The Vets (Stephen Leather Thrillers)

by Stephen Leather

  “You’re not saying that you believe that’s going to happen in 1997?” said Chung.

  Ballantine held up his hand and shook his head. “No, no, of course not,” he soothed. “But that is the perception that many Chinese have. And you know as well as I do how rumours can get spread here. Like wildfire. You must have heard the story about the tram that broke down during a typhoon. Everyone on the tram had to get off and the only place they could find to shelter was in front of a bank. People walking by assumed they were queuing to take their money out and within hours there was a run on the bank.”

  Chung smiled thinly. “An apocryphal story, Mr Ballantine,” he said.

  “That may well be, but the run on the Standard Chartered Bank in 1991 wasn’t apocryphal. There were rumours, just rumours mind, that Standard Chartered was connected to BCCI. There were queues of depositors withdrawing all their savings. And Citibank faced a similar run. They happened, Mr Chung. I saw the lines. The Chinese have a tendency to believe any rumour that affects their savings. You can tell them until you’re blue in the face that money can be sent around the world at the press of a button, but if they can’t hold it in their hands they don’t believe in it. It’s the old refugee mentality.”

  “Once bitten,” said Chung.

  “Exactly,” said Ballantine. “They’d rather have 100,000 American dollars in a safe-deposit box where they can touch it when they want to rather than the same amount in a foreign currency account earning interest. We can offer them paper gold, a sort of bank passbook which is equivalent to gold and we link the value of their investment with the price of gold on a daily basis, but they’d still rather have physical gold, either bars or gold coins. They sell more gold coins in Hong Kong than anywhere else in the world. Safety-deposit boxes have always been popular in the colony, but I’ve never seen it at this level before.”

  “What do you think will happen after 1997?” asked Chung.

  “To the stuff in our vaults? My personal opinion is that most of it will be moved overseas before then. Sure, it might come back, but I doubt it. These are nervous times, as you’re probably all too well aware. Mr Fielding tells me that you’ll be taking your antiques abroad before too long.” He looked at Chung expectantly, as if he’d just proved a complicated mathematical theorem and was expecting a pat on the back.

  “I think they’ll be more appreciated overseas, that is true,” said Chung, not wanting to deflate the man’s pompous self-regard. The more self-important he felt, the more he’d let slip information which would be of use. “But from what I’ve seen they should be perfectly safe here.”

  Ballantine smiled. “You haven’t seen the half of it, Mr Chung,” he said. “For instance, we saw you walk down the side-street and survey the building and the delivery entrance.”

  “You saw me?” said Chung, expressing the desired amount of surprise.

  “Upstairs in our control room, we have a team of men monitoring the screens linked to the various surveillance cameras. I’ll take you up and show you. But basically it’s impossible to get within a hundred yards of this building without being seen. The entrance you came in is one of only two ways into the building, the other being the vehicle entrance at the side. The lift we came up in stops only at this floor. To go down to the vaults or up to the control room you have to use the other elevator at the far end of the building which means going by a second reception desk, and again that involves being observed by at least three more cameras. The elevators also have hidden cameras, concealed in the ceiling lights. There is an elevator override system operated from within the control room, and the garage door can only be opened by our controllers. Basically, it is impossible to get into, or out of, the building without bank staff supervision.”

  There was a knock on the door and a small, plump secretary appeared with two mugs of black coffee. Chung stirred his coffee as the secretary left the office.

  “Does the bank store its own money here?” asked Chung.

  “Not our normal day-to-day cash deliveries, no,” said Ballantine. “The facility isn’t big enough for the sort of through traffic we’d need. We can get armoured cars in downstairs, but no more than three at a time and the roads don’t really give us enough room outside. So far as getting cash to our various branches is concerned, we have a vault under our head office in Central and a larger vault out in the New Territories at a secret location.”

  “More secret than this one?” said Chung with a smile. He drank his coffee, suppressing a shudder when he discovered it was instant and not freshly ground.

