James Munro - The Money That Money Can't Buy

"Forgive my vanity," he said. "But there are not three other men in the world who can do what I have just done."

"If it works," said Boris.

"It works, believe me," Istvan said. "Would you like to try?" He handed him the key. "One turn to the right, three to the left, two more to the right."

Boris inserted the key, and tried to turn it. Nothing happened.

"Forgive me," said Istvan. "It is new and stiff. Try this."

He handed Boris a short cylinder of bar steel. Boris pushed it across the rink of the key, and turned, his massive body stiff with strain. Slowly, reluctantly it grated to the right, then, with each twist, more easily to the left—once, twice, thrice. When he moved it the two final turns to the right there was no resistance at all.

Istvan pushed open the door, and had to use considerable strength to do it, then stepped inside. Boris and Craig followed, and he closed it again, looking up as he did so. Then he smiled, and his smile was quite beautiful. Craig thought that he would have a big future conning women in Vegas or Formentor. Then he too looked up.

"You see?" Istvan said. "How ingenious your stamp collector was."

Above the door was a massive steel shutter, rolled up, ready to slam down.

"If I had just cut the wires of the photoelectric cells this would have come down at once," said Istvan. "It was wired to them, too. Remember?"

Craig remembered the wires leading vertically to a place above the door. Istvan was good, all right, but there were still the time locks to face.

They looked round. The shelves empty now, dust settling, gentle as a requiem benediction on the kind of handy place round the corner the supermarkets had made obsolete. Istvan examined shelves and cupboards.

In one corner, by the stairs, stood a safe, massively squat. A heavy steel grille barred their approach to it.

THE MONEY THAT MONEY CAN'T BUY 209"Difficult," said Boris.

"Not really," he said. "But that is not the one we want. Let us try the cellar."

Craig deliberately headed for the stairs, but Istvan forestalled him.

"I'll go first please," he said. "There may be more surprises."

He found another photoelectric cell at the head of the stairs, and yet another at the foot. As he worked on them, Craig and Boris sat and waited. They had no need of conversation, and Craig was grateful for it. While he sat he could think about what Simmons had done to that poor man he had once been, and feel sorry for him. Not that it wasn't the man's own fault in a way, he conceded. It was stupid to rely on women as much as that. And who needed them anyway? The only man who really mattered was the one who knew how to fight. And there he had nothing to worry about. Sir Matthew Chinn had said it, and it was true. . .

Istvan called to them, and they went down. The timelock safe was immediately visible. It had been taken into the cellar a section at a time, and reconstructed. Now the cellar was almost filled by it. Istvan patted its slate-gray side and grinned.

"This was the one they considered burglar-proof," he said. "It is a very remarkable construction. High-tension steel all over—back, sides, door, top and bottom. There is no question of attacking it from its weakest side. It has no weakest side. Nor is it possible to blow it. Look at that door, gentlemen—hinged from inside." Istvan, carried away by enthusiasm for a masterpiece, talked like a television art expert confronted by a Caravaggio. "To insert a charge into that door would mean drilling for days, and even then the charge would have to be so great I doubt if we could survive the blast. And if we did, the door would merely drop a little and be jammed in grooves set in the base. If we used an even bigger charge to blow it free, we would of course destroy not only the safe but its contents; 99.9 per cent of all burglars would simply ignore a safe of this type. It is too much trouble."

"Safes like this have been robbed," said Boris.

"It is possible. One must break into the bank, and wait for the time lock. If the lock has been set so that the safe will not open for sixty hours, then one must wait for sixty hours. If bank employees arrive, one must kidnap them, keep them prisoner. There is no other way. A safe with a time lock has to wait for the time set."

"I doubt if we can do that," Craig said. "The Tangier bank is too crowded."

"We will not have to," said Istvan. "There is another way. You see," he said, and his manner became more than ever that of the expert lecturer to first-year students, "the trouble with time locks is that they're too good. They even have the clock inside the safe now, where people like me can't get at it. But suppose something goes wrong, then the bank has a problem. If the time lock developed a fault you couldn't get in, not without boring holes in the safe. And that could take days. So they put a secret way in—almost always. There's one in the bank in Tangier. There's one here."

"Where?" asked Boris.

"Through the safe upstairs," said Istvan. "First you have to get through a grille with a key lock— then there's the safe itself. That has a combination lock. Come up and I'll show you."

To open two sets of locks and work out two combinations took time, but there was no possibility of denying Istvan's certainty. They entered one safe at last. From there they could attack the other, now beneath them. This problem too he solved with massive certainty. As he prepared to open the trapdoor Boris said: "An hour to get in, an hour to open the safe. That's pretty good."

"It's brilliant," said Craig, and Istvan smiled. "And it'll take even less time to do the bank. The way-in's already been done. All we've got to do is the safe."

Boris lowered himself down into the time-lock safe, then a beam of light flicked at him, and he swore again in Hungarian.

Inside the safe sat Loomis, torch in hand, a flask of coffee by his side.

He beamed at Istvan.

"You're good, cock, d'you know that?" he said. "In fact you're better than good, you're bloody marvelous." He paused. "I knew you would be— or I wouldn't be here."

He beamed at Istvan once more. "You know a chap called Chelichev?"

"I do indeed," said Istvan, and Boris stiffened.

"I'll be writing to him soon. Tell him just how good you are."

15

They flew to Tangier in a Comet 4B, and Boris took advantage of the quaint local custom that allowed him to drink cheap liquor because he was on a plane. It didn't seem to affect him. Istvan tried it too, and it made him drunk, or at least talkative. Craig settled down to listen. So long as Istvan talked of the jobs he had done he was fascinating, and Craig, an expert himself, found no difficulty in tuning in to that part of his mind. The overwhelming need to solve the apparently insoluble was one he knew all about. It delighted him, and he was happy to hear it, and even as he grappled with the details of picklocks and tumblers found himself remembering his own pleasure at finding out how to defeat two men, two good men, who jump you simultaneously from opposite sides. But then Istvan began to talk of women, and Craig became first bored, then restless. It would be easy to shut him up, but Loomis had told him to be nice to him, so he went on listening. It was Boris who interrupted.

"You think too much of women," he said.

"But consider," said Istvan. "I am supposed to be an American."

Boris laughed. "That is a point, but even so, you mean it, Istvan."

"I was a very long time in Siberia," the Hungarian said.

"And were there no women there?"

"Not in the sense that I mean," Istvan said. "In that sense there were none at all."

Craig said: "Boris is right. Women get in the way —slow things up."

The Hungarian's eyes were both shrewd and pitying as they looked at him.