by George Lazăr
Now events unfolded in quick succession. The robber who had gathered the money from the cashiers’ cases entered the safe room, unfolding another bag and placing it in front of the safe. He swept stacks of neatly arranged bills from the shelves, tipping them directly into the bag. In less than a minute he had emptied the safe, zipped the bag and rushed outside. Then Bolden received another blow – this time to the back of his head. He collapsed into darkness.
Emerging from the black, he struggled to put things together. Where was he? Lying face-down on cold tile, head throbbing. How long had he been out? It seemed only a few minutes, but there was the bank manager, lying on the metallic floor of the safe room, a trail of blood trickling down his temple. Bolden couldn’t tell if the man was alive or not. He managed to get up, but only with great difficulty. The pain in his head was overpowering, far exceeding the reminders of those strikes to his ribs and gut.
In the distance, a hopeful chorus of police sirens. Bolden stirred, then noticed that the gangsters had not yet left the building. The sentry at the entrance came and told the other ones something in a rushed tone. The robbers exchanged a few words in their own language. One of them addressed the people inside, speaking in English with a Slavic accent:
“We are caught in here. We are going to demand a car. We will use you as hostages. If you cooperate, you will live.”
A phone on top of one of the desks rang. The one who had hit Bolden beckoned one of the bank’s employees, who was lying on the floor, to answer it.
He listened, then spoke to the robbers. “They want to know who the leader is. I think they want to negotiate.”
The attacker who was giving orders moved rapidly to take the receiver.
“A car! Now! Or I start killing hostages!”
He listened to the answer and reacted with visible displeasure.
“I said now!”
The man slammed down the phone and spoke in thunderous English addressed to no one in particular. “They think we are joking! They don’t take us seriously. So we will execute someone to make it clear. We want that damn car. If they don’t give it to us, we will starting shooting, one of you every five minutes. And we’ll start with him,” he said, pointing at Bolden. “After all, he is the one who caused this whole mess by deciding to play hero.”
Two masked men grabbed Bolden and dragged him towards the bank’s entrance. They opened the door to display him to the police, and the leader of the gang pointed his gun at Bolden’s temple while holding him by his collar.
In a strange way, Bolden contemplated his end unemotionally. He felt detached, as if all of these things were happening to someone else. Even the pain caused by the blows he had received was fading. The black envelope came to mind and he recalled the date written on it. A calendar clock hanging over the tellers’ counter confirmed what he already knew: it was the same date as the date on the envelope.
The day of his death.
The unknown sender had foreseen it and warned him. For a moment he wondered if this whole story was a setup, if he had arrived on the set of one of those “cops and robbers” films and the director was about to appear any moment to call “cut” and end the scene. Or maybe the sender of the envelope was the one who organized the robbery.
It all remained as inexplicable as the fact that he had willingly and so foolishly pressed the panic button. Otherwise, the robbers would have finished their task and slipped away with the money, and he would be free by now. Later on, when he analyzed his foolish gesture, he would suppose that the blow to the back of his head had been responsible for his muddle-minded blunder, perhaps assisted by a desire for revenge against men who had humiliated him, men who dared to give him orders by right of nothing more than some shoddy weapons and an apparent willingness to use them.
The police had sealed off the area around the bank with a fence made of panels of welded bars painted in white and red stripes. Onlookers gathering behind them as tourists poured out of a bus that had been stopped by the police cordon. His saga would play out before this crowd of police and reporters and cameramen and Parisians and tourists, in front of cameras and videophones. But Bolden no longer saw them; his mind slipped toward the void, as if all his thoughts had spilled out, leaving him empty. He felt his legs giving way and he fell to his knees, the hand of his aggressor still holding him tightly by the collar of his coat.
And then the shot. Even weeks later, after intense police investigation, the mystery of exactly where it came from and who had fired it would remain, but there, in the moment, it was merely a series of events. A rifle crack. The head of the robber who was about to shoot Bolden jerked backwards, his forehead pierced by a small hole, the back of his skull blown out by a large one. The dead man swayed a moment, and then his body went limp and heavy, collapsing onto Bolden, for whom the world had passed into a surreal dreamscape.
After a moment of dazed stillness, the robbers in the bank opened fire chaotically, shooting at police, randomly executing hostages who still lay harmlessly on the floor. The strike team tossed smoke grenades through the open door before and the bank filled with whitish, pungent smoke. The gunmen and their surviving hostages began to cough and cry.
Despite the smoke, confusion and gunfire, Bolden no longer hesitated. He pushed away the body of the dead bank robber, got to his feet and ran unsteadily toward the barricade. Taking advantage of the fact that the policemen’s attention was directed towards the bank, he disappeared into the uproar of streets filled with fleeing spectators.
He could still feel the ghost sensation of the gun barrel against the back of his skull, and his head and torso throbbed from the beatings he had endured. But nothing could compare to the deep satisfaction he felt in the simple act of remaining alive. He looked a horrifying mess in disheveled clothes and awash in blood from an open wound on his forehead, and his first two attempts at hailing a cab ended in predictable failure. But the third taxi stopped for him, and Bolden slipped into the back seat in profound, exhausted relief.
