Michael Connelly - The Black Echo

He said nothing.

“Where should we begin on it today?” she asked.

“I’ve got some things working that weren’t in the book yet. Why don’t you tell me about the bank burglary first? I need the background. All I know is what you put out to the papers and on the BOLOs. You bring me up, then I’ll take it from there, tell you about Meadows.”

The waitress came and checked his cup and her glass. Then Eleanor Wish told the story of the bank heist. Bosch thought of questions as she went along, but he tried to note them in his head to ask afterward. He sensed that she marveled at the story, the planning and execution of the caper. Whoever they were, the tunnelers, they had her respect. He found himself almost jealous.

“Beneath the streets of L.A.,” she said, “there are more than four hundred miles of storm lines that are wide enough and tall enough to drive a car through. After that, you’ve got even more tributary lines. Eleven hundred more miles that you could walk or at least crawl through.

“This means anybody can go under and, if they know the way, get close to any building they want to in the city. And it is not that difficult to find the way. The plans for the whole network are public record, on file with the county recorder’s office. Anyway, these guys used the drainage system to get to WestLand National.”

He had already figured as much but didn’t bother to say. She said the FBI believed there were at least three underground men and then at least one on top to act as lookout, provide other necessary functions. The topsider probably communicated with them by radio, except possibly near the end because of the danger that radio waves might set off the explosive detonators.

The underground men made their way through the drainage system on Honda all-terrain vehicles. There was a drive-in entrance to the storm sewer system at a wash in the Los Angeles River basin northeast of downtown. They drove in there, probably under cover of darkness, and following recorder’s maps, made their way through the tunnel network to a spot under Wilshire Boulevard in downtown, about 30 feet below and 150 yards west of WestLand National. It was a two-mile trip.

An industrial drill with a twenty-four-inch circle bit, probably diamond-tipped, was attached to a generator on one of the ATVs and used to cut a hole through the six-inch concrete wall of the stormwater tunnel. From there the underground men began to dig.

“The actual break-in to the vault occurred on Labor Day weekend,” Wish said. “We think they must have begun the tunnel three or four weeks earlier. They’d only work nights. Go in, dig some and be back out by dawn. The DWP has inspectors that routinely go through the system looking for cracks and other problems. They work days, so the perps probably didn’t risk it.”

“What about the hole they cut in the side, wouldn’t the water and power people have seen that?” asked Bosch, who immediately became annoyed with himself for asking a question before she was done.

“No,” she said. “These guys thought of everything. They had a piece of plywood cut in a circle twenty-four inches wide. They coated it with concrete-we found it there after. We think that when they left each morning, they put this in the hole, and then each time they’d caulk around the edges with more concrete. It would look like a pipeline from a storm drain that had been capped off. That’s pretty common down there. I’ve been. You see capped lines all over the place. The twenty-four inches is a standard size. So this would have looked normal. It doesn’t get noticed and the perps just come back the next night, go back in and dig a little farther toward the bank.”

She said the tunnel was dug primarily with hand tools-shovels, picks, drills powered off the generator on the ATV. The tunnelers probably used flashlights but also candles. Some of them were found still burning in the tunnel after the robbery was discovered. They were propped in small indentations cut in the walls.

“That ring a bell?” Wish asked.

He nodded.

“We figure they made about ten to twenty feet of progress a night,” she said. “We found two wheelbarrows in the tunnel, after. They had been cut in half and disassembled to fit through the twenty-four-inch hole and then strapped back together to be used during the digging. It must have been one or two of the perps’ jobs to make runs back out of the tunnel and to dump the dirt and debris from the dig into the main drainage line. There is a steady flow of water on the floor of the line, and it would have washed the dirt away, eventually, to the river wash. We figure that on some nights their topside partner opened fire hydrants up on Hill to get more water flowing down there.”

“So they had water down there, even in a drought.”

“Even in a drought…”

Wish said that when the thieves finally dug their way under the bank, they tapped into the bank’s own underground electric and telephone lines. With downtown a ghost town on weekends, the bank branch was closed on Saturdays. So on Friday, after business hours, the thieves bypassed the alarms. One of the perps had to be a bellman. Not Meadows, he was probably the explosives man.

“The funny thing was, they didn’t need a bellman,” she said. “The vault’s sensor alarm had repeatedly been going off all week. These guys, with their digging and their drills, must have been tripping the alarms. Four straight nights the cops are called out along with the manager. Sometimes three times in one night. They don’t find anything and begin to think it’s the alarm. The sound-and-movement sensor is off balance. So the manager calls the alarm company and they can’t get anybody out until after the holiday weekend, you know, Labor Day. So this guy, the manager-”

“Turns the alarm off.” Bosch finished for her.

“You got it. He decides he isn’t going to get called out each night during the weekend. He’s supposed to go down to the Springs to his time-share condo and play golf. He turns the alarms off. Of course, he no longer works for WestLand National.”

Under the vault, the bandits used a water-cooled industrial drill, which was bolted upside down to the underside of the vault slab, to bore a two-and-a-half-inch hole through the five feet of concrete and steel. FBI crime scene analysts estimated that took five hours, and only if the drill didn’t overheat. Water to cool it came from a tap into an underground water main. They used the bank’s water.

“After they got the hole drilled, they packed it with C- 4,” she said. “Ran the wire down through their tunnel and out into the drainage tunnel. They popped it from there.”

She said LAPD emergency-response records showed that at 9:14A.M. on that Saturday, alarms were reported at a bank across the street from WestLand National and a jewelry store a half-block away.

“We figure that was the detonation time,” Wish said. “Patrol was sent out, looked around and didn’t find anything, decided the alarms were probably triggered by an earthquake tremor and left. Nobody bothered to check WestLand National. Its alarm hadn’t made a peep. They didn’t know that it had been turned off.”

Once into the vault, they didn’t leave, she said. They worked right through the three-day weekend, drilling the locks on the deposit boxes, pulling the drawers and emptying them.

“We found empty food cans, potato chip bags, freeze-dried food packets, you know, survival store stuff,” Wish said. “It looks like they stayed there, maybe slept in shifts. In the tunnel there was a wide part, it was like a small room. Like a sleeping room, we think. We found the pattern from a sleeping bag impressed on the dirt floor. We also found impressions in the sand left by the stocks of M-16s-they brought automatic weapons with them. They weren’t planning on surrendering if things went wrong.”