  “Oh yes, it has an even lower profile than this one,” said Ballantine. “How’s your coffee?”

  “It’s delicious,” said Chung, taking another mouthful and sliding the mug on to Ballantine’s desk. “So this is wholly a safe-deposit centre?” he said. “That the bank doesn’t use this to store its own resources? I find that a little troubling.”

  “Oh no, that’s not what I meant to suggest at all,” said Ballantine, putting his own steaming mug on the desk. “I was referring to storage and delivery of cash, the notes which are printed by the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank and by Standard Chartered. Our gold stocks, which are considerable, are held here, as are our stocks of foreign currency. Why don’t I give you the tour? We can finish our coffee later.”

  “That would be marvellous,” said Chung. He stood up and followed Ballantine out of the office and along the corridor. Ballantine walked to a second elevator and hitched up his trousers while he waited for it to arrive. Like the elevator that had ferried them up from the reception area, there were no floor indicators. When it arrived and the two men had stepped inside, Chung saw that the buttons inside weren’t labelled either.

  “I’ll take you to the main vault first,” said Ballantine. “I think you’ll find it quite impressive.” He pressed the lowest button and Chung felt the elevator descend smoothly. When the doors opened they stepped out into a large lobby. To the right was a long, low desk behind which sat a man in a light grey suit and wearing a bank tie. He stood up when he saw Ballantine.

  “Good afternoon, Mr Law,” said Ballantine. “This is Mr Chung. He is considering becoming a client of ours. Could you give him a badge, please?”

  “Certainly, Mr Ballantine,” said Law. He took a laminated badge marked “Visitor” from a drawer and affixed it to the breast pocket of Chung’s suit.

  Ballantine took Chung past the desk and stood in front of a door composed of thick, vertical, metal bars, each the diameter of a man’s wrist. Ballantine looked over his shoulder and nodded at Law who pressed a button on a control panel mounted in the top of the desk. The door slid smoothly sideways, revealing a corridor lined with steel which led to a huge circular vault door which Chung recognised from the photograph in Ballantine’s office. The door itself was about eight feet thick and it was wide open, revealing the metal-lined vault beyond. Chung could see the thick metal rods set into the door which would slot into the sides of the vault when the door was closed and the locks turned. The door itself was tiered, like a steel wedding cake put on its side, and there were corresponding grooves in the wall of the vault so that there was no way anything could slip through the sides of the door when it was shut.

  “Wow,” said Chung. “It’s massive. Is it solid steel?”

  Ballantine nodded. “Yes, and it has the latest in time locks. Once the door is locked and the clocks set, it can’t be opened. By anybody.”

  “Surely there must be some way? What if someone is locked in by mistake?”

  Ballantine laughed. “Mr Chung, you’ve been watching too many movies. It would be impossible for anyone to be locked in. But – and it is a huge but – if anyone were foolish enough to get themselves trapped, the vault has its own air supply. He would just have to wait inside until the time locks open the vault door. There is no way to open the doors any sooner. If he were to be locked in on Friday evening, it would be Monday morning before the door opens. He would be very thirsty and hungry, and the v
ault would probably stink to high heaven, but he’d be alive.”

  “So it’s locked right through the weekend?”

  “That’s right. That’s one of our best safety features. Even if anyone were to get into the building, they wouldn’t be able to open the vault door.”

  Ballantine stepped into the vault and motioned for Chung to follow him. The vault itself was about the size of a basketball court, with the floor and ceiling composed of seamless metal. Around the walls were racks containing polythene-wrapped parcels which Ballantine said were foreign currency stocks. “Sterling, Deutschmarks, yen, dollars, francs,” he said as he walked around the vault. In the centre of the vault was a line of four blocks, each as high as a man’s stomach and each covered with a light green cotton sheet. “And here,” he said, indicating one of the piles, “here is where we keep the gold.” He pulled back the cloth to reveal a steel rack filled with gold bars which gleamed dully under the subdued lighting. The stack was ten bars wide and ten bars deep and the rack was ten bars high. There were 1,000 bars in the single stack, and each bar weighed one kilo. “This is where we keep the bullion; the various coins we sell are in the racks over there.”