Later, back at his apartment in the 8th Arrondissement, he downed a handful of pain-killers and took a much-needed shower. Feeling considerably better, he dressed his wounds (which were mercifully superficial), and watched the conclusion of the bank robbery on television.
Dramatic video of his near-execution had been looping through TV coverage of the crime ever since the shootout vaulted to the top spot in the local news cycle. Neither the police nor the press had yet connected his name to the on-screen image of the doomed man with the gun to his head, but Bolden grasped intuitively that this was merely a matter of time. He processed his options quickly, made his decision, and called his pilot with orders to prepare the plane immediately. He would call Danielle once they were airborne, give her some excuse about some made-up emergency. His motives were mixed: on the one hand, he didn’t want to scare her. On the other, he didn’t understand what had happened in his life since the arrival of the black envelope, and he was certainly in no mood to talk about it.
One way or the other, he reasoned, their next encounter would be on familiar American soil. He would send for her, fly her to the country where he felt safe, get them both an ocean away from the mystery of death and salvation in Paris.
But here he was, inexplicably still alive.
The men who nearly killed him had not fared so well. All of the four had been shot dead, and their getaway driver was being interrogated by police. Early details emerging from the investigation described three of the bank robbers as members of a Chechen paramilitary group, backed by two Russian hired guns. They intended to use the bank money to buy weapons for the Chechen guerrillas who had been harassing the Red Army for decades, a long-smoldering wildfire the Russians could often tamp down, but never extinguish.
Eleven bank employees and customers died in the random carnage at the end of the robbery, with another seven victims rushed to the hospital for treatment of life-threatening wounds. Only Bolden emerged from the ordeal without serious injury, and his esc
ape pivoted on a single rifle shot that spared his life and sparked the massacre.
A police spokesman forcefully denied initial press reports claiming that someone in law enforcement had fired that first shot, but eyewitness, video and forensic evidence all amounted to little more than nothing. The bullet itself proved the most maddening piece: it was an unknown design for a fragmenting slug, built to disintegrate on contact. Its exploding shards made pudding of the Chechen gunman’s head, but left little of use to ballistic analysts. Trajectory and tell-tale weapon characteristics remained unknown.
Bolden watched his near-execution in morbid fascination with each re-looping of the news video. There he was, face down, gun to his head, his life’s clock run out – and then the back of the bank robber’s head exploded, unleashing a furiously chaotic shoot-out. The cameraman lost focus on him in the moments that followed, and Bolden had slipped away without anyone capturing an positively identifiable image of him. Police would soon review the evidence inside the bank, though, and Bolden had no doubt they would quickly connect his name to videotape of the doomed man at the doorway.
Bolden planned to be far away by then.
He had no intention of returning to Europe any time soon. There would be no idyllic life on a French estate with Danielle, and he would task his lawyers to deal with the Paris police once his plane had cleared French airspace.
The adrenaline rush began to fade, and his thoughts drifted with some satisfaction to the black envelope. He wanted to tear it to shreds in triumph and defiance, but felt much too tired. The mysterious sender had been wrong.
He had survived.
Chapter 4
The elevator doors to the underground parking level beneath Bolden’s midtown-Manhattan apartment slid open to reveal a distinguished and athletic-looking man with cropped gray hair and impeccable grooming. He held a cheap brown-leather briefcase in one hand and stood casually with the other hand in his trouser pocket.
“Hello, Mr. Bolden. We are The Guardian Angel.”
Bolden felt the world falling away from him, as if the elevator had suddenly plunged into the void.
His sense of reality, which hadn’t felt secure since his hasty return from Paris, now seemed to break loose softly from any outward semblance of normality, his frame of reference drifting absurdly as his insides chilled and his heart raced. Bolden’s eyes darted around the dim scene, searching for danger or reassurance. The man had said “We.” Was this some kind of a trap? Dizziness washed over him like a child surrendering to vertigo on a sinister amusement park ride.
As if flipping a switch, Bolden’s sense of disoriented helplessness transformed itself into a more useful emotion: anger. He’d left his gun in the glove compartment of his sports car, and the thought of being menaced without an effective means to even the odds made him furious. How could he have been so stupid?
Now his brain worked rapidly to process the scene for information. The underground parking deck looked normal – surveillance cameras in place and functioning, residents coming and going from their cars with no visible sense of alarm. A middle-aged security guard scanned a tablet in his plexiglass booth. Bolden felt his heart rate and breathing come back under his control. Nothing about his surroundings suggested an ambush.
The man spoke again, as if reading Bolden’s mind.
“Perhaps you misunderstand. We’re the ones who sent you the black envelope and card. We’re the ones who saved your life in Paris at the door of the bank – although your actions in the vault room forced us to improvise. Not a mode of operation we prefer. Not at all. We still don’t understand why you pressed that alarm button, but then again, it is not the first time we’ve intervened in issues we don’t fully understand.”
“Who are you and what do you want?” Bolden demanded, feeling his familiar executive confidence returning to his otherwise shaky body.
The gray-haired man’s face briefly conveyed a perplexed expression, but it morphed into a broad smile as he withdrew his hand from his pants pocket. Bolden tensed for action, but the hand emerged without a weapon in it. The gray-haired man extended it palm up to show it was empty. He didn’t offer to shake hands.
