the one television screen silently, making the action all the more eerie and disconnected. Boldt listened to SPD dispatch in his right ear, mentally dialing it into the background.
“Can we hold on number four, please?” Boldt asked as he and Gaynes stepped closer.
She whispered, “I’d rather be in the movie, than watching it.”
“Stay tuned, we may be yet,” Boldt informed her. “First, we see how smart Vanderhorst is.” He lifted the handheld, tripped the TALK button, and issued the order he knew he’d be held responsible for: “Okay, let’s do it.”
“Affirm.” Dispatcher Dennis Schaefer’s reply passed thinly through Boldt’s earpiece. Mackenzie was ordered to “lay the bait.” The rest of the team was put on high alert. Like most operations, after several hours of waiting, the real-time event was likely to play out in a matter of seconds or, at the most, a few minutes. For those few precious moments, disparate players, several city blocks away from each other, had to move, think, coordinate, and act in harmony. Anything less, and Vanderhorst was likely to escape. Denny Schaefer was the stage manager, but Lou Boldt was the playwright, and as such, he listened and watched carefully.
On the small screen Frank Mackenzie unplugged his earpiece from his radio and then fiddled with a knob, turning up the volume.
The message from dispatch: “Suspect is in the building,”
played over Boldt’s radio at the same time it did Big Mac’s-as planned. The message spilled into the bank lobby, turning heads.
This was it. Boldt leaned in and watched. Vanderhorst, along with everyone else in the lobby, overheard Mackenzie’s radio.
The suspect cocked his head slightly in that direction, but he did not overreact. His left hand pocketed the cash from his paycheck. Mackenzie did a convincing job of playing the buffoon.
He dropped the radio, turned the volume back down, and tried to look like nothing had happened. He then took a couple obvious steps toward the entrance, clearly planting himself to block the main doors. A colorful sign there advertised the benefits of home equity loans.
Vanderhorst abandoned the teller window and walked incredibly calmly, Boldt noted, toward the EMPLOYEES ONLY door that led into the back hallway. But Vanderhorst stopped at that door, studying Mackenzie, who had his back turned.
Boldt spoke loudly into the crowded security room, “Open the door, Vanderhorst.” On the screen, Vanderhorst continued to look like he was weighing his options. “Through that door! Now!”
Vanderhorst disobeyed, taking several steps toward Mackenzie and the bank’s main entrance.
“We’re losing him!” Boldt shouted into his handheld.
Denny Schaefer calmly instructed Mackenzie, “Phase two, Big Mac.”
On the screen, Mackenzie spun on his heels, looked in the direction of Vanderhorst, and reached inside his sport jacket, revealing his holster and weapon.
Crack the whip. Vanderhorst turned, shoved a key into the side door, and hurried through.
“Okay!” an elated Boldt shouted much too loudly for the small room, “let’s do it like we talked about.”
The guards busied themselves throwing switches, and the monitors displayed new views: the back hall, the ATM room, the stairs to the basement, and several angles of the basement itself.
“Go … go … go!” Boldt shouted at the screen like an arm-chair quarterback. Into the radio’s microphone he shouted, “More pressure, more pressure!” as Vanderhorst paused in the hallway outside the door that led into the ATM room. Boldt didn’t want that door an option.
Dispatch barked another order, and although the monitors had no sound, Boldt knew that Mackenzie was now pounding on that hallway door. Vanderhorst reacted in a mechanical, nervous way, looking first in that direction and then taking off down the hall and into the stairs leading to the basement.
“Yes! ” Boldt shouted excitedly. He grabbed Gaynes by the arm. “Get ready to run. You first. The basement.”
“Copy,” she said, moving toward the security room’s door.
Behind them, the image of Vanderhorst moved one monitor to the next, as if he were jumping from screen to screen. As he reached the last, with the flip of a switch, the monitors displayed several different views of the basement.
Special Ops had added these cameras at Boldt’s request.
Gaynes understood Boldt’s plan then for the first time.
“You’re stinging him into showing us the way into the Underground,” she said.
“We hope,” he answered.
With that, as if instructed, Vanderhorst moved quickly across three of the screens and used a master switch to lower the elevator.
Boldt mumbled, “Not possible. I checked that elevator myself and-” But he interrupted himself as Vanderhorst boarded the elevator, stepped inside, and-after a brief but unexpected monitor glitch that left Vanderhorst off- camera momentarily-keyed open a back panel on the elevator car intended for emergency evacuation.
“Oh, shit,” Boldt barked, a police lieutenant who took pride in rarely swearing. Vanderhorst stepped through and pulled the elevator’s panel closed behind him.
“Keys!” Boldt shouted at the security men, as if rehearsed, which it was not.
One of the guards tossed him an enormous ring of keys, saying, “The small, silver one does the panel. The green dot does the elevator override.”
Susan Hebringer had been pulled through that panel. Patricia Randolf before her. Boldt could see it play out, as if watching one of the monitors.
Boldt and Gaynes took off at run, Boldt shouting instructions into a handheld that he knew would lose contact once he was underground. “Contact lost. Repeat, Wildhorse contact lost!”
Dispatch copied. Boldt shouted, “We want him alive, people!
For God’s sake, let’s take him alive.”
Into the Dark
Boldt and Gaynes descended the stairs two at a time, reaching the basement only seconds after they’d left the security room.
At the most, Vanderhorst had a half minute lead on them.
Boldt keyed the elevator open, then tossed the keys to Gaynes, who was first into the car. She keyed open the back panel as Boldt stepped through. “Sixty seconds,” Boldt said, checking his watch.
They climbed through the open hole, descending a ladder of rebar that protruded from the chamber’s concrete wall. The space between the shaft’s wall and the car was narrow. Gaynes descended effortlessly, while Boldt had to flatten himself, his jacket hanging up on the car’s mechanics. The thick air smelled heavily of grease and electricity. Gaynes switched on a Maglite well before she reached the bottom rung, making the short leap to the shaft’s dirt floor. Boldt followed immediately behind her.
“Lieu!” The Maglite’s beam revealed the inside of a cast-iron coal chute door about two feet square. A false wall of bricks had been stacked to create an illusion, from the Underground side, of an enclosed coal chute. Gaynes kicked down the dry stack, pushed the iron door open further, and squeezed through.
Boldt followed, again straining to get his girth through the small space.
Boldt heard a crackle in his earpiece, and the broken voice of Denny Schaefer as a few radio waves managed to briefly penetrate the depths. He couldn’t understand a word that was said: They were on their own.
They stood in one of the dark underground hallways, vaguely familiar from the previous foray into the underground city block.
Boldt used sign language to direct Gaynes, indicating that they would split up. She would take this hallway, Boldt would move south and search for another. Gaynes acknowledged. Boldt’s fists came together: They could reunite at the far end of the underground space.
Boldt got his flashlight lit. Ninety seconds had elapsed since they’d lost Vanderhorst.
They heard a crash in the distance-wood and then glass.
