Карин Слотер - Cleaning the Gold

“We didn't have the raw resources to make it ourselves.”

“Whatever.” Baldani led him down the hall.

Two more guards stood outside a pair of large, wooden doors. The hinges were polished brass, as long and wide as an outstretched Corgi. Will looked up, carefully studying the individual block letters carved into the arch. Each one was at least three inches deep into the stone, a chisel and hammer digging out the meat of the marble to form the words—

UNITED STATES DEPOSITORY

Baldani asked, “You gonna eye-fuck that sign all day or you wanna go inside?”

The two men muscled apart the wooden doors, and just like that, Will found himself standing at the open vault door. Four armed guards blocked a long, white hallway. The Mint Police. They wore Kevlar vests with the seal of the US Department of Treasury on their chests. Will counted three weapons on each of them, which meant there were probably more he wasn't seeing.

Will had to touch the vault door. The stainless steel was cold under his palm. It was massive, as thick as three grown men and twice his height.

Baldani said, “Takes four people to open that bad bitch. They have to memorize their own combinations, given to them verbally by the Secretary of the Treasury. Nobody can watch them spin it in. Then the wheel gets turned fourteen times to pull back the bolts.”

Baldani walked inside, so Will walked inside.

The opulence stopped at the door. Will was reminded of every single government building he'd ever been through. Low ceilings. Exposed air conditioning ducts. White paint that had turned yellow two days after it was slathered onto the concrete blocks. Cracked tile floors. Dirty grout. Multicolored wires leading to nowhere.

The temperature dropped another ten degrees. They were going down a steep slope. The walls were lined with smaller versions of the main vault door. Blue signs were posted beside each one. Ribbons hung like police tape from one side of the jamb to the other. Clear plastic envelopes dangled from the ribbons. Will squinted at the lines of type on the papers, but all he saw was row after row of numbers. He assumed they corresponded to serial numbers on the gold bars. He longed to stop and examine each one, to open the stainless-steel-clad doors and peer inside. There were no windows. Each door had two sets of combination dials and a keyed lock straight out of a supermax.

Baldani turned down another hallway. Will looked up. The lights were Xenon, bright enough to pull the intricate details out of the grout between the tiles. He could hear music playing. The sound echoed off the hard surfaces. He took another turn. More vault doors. More signs. More ribbons. Every thirty feet, there was a red phone mounted on the wall, the rotary dial gleaming in the unnatural light.

Up ahead, Baldani turned another corner. The music was louder. Hoobastank, which was some kind of crime. There were no guards this far into the vault. Will guessed there was only one way out and hiding an almost thirty-pound bar of gold on your person would take a special kind of asshole.

“Holy shit.” The words slipped out of Will's mouth before he could stop them.

They had reached their first open door. Three men wearing white cotton gloves and face masks were removing bars of gold bullion and stacking them onto a pallet.

“The Reason” stopped mid-whine. Or maybe Will lost his sense of hearing. He had never seen anything like this in his life. This whole time he had been picturing Scrooge McDuck doing his daily money swim when he should've been thinking Minecraft building an entire freaking city.

Baldani said, “Meet the FNG, turdblossoms.”

Everyone ignored the douchy introduction. Will stuck his head inside the open vault. The room was around the size of a commercial freezer. No overhead light, but the gold reflected a metallic light that was brighter than any bulb. The bars were stacked on their edges from floor to ceiling in a horseshoe around the periphery. There was enough space for one guy to stand inside and pass the bricks to the guy standing outside. The second guy handed off to the third guy, who gently placed the bars onto a steel pallet.

Will realized he was gawking. He squinted down the hallway as he waited for his pupils to return to a normal size. There was another open door just past the first one. The second team was one man down, but they seemed to be farther along in the process. The guy outside was kneeling down to wipe the bars with a cotton cloth before grabbing two bars in both hands, standing, swiveling around, and handing the bars to the guy inside.

Back-breaking work.

“The read-out for the scale.” Baldani tapped the LED display sticking up behind the pallet. “We don't actually count each bar. We weigh the contents of the room, give them a wipe-down, then stack them back inside nice and neat for the next time.”

Will nodded, but he wasn't sure that made sense. The vaults were sealed shut, deprived of oxygen. Surely putting the bars outside in the open somehow affected their weight. There had to be moisture in the air, maybe fuzz from the cotton gloves, a stray strand of hair from one of the cleaners. When you were talking millions of ounces, that kind of thing added up.

“Here's where we check the math.” Baldani pointed at one of the blue signs. Someone with very neat handwriting had used a white marker to fill in the information. “36,236 bars of gold. Almost twelve billion troy ounces. Gold's going for around thirteen hundred bucks an ounce right now, so that's —well, shit, that's a boatload of fucking benjamins.”

A deep voice came from inside the second vault. “$472,238,000.”

Will looked past the top of Baldani's stubby head.

The guy inside the vault was hidden from view. Will saw a pair of humongous hands reach out, the seams busted on a pair of cotton gloves. The man's arms were chain-linked with muscle. The faded tan indicated he was more accustomed to working outdoors. He one-handed two bars of gold like they were Lego blocks. Then he took another two bars in the other hand.

“Switch it up, big guy.” Baldani snapped his fingers, indicating he meant now. “Lukather doesn't want her new boy breaking a nail.”

The man ducked his head as he exited the vault. He pulled down his face mask. White male. Blond hair. Blue eyes. Mid-fifties. Around six-foot-five and two hundred fifty pounds. Built like a linebacker, some might say, but given the visual reference, Will would describe him as approximately the size of a sealed vault inside of Fort Knox.

The last pieces of the puzzle: Former MP. Currently homeless. Mercenary. Ass kicker. Gold cleaner. Cop Killer.

The stranger from Margrave introduced himself. “Jack Reacher.”

Reacher was there because of a temporary financial embarrassment. Literally. Nothing sinister. No impending bankruptcy. Purely mundane. Seventeen days earlier he spent more on lunch than he expected, and being a guy who looked ahead when he could, he figured he didn't have enough remaining for all three of a bus ticket, dinner, and a motel for the night. So he went to the ATM.

There was a recent deposit in the sum of $612.14.

Which was unexpected, but easy to explain. It was a message. The six was F, the sixth letter of the alphabet. The twelve dollars was L. The fourteen cents was N. Frances L. Neagley. Not enough to say she was the best NCO he ever had. She was the best soldier he ever met. Maybe the best person. Certainly the closest he ever got to a friend. After the Army she started a hotshot security agency in Chicago. She was doing well. She was connected in all kinds of different places. But now she wanted to talk. That was the message. It was her only way of pinging a guy who lived under the radar, but also ran out of cash now and then. The money was real. She expected him to keep it. Some kind of big-sister thing. Or little sister. Maybe she pitied him.