  He picked up one of the bars with both hands. “This is a one kilo bar, 99.99 per cent pure,” he said. Chung took it from him and lifted it to his chest.

  “There’s something so powerful about gold,” said Chung. “It has an aura about it that you just don’t get with money.”

  “I know what you mean,” said Ballantine. “I can understand why you Chinese are so attracted to it.”

  Chung looked at Ballantine coldly and wondered if the man knew how offensive he found his racist comments. Almost certainly he didn’t. And Chung had no doubt that if he were to tell Ballantine, the man would put his hand on his heart and say that of course he wasn’t racist and that some of his best friends were Chinese. Chung smiled. “This is all the bank’s gold?”

  “Some of it is kept on behalf of our customers, private investors and companies who wish to keep some of their assets in gold. But most of it is the bank’s. Of course, we have no idea how much gold is stored in the safety-deposit boxes upstairs. It’ll be tens of millions of dollars, I’m sure. I would think that the gold exceeds the cash.”

  “How much gold do you have here?” asked Chung, waving his hand at the cloth-covered stacks.

  “You’d have to ask Mr Law for an exact figure,” said Ballantine. “But I would think it would be of the order of thirty-five million pounds.” He said the figure slowly, as if wanting Chung to be impressed.

  Chung whistled softly. “Wah!” he said, hating himself for playing the dumb Chinese but knowing that he had to play along with Ballantine. There was still information he needed.

  “So you can see, the bank is more than happy with the security arrangements here. And I’m sure you will be, too. Let me show you our safety-deposit area. I think it should be suitable for your antiques, but if not we can arrange to have them stored here.”

  They went out of the vault and Chung handed his badge back to Mr Law, smiled and thanked him, and followed Ballantine to the elevator. Their next stop was the floor above the vault. The elevator door opened on to another lobby which was identical to the first, though this time there was a young girl with shoulder-length wavy hair wearing a white blouse and dark blue skirt behind the low desk. Like Mr Law she stood up when she saw Ballantine, and she pinned a security badge to Chung’s breast pocket. She patted the lapel of Chung’s suit after she’d attached the badge and she gave him a warm smile. Ballantine didn’t introduce her, he walked past her without a word and stood in front of the barred door. She pressed the button to open the door and it slid open. The two men walked into the waiting area. Along the wall were a number of booths, each with two metal chairs with padded leather seats in front of a wooden shelf. Several of the booths were occupied with customers, all Chinese, Chung noted, bent over their safety-deposit boxes. Opposite the booths was another vault door, almost as big as the first one.

  “This one has time locks as well?” asked Chung as they walked through it into the vault.

  “Just like the one below,” said Ballantine. “This one is monitored, too, and there are alarms connected to the control room.”

  The walls of the vault were lined with thousands of safe-deposit boxes, varying in size from small ones a few inches square; which could contain nothing bigger than a few papers, to ones on the lower levels which were the size of large cabin trunks. Each box had two locks. Ballantine walked over to one wall and showed the locks to Chung. “When you rent a box, we give you one key, and we keep the other,” he explained. “When you come to open your box we match your signature against our records and we use our key and yours to open the box. That way no one else can open your box.”

  “What if I lose the key?” said Chung.

  “We do have a way of opening the boxes if absolutely necessary, Mr Chung, but people rarely lose their keys. And if they do, the signature is an extra safety check.”

  Chung turned around and looked at the open vault door. “Upstairs, you mentioned that the door was mainly for show,” he said.

  “Perhaps I was being over-simplistic,” said Ballantine. “What I meant was that any robber worth his salt wouldn’t try to get into a vault through the door. He’d come in through the floor or ceiling, or the walls. They tend to be the points of least resistance. Though in the case of our vaults, we have incorporated extra features which will make entry there next to impossible.”

  “Really?” said Chung.

