The Unusual Suspect

by Ben Machell

  Copyright © 2021 by Machell Lees Limited

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Ballantine and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Machell, Ben, author.

  Title: The unusual suspect : how to rob a bank and (nearly) get away with it / Ben Machell.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Ballantine Group, [2020] | Identifiers: LCCN 2020008987 (print) | LCCN 2020008988 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593129241 (Ebook) | ISBN 9780593129227 (Hardback) | ISBN 9780593129227 (hardback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Jackley, Stephen. | Thieves—Great Britain—Biography. | Bank robberies—Great Britain. | Robbery investigation—Great Britain. | Criminals—Great Britain—Biography.

  Classification: LCC HV6665.G7 (ebook) | LCC HV6665.G7 M32 2020 (print) | DDC 364.15/52092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020008987

  Ebook ISBN 9780593129241

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Caroline Cunningham, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Carlos Beltrán

  Cover image: Getty Images

  ep_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Prologue

  It is early autumn in rural Vermont, the hills and valleys are turning from green to gold, and two federal agents are driving along the tight winding road that leads to the Southern State Correctional Facility. One is a special agent with the FBI. The other is Special Agent Scott Murray, who works for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Both are experienced men who have worked to bring down everyone from arms dealers to white supremacist terror groups to heroin trafficking rings. The FBI agent is tall, middle-aged, with a dark suit, a long, impassive face, and a steady, methodical manner. Murray is shorter, with close-cropped black hair, and seems altogether more lively and convivial.

  They are driving to the state prison in order to meet an inmate who had been moved there four months earlier, in July 2008. They already know he is like no criminal either of them has encountered before. He had committed a string of bank heists but escaped the authorities time and time again. In carrying out his crimes, he had used flamboyant disguises and elaborate escape routes. He had caused chaos. He had forced the deployment of bomb disposal squads, armed response units, police helicopters, and whole teams of detectives. An unpredictable lone wolf, he operated internationally. He was wanted for crimes in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. He’d narrowly avoided arrest in Istanbul. Almost untraceable, he would strike, leave with a bag full of cash, and then just seem to vanish. The police did not even know his name or identity. “There would be a robbery and the area would be flooded with cops,” says one of the detectives charged with capturing him. “But there would just be no sign of him.”

  In May 2008, though, he’d finally been captured in Vermont. The authorities searched his car and found a diary in which he’d meticulously planned and detailed his crimes. Slowly, they began to piece together exactly who he was and what he had done. And as the full scale of his crimes became clear, more and more agencies found themselves involved in his case. Dutch police. British police. The FBI. The ATF. The U.S. Marshals recommended that prison authorities take extra precautions when dealing with him. Possible links with terror groups were investigated. Interpol declared him a flight risk. The use of military personnel to escort him across national borders in order to stand trial was, at one point, seriously explored. Eventually, it was decided he would remain under lock and key in Vermont until all the various agencies could decide what to do with him.

  Murray and the FBI man arrive at the prison and climb out of their cars. The air is cool and fresh with pine. The Southern State Correctional Facility sits atop a steep hill surrounded by deep, dense forest, giving it the look of a grim fairy-tale keep. The twenty-foot walls are gray and smooth. Immediately behind the walls is fencing, rising to thirty feet and topped with razor wire. Above everything, an American flag cracks and flaps in the wind.

  The two agents begin the lengthy process of passing through layer after layer of security. This is because the man they have come to see is not with the general prison population. Instead, he has been placed in Foxtrot Unit, a separate self-contained wing of the prison. Technically, Foxtrot Unit is categorized as “secure housing” and is specifically designed for the “close custody” of particularly disruptive or dangerous prisoners. But these are just euphemisms. To inmates and guards alike, this is simply “the Hole,” a place where men are held in solitary confinement, kept in six-by-nine-foot concrete cells for twenty-three or more hours a day. Each tiny, claustrophobic chamber is a prison within a prison within a prison.

  The two agents are shown to a small interview room where they wait. Meanwhile, down the corridor of Foxtrot Unit, a pair of large, solidly built prison guards approach a metal cell door and rap on it sharply. One of the guards peers through a viewing slot and tells the figure inside that he is coming with them to meet some visitors. The guard opens a second slot halfway down the door, and after a short pause a pair of white hands and ten thin fingers come through. For just a moment, it looks like some pale anemone emerging from a rock. Then a pair of handcuffs are firmly clamped around the wrists, and the heavy cell door is buzzed open from a central control room. The guards enter the cell, fit a pair of leg-irons on the prisoner, and then proceed to walk him to the interview room. The inmate keeps his head bowed low. Together, they pass other cell doors, where the voices of other inmates chatter, sing, shout, and whimper. The air is recycled and stale. The noise and echoes and anemic overhead lights combine to produce a low migrainous throb.

