“Fuck it, you’re not going! There are procedural problems, and you can’t do it.”
For the first time, Sid Walker joined the argument. “Well, John,” he said quietly, “Charley’s got a point.”
Outvoted two to one, Butler gave in. The three men made a plan, or at least agreed to proceed without a real plan. They did take steps to safeguard the fortune in kroner that Walker had flashed under Johnsen’s nose. At dawn, Walker would take his bagful of cash out of the Plaza, book a room at the Grand Hotel, and lock the money in a safe there.
Beyond that, they would have to wing it. Come morning, Hill and Walker would go off with Johnsen to wherever it was the Norwegians had been so eager to get to the previous midnight.
32
On the Road
EARLY MORNING, MAY 7, 1994
Hill and Walker left Butler and headed off to their own rooms. It was late—Hill hadn’t gone out to Ulving’s car until midnight—and they would be underway early the next morning. (Walker, who had to switch hotels, would be on the move even earlier than Hill.) But they had time to grab a few hours’ sleep. For Einar-Tore Ulving, on the other hand, the night of May 6, 1994, would prove the longest of his life.
The art dealer’s ordeal began at midnight, when the stranger slipped into his car. Even with Johnsen and Hill out of the car and in the hotel, the newcomer stayed in the back seat, his eyes fixed on Ulving at the wheel. In the dark, with his cap pulled low over his eyes and his scarf pulled high over his chin, he was a large and looming shape. Afraid to speak or to turn around, Ulving sat cowering and waiting for instructions. His unwelcome guest never gave his name. The art dealer thought of him simply as “the man with the cap.”
Finally the stranger broke the silence. “Drive,” he said, directing Ulving through the near-empty streets of a wintry Oslo night. “Right.” “Left.” “Through the tunnel.”
Ulving obeyed. The route led out of the city, but Ulving had no idea of their destination. Soon they were on a quiet road. The houses were dark, the street deserted. No streetlights, no traffic, no pedestrians. “Stop!”
Ulving pulled over. “Wait here.” The stranger walked to a pay phone. A minute or two later, he returned and gestured to Ulving to roll down his window. “Drive south on the E-18,” he said, “and someone will phone you.”
Then he vanished into the gloom.
Ulving found his way to the motorway. He knew the E-18. He drove along, expecting his cell phone to ring at any moment. It didn’t. For an hour and fifty minutes he sped along the motorway in silence. The E-18 south from Oslo, as it happened, led toward the town of TOnsberg, where Ulving lived. He decided to drive home.
By now it was well past two in the morning. Ulving entered his darkened house. At once the phone rang. Unnervingly, the call came not on Ulving’s cell phone, as he had been expecting, but on his home phone.
Ulving knew the name—the By the Way was a restaurant on the expressway only five or ten minutes from his house. He sped over. The restaurant was long since closed, and the parking lot was empty. Ulving pulled his car to the edge of the lot and parked by a low stone wall. Then he sat in the dark and waited.
Suddenly the stranger materialized in front of Ulving’s car. “Get out!”
Ulving stood in the deserted parking lot. The man in the cap stared at him, silently, for a minute or two. “Open the back!”
The stranger moved a short distance away. Another man took shape in the darkness, on the far side of the stone wall. He carried a neatly folded blanket with something wrapped inside. He handed the blanket to the stranger and disappeared again. The stranger placed the blanket and its contents in the back of Ulving’s station wagon.
“That’s the picture.”
Ulving gathered his nerve. “I don’t want it in my car.”
“Well, it’s in your car.”
“Where are we going to take it?”
“To your house.”
“We can’t. My kids and my wife are there. But I’ve got a summerhouse in Osgardstrand. It’s empty now. We can take it there.”
The man in the cap went along with the new plan. Osgardstrand was only a few miles away. He and Ulving drove off and hid their package in Ulving’s summer house.
Ulving, exhausted, pleaded with the stranger. Couldn’t he go home and take a shower and change his clothes?
Yes, he could. This was unexpected good news, the first conciliatory remark the stranger had made. Ulving drove home eagerly and entered his dark house. To his dismay, the man in the cap barged into the house behind him. Ulving walked into the bathroom and climbed into the shower. His “guest” shoved the bathroom door open, then stood a yard from the shower, watching.
It was nearly five in the morning. Ulving’s wife, Hanne, woken by the commotion, hurried to investigate. Her husband was in the shower, a hulking stranger nearly at his side, glowering.
“What’s going on?”
33
“Hands Up!”
The Norwegian cops, in the meantime, had their own trouble sleeping. “The thing keeping me up at night,” said Leif Lier, the Norwegian detective, “was worrying that the undercover agents would be hurt or killed, because we didn’t know who the criminals were.”
Charley Hill had more regard for Lier than he did for most cops, but he didn’t share Lier’s concern. Though Hill was the least laid-back of men, his own well-being was not a subject that engaged him. Let someone venture a foolish opinion on, say, the French Revolution, and Hill would scowl and leap to correct the record. If the conversation turned to his own safety, he would drift off.
Before 1994, Hill’s closest call had come in a counterfeit money case. In autumn 1988, Hill was undercover as a crooked American businessman named Charles Gray. He had heard rumors about someone looking to sell serious quantities of counterfeit hundred-dollar bills. Hill, as Gray, put out word that he might be interested. Soon a shady used-car dealer outside London made an approach. The dealer handed over a few of the counterfeit hundreds.
Hill took them to a friend at the U.S. embassy, a Secret Service man with a plum posting in London. Hill’s friend oohed and ahhed. Franklin’s portrait, the shading—these bills were superb. The Secret Service had picked up whispers about a giant shipment of counterfeit money coming into Britain from Italy. These were thieves worth going after. Scotland Yard agreed. Anything to help their American colleagues. Charles Gray met with the car dealer contact to work out a deal. A bit of haggling and then a handshake—Gray would pay ?60,000 for a cool $1 million in phony but virtually undetectable hundred-dollar bills.
Hill booked a ground-floor room at a Holiday Inn near Heathrow Airport for the handover. Though he liked to freelance, this job was not to be an improvised solo act. The Counterfeit Currency Squad was in charge, and the Regional Crime Squad was on hand, too. Hill’s hotel room was bugged, to obtain evidence for an eventual trial, and a surveillance team was in place. The Counterfeit Squad gave Hill a briefcase with ?60,000 in cash.
Hill met the car dealer at the Holiday Inn. The counterfeit hundreds, the man said, were in a valise in his car, in the parking lot. Hill and the dealer walked to the car, and Hill picked up the case with the phony bills. Immediately, he knew there was trouble. A million bucks in hundreds should have weighed about twenty pounds. This case was far too light.
Hill played along. Carrying the valise with the counterfeit bills, he walked back inside and turned down the
