blades whooping through the air, strobe lights flashing.

The cops who were already on the scene, unarmed and reduced to play-acting, did their best. One cop standing in the parking lot outside Hill’s room smashed his hand through the window (slicing himself badly) and shouted “Armed police!” Other cops followed his lead, shoving their hands through the broken window and into the curtains, pretending to have guns. Down the hallway thundered two more cops shouting “Armed police!” though they were only pointing the antennas of their radios.

The crooks might have shot Hill or fired at the cops. Instead, they fled. Out the door and down the hall they ran, cops in pursuit. Moments later, they were tackled and arrested.

The crooked car dealer hadn’t managed to make a break. Too slow in freeing himself, he was still wrapped up in duct tape when the police crashed in. The police untied Hill and handcuffed the crook. Hill fixed himself a drink at the minibar. He raised his glass to his former partner in crime. “You don’t mind if I don’t offer you one?”

Hill relished such cinematic moments. What could be better than an adrenaline-pumping adventure that featured large helpings of danger, stupidity, and bravery and then wrapped itself up in a happy ending and a wisecrack from the hero? Somewhere in the back of Charley Hill’s attic of a mind, Casablanca is always on the bill and Hill himself is Bogey.

Hill turned over the £60,000 pounds and the counterfeit money to the police and made his way out of the hotel. A crowd had gathered. Tourists gawked in the lobby, trying to sort out what had happened. The waiters and chefs from the restaurant craned their heads to look. Hill threaded his way through the crowd to the reception desk.

“I’d like to book out. I didn’t like my room.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. What was the matter?”

“It was too noisy.”

By the time Hill had finished with a police debriefing and driven home, it was three in the morning. At five-thirty, the doorbell rang. It was Sid Walker. He and Hill had an informant to meet, in connection with the paintings stolen from Russborough House in Dublin.

“They’re talking about the counterfeit deal on the radio,” Sid said. “Well done.” Walker had absorbed the details of the story from the radio announcers’ breathless reports, but his own style was as understated as theirs was shrill. By his standards, his few words were close to a hymn of praise.

“Well, I’m a bit knackered now.”

Hill’s wife, Caro, had been roused by the doorbell and the sound of her husband talking to someone. Hill hadn’t woken her when he’d come in the night before. She stumbled downstairs and greeted Walker, an old friend.

“How’d it go?” she asked.

Sid chimed in. “Oh, it went very well. It’s on the news.”

Caro noticed the angry red scrape just above Charley’s collar. “What’s that on your neck?”

Sid stepped closer to see for himself. “It looks like the mark of a double-barreled shotgun,” he said deadpan, as if he were doing his earnest best to be helpful.