  The prisoner enters the interview room. He is young and skinny, just under six feet tall, with short, dark hair and deep-set eyes that glance around the room from behind a pair of cheap glasses. As the two agents introduce themselves and sit down opposite him, he remains impassive, staring at his handcuffs. He glances at a pile of papers the FBI agent places on the table, and for a moment it seems as if he will instinctively reach out to them. But he checks himself, and keeps his eyes down.

  “So, Stephen,” says Special Agent Murray, leaning forward and speaking with bright but concerned interest. “How have you been?”

  The prisoner raises his head and looks directly at the two agents for the first time. Seconds pass. He shuts his eyes and lets out a long sigh.

  Chapter Oner />
  It was a cold December morning, the sky was gray and heavy, and a young man stood at the edge of a high cliff. He looked out to sea as the wind whipped against him, stinging his eyes and making his blond hair stream and dance. Directly in front of him, just a single stride away, was a five-hundred-foot drop onto a shingle beach where rolling green waves frothed, crackled, and vanished. He looked up and down the narrow track running along the top of the white chalk cliff. It was deserted. He could have been the only living soul for miles around. He shut his eyes and took a deep breath. Gulls cawed beneath him. The sharp smell of the sea filled his nostrils. He thought of everything that had led to this moment: the decisions, the beliefs, the fears, the regrets. He thought about what he was about to do, and it left him euphoric with terror, light-headed and weightless. A small, insistent voice inside him said that he did not have to go through with it. That it was not too late to change his mind. He squeezed his fingernails into the palms of his hands and pushed the thought away. He had to see this through. He did not have a choice. He took a few more deep breaths to steady himself. And then he opened his eyes, turned away from the precipice, and started to walk along the high coastal path.

  He moved quickly, picking his steps without hesitation, despite the danger. He had known these cliffs since childhood. They formed part of Devon’s Jurassic Coast, mile after mile of rugged, almost unbroken rock face, 185 million years old. He was heading west, which meant that, directly to his right, the English Channel stretched toward the horizon. To his left were gorse thickets and coarse meadows that, come springtime, he knew would be dotted with wildflowers: sea lavender and samphire, bluebells and garlic. Beyond were trees—ash, sweet chestnut, rowan, sycamore—which, in turn, gave way to the rich, rolling green farmland of South Devon. Beneath his feet was the rock of the cliffs themselves. Formed of strata upon strata of ancient rock, these cliffs drew geologists and paleontologists from around the globe, home, as they were, to an incalculable amount of ancient life, frozen in time. Fossils of ammonites, trilobites, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, pliosaurs. Again, he knew all this. He knew their names and shapes as intimately as he did the sight of the hovering peregrines that nested along the high rocky outcrops, or the sound of the green woodpeckers in the woodland beyond.

  He was slim, wore a waterproof jacket, and carried a small nylon bag slung over one shoulder. As he walked along the narrow track, he passed sites he had known for years. The remains of an Iron Age hill fort overlooking the sea. A series of limestone caves and quarries first dug by the Romans. Small coves and seaside villages once home to prolific eighteenth-century smugglers. Eventually, he reached a high headland, and the cliffs that stretched ahead of him in a concave bend were no longer white. Instead, they were a tawny, dusty red, which meant he had almost arrived. Another fifteen minutes and he was approaching the outskirts of Seaton, a small town with a harbor, shops, churches, pubs, bed-and-breakfasts, and neat rows of white wooden beach huts along the pebbly seashore. It was approaching noon, and of the few pedestrians who were out and about, none seemed to pay the young man any attention. He made his way toward the center of town. As he walked, he reached into his bag and pulled out a pair of mirrored aviator sunglasses. He put them on and quickened his pace.

  A few moments later, a middle-aged bank clerk was sitting behind a plexiglass screen in the Seaton branch of Lloyds TSB, typing a few lines into her computer. A greystone Victorian building, the bank sat some one hundred yards from the sea on a narrow street of cafés and thrift shops. The clerk had just dealt with a customer and seen them off with a brisk smile. The bank was quiet. There were only two customers present: one who was already being dealt with by a colleague, and another who had just entered the building. The clerk looked up at the approaching figure and saw a young man with long blond hair and sunglasses, holding a small zippered bag. He walked straight to her screen and, without saying a word, slid her a piece of paper.

  Loaded pistol. No alarms. Stay sitting.

  She did not quite know what to make of this. She looked back up at the strange figure in front of her with the wry curiosity of somebody expecting a punch line. The figure, sensing this, placed the small bag on the counter and partially unzipped it, revealing a black automatic pistol. There was a pause as the cashier absorbed this. Then she began briskly taking money from her till before sliding it under the screen, as though she were dealing with any other customer making a large cash withdrawal. She looked at the man on the other side of the plexiglass trying to get all the banknotes into his small nylon sack and asked if he would like a bigger bag. He shook his head and gruffly told her that he would not. She shrugged. “Well, don’t blame me if you drop it all,” she said. Seconds later, the man had turned away and was walking back toward the door of the bank. He waited for the piercing sound of an alarm, or for police sirens, or for the wind to be suddenly slammed out of him as he was forced to the floor from behind. None of these things happened. He walked out of the bank and back into the cold sea air.