“Let me try this again, Mr. Bolden,” he said. “My name is Colonel Folder, I represent The Guardian Angel, and we’ve been watching your back for years. So don’t be afraid. We’re the good guys.”
Bolden processed the man’s words cautiously.
“Are you telling me... “
“That we were there protecting you in Paris? Yes. The shooter who took down your executioner was one of ours. But don’t take my word for it. We record everything.”
“And the black envelope?”
Colonel Folder glanced around him uncomfortably, and Bolden realized that the two had not yet moved from the elevator door. The gray-haired man turned sideways and made a graceful gesture toward the parking deck, and Ian stepped out of the elevator, cautious but intrigued. The two walked slowly side-by-side, their footsteps echoing sharply.
“Now, the black envelope,” Colonel Folder began. “Granted, it’s an unusual means of contacting someone, but we consider it an effective technique for activating a person’s focused attention when full attention in unusually stressful situations is essential to success. It was quite literally a matter of life and death, as you learned for yourself.”
“How could you have possibly known?
“That your life was in danger? Paris wasn’t the first time we’ve intervened on your behalf, you know. We saved your life when you were a child. Recorded that, too. It’s all there for your review, if you need help remembering.”
But Bolden remembered. A watershed moment when he was five, precise details long ago worn soft by time. His adult memory of the event was more a recollection of the story as told to him by grown-ups, with remnants of his murky emotional reactions mixed in.
One of his stepmother’s parties. Rich, guests celebrating their mutual hedonism. Everyone was drunk, or high, or both, including his Mexican babysitter, who dozed in an armchair.
Young Ian saw his opportunity and took it, sneaking around the forbidden corners of the party. He watched guests having sex in various configurations, passed sleeping couples in unlikely places. He listened to someone playing a guitar, eavesdropped on drunken conversations. None of these things impressed him: at five, Ian was used to the sounds of his stepmother’s frequent parties, the sweet smell of marijuana, the heavy pall of cigarette tobacco. But curiosity drove him.
He snuck out the wide-open back door unnoticed by the adults, and there, beside the pool, something unexplained occurred. Perhaps he slipped on wet concrete, or stumbled across some passed-out party-goer in the darkness. In any case, the five-year-old hit his head on the cement and fell into the tepid water, sinking slowly past beer cans and cigarette butts. The swimming instructor who coached young Ian in the summer months had taught him well, but now he was drowning, unconscious and unnoticed.
Or, almost unnoticed. Guests later described a nondescript man in a tight black suit who dove into the pool and emerged with the limp child, placing him on the cement and performing expert mouth-to-mouth resuscitation that soon returned Ian to his addled senses, coughing and spitting out the water he had inhaled. A crowd of bewildered revelers gathered around them, scattering only when Ian’s father elbowed his way through the crowd to his son. He gave Ian a hug a rare hug and clutched him tightly to his chest, and by the time the crowd’s attention shifted from their poignant embrace, the man in the black suit was gone. No one saw him arrive. No one saw him leave.
“How do you know about that?” Bolden asked.
The colonel chuckled. “I know plenty. For instance, that night created your first collateral victim. The higher the level of intervention, the greater the chances of collateral damage. It’s unfortunate, but that’s just how it goes.”
“You were there...” Bolden said, a half-whisper that expressed his amazed recognition. The colonel only smiled an enigmatic smile, neither
confirming nor denying. “What’s this about a collateral victim?”
The colonel offered no answer, only his calm, piercing gaze. Folder’s eyes led Bolden deeper into his memory, where he recalled strands of a story about the irresponsible sitter. He never seen her again, and always assumed that his father had fired the young woman for drinking on the job and sent her back to Juarez. But there were darker strands in that part of the story as well, tales of her suicide, talk that his father had killed her that night in a blind rage and used his money and influence to make the whole ugly incident go away.
Bolden swallowed hard.
“So you knew what was about to happen to me? You knew I was going to drown?”
“Yes, and I understand your amazement,” Folder answered serenely. “What I am about to tell you may sound unusual. I assure you it is real. We can provide you all the proof you could require.
“Mr. Bolden, we have a particular Device. It gives us the ability to determine with a high degree of confidence the likelihood of your death over the next 48 to 72 hours. Most days, the Device reports the likelihood as low. When it rises, we pay attention. When it spikes, we go into action.”
Bolden studied Colonel Folder’s face, searching for evidence of the great practical joke this story no doubt represented. He found none of it, and Folder recognized the look.
“Let me assure you, Mr. Bolden. I’m not kidding around. In fact, I never kid around. The Device exists. It isn’t magic, it isn’t a fable. It’s a technology – an invention, like the computer or the automobile.”
“So what does that make you? The inventor?”
“I represent The Guardian Angel. We are a specialized organization that cheats death for clients who can afford our services. That’s what we do. That’s all we do.”
“But I haven’t paid anyone!”
The colonel’s implacable gaze increased in gravity.
“Correct. You haven’t paid anyone. Yet. But we consider it highly likely that you will soon elect to do so.