  Ballantine nodded. “There are sensors inside both vaults which pick up any movement. The smallest movement will set them off. There are also temperature sensors which monitor any change in temperature.”

  “Impressive,” said Chung.

  “But before they can even get inside the vault to set off the sensors, they’d have to get through the outer walls which are a combination of reinforced steel and concrete. On the outside we have the entire vault covered with a network of thin wires through which we pass electricity. Any breakage of the wires sets off an alarm in the control room.”

  “And you said the control room is manned twenty-four hours a day?”

  “Even on Chinese holidays,” said Ballantine. “I’ll take you up and show you round.”

  They went back to the elevator, Chung giving up his badge and receiving another warm smile in return, and Ballantine pressed the top button. On the way up he explained how the bank ran most of its security operations, including fraud investigations, from the building, and that most of the upper floors were used by administrative staff.

  To get to the control room they had to pass through two security doors, both of which were monitored by security cameras and which Ballantine opened by swiping a magnetic card through a reader. “This is the nerve-centre of the depository,” he explained as he led Chung down a carpeted corridor to a third door which was composed entirely of glass on which was stencilled “control room”.

  “Bullet-proof glass,” said Ballantine. “Totally unbreakable.” He waved at the uniformed man sitting at a console behind the door and the door opened. There were five men, all in light blue uniforms with the bank’s insignia over their breast pockets. Chung took the trouble to introduce himself to all five of the men as he toured the control room, and he looked at the identity card each man had clipped to his chest, memorising their names as he shook their hands. The men studied ranks of television screens, some black and white and some colour. Some of the screens showed a constant picture, such as the ones covering the corridors, but others were continually moving and changing their viewpoint. Others clicked from view to view every few seconds. Ballantine had one of the men demonstrate how a picture on one of the small black and white screens could be called up on one of the big colour screens if there was something they wanted to see in more detail. Some of the cameras could be moved by operating tiny joysticks on the console.

  “Very impressive,” said Chung. On
the wall behind the men were half a dozen shotguns in a cabinet. “Very impressive indeed.”

  “We don’t expect the men here ever to use the shotguns, of course,” said Ballantine, seeing Chung’s interest in the weapons. “The telephones over there are direct lines to the police station, and to a private security firm.”

  “A private firm?” said Chung. “Why is that necessary?”

  Ballantine smiled. “The police are stretched to breaking-point these days,” he said. “We can’t depend on them always responding as quickly as they used to, so to be on the safe side we have a private firm on hand. Just as a precaution.”

  “Are the alarms linked directly to the police?” asked Chung.

  “Yes. And to the security firm. If the alarms go off here they also go off there. Our staff here call them either to confirm there is an emergency or to tell them it’s just a test. The function of the men in this room is to bring in outside help, not to protect the vaults themselves. They do not leave their posts during their shift. They even set the electric time locks on the vault doors from here.”

  “It seems a faultless system,” said Chung.

  “It is, Mr Chung. It is. Now, let me take you back to my office and I’ll give you an application form and some leaflets.”

  Chung spent ten minutes in Ballantine’s office listening to his views on bank security and drinking his awful coffee before thanking him and leaving. On the way to his car, Chung removed a gold pen from his inside jacket pocket and on the back of Ballantine’s business card he wrote down the names of the men he’d seen in the bank’s control room.

  Neil Coleman took the lift to the floor which housed Terry McNeil’s office in Special Branch. McNeil was sitting hunched over a computer terminal. By his side was a red and gold-patterned mug with a lid on it. When McNeil saw Coleman he switched off his screen and sat back in his chair. He lifted the lid off his mug and the fragrance of jasmine filled the small office. Unlike Coleman, McNeil was not required to share office space. He had personalised it with several tall green plants and a variegated spider plant which tumbled either side of his computer screen and there was a large parchment scroll behind his desk on which was a vertical line of Chinese characters. On a table behind the chair on which Coleman sat was a Pioneer portable television and underneath it, on the floor, a video recorder of the same make.