Dean Koontz - Surrounded

In Oceanview Plaza's main lounge Michael Tucker pushed open his booth door and stepped out of the stench of French perfume. He went over to the fountain and dipped one hand into the pool, splashed his face with cool water. It felt good. It ran down his neck and soaked his shirt, and that felt good too. The water flushed away the clinging perfume and the bad odor that he imagined he had picked up from talking to Kluger.

Refreshed, he started across the lounge again, toward the entrance to the east corridor, and was brought up short by a sudden, incredible idea. Somewhat numbed by the daring of the plan that had just occurred to him, he walked unhurriedly back to the fountain and sat down on the fake lavaform rocks at the edge of the pool. For some long minutes he stared into the falling water, thinking furiously. When he got up, he was grinning like a fool, though he knew he was most certainly not one. It just might work

Meyers and Bates were waiting for him by the gate at the end of the east corridor.

"What was the call about?" Meyers asked.

Bates said nothing. He was pale and even shakier than he had been earlier.

"Wait here a minute," Tucker said. He stepped into the warehouse, smiled at Chet, Artie, and Evelyn Ledderson.

"What's going on out there?" Chet demanded.

"We're about to rob the bank," Tucker said. "Then we'll make our escape."

"Not damned likely," Chet said.

Artie said nothing, but the woman disagreed with Chet. She looked at Tucker and said, "He'll do it. He'll get away."

Tucker winked at her.

Although she met his gaze frankly and studied him with icy interest, she made no response.

He searched for and found the panel of switches that controlled the mall lights. He was able to decipher the abbreviations beneath the toggles in fairly short order, and he doused two of the three overhead fluorescent strips in each of the mall's four main corridors. When he went back out and pulled the warehouse door shut behind him, he told Meyers and Bates why they were going to have to make do with minimal illumination. "This Kluger is too damned clever. And if he's able to keep watch on us, he'll soon decide there are only three of us. When he's sure of that, he might try to force his way through one of the entrances."

"But we have hostages!" Bates said.

"Kluger is the hard-nosed type," Tucker said, remembering the humorless man to whom he had spoken, the low voice like flint striking sparks on flint. "He doesn't give a damn who stands in his way."

"Surely he wouldn't kill hostages," Bates said. "And one of them a woman!"

"He'd try not to," Tucker said. "And if he accidentally did kill them, he'd still come out of it with another promotion. He's that type."

"If he comes in here, he loses a lot of men," Meyers said, brandishing his Skorpion.

"If he comes in here," Tucker corrected, "it won't matter. Because, my friends, we won't be here."

Bates and Meyers stared at him uncomprehendingly, like a couple of straightmen who had been set up for the punch line.

Then the jugger blinked and cleared his throat and said, "You've come up with something, haven't you?" He was still pale and shaky, but now he was smiling.

"You found a way out?" Meyers asked.

"A way out," Tucker said, not without some theatricality. "But not exactly a way out."

Meyers and Bates glanced at each other.

"Yes," Tucker said, "that's the best way to describe it-just like a line from Alice in Wonderland. It's a way out, to be sure-but not exactly a way out."

"What is this?" Meyers asked. "Riddle time?" He half believed that Tucker was on to something, but he also half believed that Tucker was out of his mind.

"Best of all," Tucker said, "we can go ahead and knock over the bank and the jewelry store."

"We can?" Edgar asked.

In the darker hall the red lights from the police cars that were parked outside shone brighter than they had when all three of the fluorescent strips had been turned on, and they gave everything an eerie, bloody hue

"We can take the money and the stones," Tucker said.

"You're serious," Meyers said, moving up close to Tucker and staring into his eyes.

"Sure."

Meyers grinned hesitantly, then more surely, then as broadly as he could. "You sonofabitch, you really mean it!" Meyers laughed and slapped him on the shoulder.

Bates laughed, too, but more nervously. "Tell us about it, for God's sake."

Tucker told them.

The door of the Countryside Savings and Loan Company's main vault measured eight-feet-four by six-feet-two and was, — in Edgar Bates's professional judgment, at least nine but no more than twelve inches thick. It was constructed of from twenty-eight to fifty-four layers of highly shock-and heat-resistant steel alloy, set as flush with the wall as could be done, and it had beveled seams that were half an inch deep and an inch wide where it was joined to its steel frame. On the top, bottom, and right-hand side these seams had been filled tightly with a contiguous charge of gelignite, a grayish plastic explosive that resembled carpenter's putty, although it was a good deal more rubbery and more cohesive than putty. On the right-hand side, where the door and the frame joined, there were three massive hinges as large as automobile shock absorbers, each twelve inches long and four inches in diameter. These were protected from assault by heavy blue steel casings that had been shaped to the hinge cylinders and then riveted shut when the door was hung in place. Edgar Bates had carefully molded six ounces of gelignite to each of these hinge casings.

"One of the finest vaults made," Edgar said as he worked. He was flushed and happy. "Pekins and Boulder Company of Ashland, Ohio. They're always a challenge."

Tucker was kneeling on the floor on the other side of Bates's open satchel, in front of the vault door. "Has one of their safes ever stumped you?" he asked the older man.

Bates was disgruntled by the question, and he made no effort to conceal his irritation. "Hell, no. Of course not. You know how good I am."

Tucker smiled. "Sorry I asked."

"I've knocked down and split open maybe thirty of them over the years. Not a bit of trouble any time. They're always a lot of fun, though."

The safe's hatchlike opening handle, a wheel with a two-foot diameter, the design for which had been borrowed straight from the watertight doors in submarines, was also packed with gelignite at every jointure. It was most likely affixed too smoothly and too seamlessly to the main body of the door to be easily blown loose. However, there was no harm in trying.

Bates had chiseled away the manual combination dial above the wheel, had removed the guardian plate that was soldered beneath it, and had squeezed several ounces of gelignite into the vault door's primary mechanisms. This lump of explosives had been tied to that around the wheel and to that which was molded in the door's seams by a thick gray thread of itself.

Consulting his wristwatch, Tucker said, "It's five minutes of one. You about finished?"

"Done," Bates said, getting to his feet and quickly massaging his tension-knotted thighs. Again, he might have been a Russian peasant working out the kinks in his muscles after a long day in the fields. "Except for the detonator."

Tucker rummaged in the satchel, came up with a blasting cap about half as large as a breakfast muffin. He passed this on to Bates, closed the jugger's neatly packed black bag, hefted it, and stood up.

After he had examined the cap's battery and timer to be sure they were operable, Bates set the device for a two-minute fuse. The moment he had plugged its two base prongs into the gelignite on one of the hinge casings, he said, "Let's get out of here."

They hurried around the desks behind the tellers' cages and went through a half gate into the bank's lobby. Out in the south corridor they ran sixty or seventy feet to a stone planter and stooped beside it, waiting for the explosion.