  It had just struck noon. He passed pensioners and local workers starting their lunch breaks, but otherwise, the town was quiet. He walked for ten seconds, twenty seconds, thirty seconds, every moment expecting the peace to be shattered by the sudden chaos of pursuit. After sixty seconds, he turned in to a small local park and vanished from sight. A minute passed. And then another. And then a different figure emerged. It was a slim young man, but his hair was short and dark rather than long and blond. He was not wearing sunglasses. He had on different clothes and was wearing a backpack rather than carrying a shoulder bag. Leaving the park, he broke into a jog and headed toward the coastal path west out of Seaton, following the track as it rose up and up and up. He jogged past coves and smugglers’ villages. Past Roman quarries. Past Iron Age hill forts. After a few miles he slowed to a walk. Bespectacled and unassuming, he could have been a bird-watcher or amateur geologist. Couples out walking their dogs along the high path smiled and nodded at him, and he smiled and nodded back. Behind him, in the distance, he could hear the sound of a helicopter flying over Seaton. He forced himself not to turn around and scan the horizon. It would simply be the coast guard, he told himself. He kept walking, as the English Channel rolled and broke hundreds of feet below him.

  * * *

  —

  When detectives from the Devon and Cornwall Police arrived in Seaton to investigate, they could guess, very quickly, who was responsible. They did not know his name or identity, but they knew that he was almost certainly the same man who had been targeting banks and credit unions across the region—and possibly farther afield—for weeks. Armed bank robberies in this peaceful, coastal corner of the UK were almost unheard of. And the individual carrying them out had, so far, evaded them, dissolving into the background within moments of striking. As the crimes continued to mount, the investigating officers began to understand that there was something distinctive about their quarry that went beyond an ability to vanish into thin air. He left strange mementos. Pound coins with a single line scratched through their faces were found at the scenes of his crimes. When at one point the police arrested the wrong man, he let them know through an anonymous letter to a local newspaper. In the same letter, he announced that he would be carrying out more robberies. These were not the kinds of things that most bank robbers did. It made no sense at all. Why was he doing it? What did it mean? And, above all else: Who was he?

  That same day, as night drew over Devon, the figure from the cliff top slowly approached a grove of trees at the top of a small hillock. It was dark, and he paused to look and listen before slipping in among them. His backpack held, among other things, a long blond wig, a pair of mirrored aviator sunglasses, and a black semiautomatic pistol. It also contained £4,830 in cash, most of which he had divided into thick stacks of notes, each wrapped tightly in a plastic bag. Taking hold of a large, low branch, he pulled himself up and began to climb one of the trees, moving slowly up through the darknes
s until he found what he was looking for. Pulling the plastic bags of cash from his backpack, he began to stuff them into a deep nook within the crown of the tree. The lights of a small town shone beneath him. It was December 19, 2007. Five thousand miles away, the United States had just officially entered recession, precipitating what would soon become known as the global financial crisis, a cataclysm of unimaginable scope and scale. It was an event that the figure in the tree, at least, had been expecting and preparing for. His crime that day, like all his crimes, was not random. Nor was it motivated simply by greed. What the police detectives had yet to understand was that they were not hunting a criminal. They were hunting an outlaw. He dropped down from the tree and slipped away.

  Later, a homeless man sitting on a cardboard mat quietly asking passersby for spare change was having no luck. He turned to give his dog a stroke and some whispered reassurances when he heard a light thud and the jangle of coins. Something had landed among the pennies in the hat he had laid out. He looked up and saw the figure of a man, walking away. Then he looked back down at his hat and picked up the object. Holding it close to his face, he realized it was a tight, thick roll of £20 notes. And as he leafed through the bills, not quite sure what to think, he noticed something. Every single note had been marked with the same two letters. RH. RH. RH. Again and again and again. He looked for the man who gave it to him. But he’d gone. Vanished into the night.

  Chapter Two

  The name of the young man in the interview room at Vermont’s Southern State Correctional Facility was Stephen George Dennis Jackley. He was twenty-two years old and came from a small town called Sidmouth on the South Devon coast. He was a geography student at the University of Worcester. As a rule, geography students from Devon do not tend to find themselves consigned to the Hole. Or known to Interpol. Or being interrogated by a pair of U.S. federal agents. Or, for that matter, being the subject of a multiagency, multinational criminal investigation. But Stephen Jackley was not like most geography students.