by Steve Levi
“I’ll bet if you look under this ledge running along here,” Noonan tapped his foot on the narrow lip dividing the outside wall of the tunnel from sheer space, “you’ll find some pitons, probably cemented in. They hooked up and dropped down right here. They doubled the rope so they could pull it free once they got down there,” Noonan said, pointing at the water below. “Then they headed away from the end of the tunnel where the police were going to be stopping traffic.”
Swensen gave Noonan a strange look and then looked at the rest of the troupe. It was clear no one wanted to go out onto the narrow ledge to check on Noonan’s theory. When no one stepped forward, Noonan took up his own challenge. “Not a lot of brave souls, eh? OK. Give me about ten feet of slack and then tie it off to the wall. No, Ramon, I don’t want anyone holding it. If I slip, I’m only going to fall ten feet. Then you can pull me back up. If you were holding it, there might be both of us making it all the way down to the river.”
Delgado gave a sick smile and then gave Noonan about a dozen feet of slack.
“OK, now give me the end of one of those bundles of rope.” Swensen handed him the end of a coil, and Noonan edged out onto the lip. He maneuvered himself awkwardly onto his belly and crawled along the ledge, his left hand gripping whatever outcropping or niche he could feel. With his other hand, he felt along the underside of the ledge. Inching his way along ten feet, he suddenly stopped. Then, with his left hand gripping the wall, he pulled the rope through what he thought felt like a piton. When the rope displayed firmness, he took a deep breath, and bracing himself with the taut rope on what he hoped was a cemented piton, he carefully pulled himself over the edge and looked underneath. As he suspected, there were two pitons spaced six feet apart. He was at the first. With great effort he pulled himself back onto the ledge and crawled back to the mouth of the aqueduct.
“You’re shaking, Heinz,” said Edison as Noonan finally stood erect.
“You’re right, Chelsea,” said Noonan with a sickly smile. “This is a young person’s game.” He handed Delgado the end of the rope that had been passed through the piton. “Now it’s someone else’s turn to white knuckle it. Somebody’s got to go down and take a look around.”
“Not me,” said Delgado as he passed the rope to Swensen. “I get vertigo standing in front of the toilet.” Swensen was hesitant; Edison was not.
“Men!” was all she said as she pulled the rope down over her head and shoulders. She wrapped the rope around her torso twice and then tied the end with a bowline. Then she stepped on the rope and pulled it tight under her boot.
“You’ve done this before,” Delgado said with a smile.
“How’d you guess,” she snickered and then walked over to the edge of the lip.
“When you get down, Chelsea, I want you to work your way up to the road. See if you can find anything showing two guys went through the area.”
Edison nodded. She took one look down the sheer drop and smiled. “OK, guys, lever the rope through the piton and around the pillar. We want to be double safe for our colleagues in blue! It’s time to rock and roll.” When the rope was looped, she sat on the edge and dropped over.
“Now that’s a gutsy gal,” Noonan said as he looked over the edge and watched her recede down the sheer face of the mountainside.
After Edison made it down to the level of the river water, she unwrapped the rope from around her and pulled one strand of the doubled rope. The rope snaked free of the piton when she pulled it hand over hand. She left the rope on the side of the pool and maneuvered around some bushes and then waved excitedly back toward where Noonan and the other two were standing two hundred feet above her. She pointed in the direction of the roadway and began working her way through the brush on the steep side of the mountain.
“Well,” said Noonan to the other two. “Now we know what happened to the dematerializing armored car.”
“Guess that wraps everything up,” said Swensen. “We’ve accounted for the money, the missing truck, and now the missing Jacksons.”
“Almost everything,” said Noonan. “Almost everything.”
SATURDAY
Chapter 40
Noonan’s arms were filled with a large cardboard box of Swensen Armored Car Company logbooks when he entered John Swensen’s office on Saturday morning. Swensen was busy stacking correspondence in piles on his desk, so Noonan had to put the cardboard box on the floor by the door.
“I didn’t get a chance to thank you for all the work you’ve done for us,” Swensen said. “I can’t pay you because you work for the police, but I’d like to give you something for your effort.”
“Not a problem,” Noonan said, smiling. “Protect and defend. It’s our job.”
“And thanks for bringing in the logbooks. John and Ramon are going to need them for the auditors. I’m not sure if you know it, but I’m more or less retiring from Swensen. I had a bout with cancer, and the good Lord told me it was time for me to step back.”
“Actually, I did know, John . There is nothing pleasant about cancer. Active or in remission, it’s like a beast in your bowels. It’s always there, asleep. It can wake up at any time for any reason. It changes your life.”
“Been there before, eh?”
“No, knock on wood.” Noonan paused. “I just wanted to come by and clear up some last-minute items about this last week, you know, the dematerializing armored car.”
“Quite an episode, I must say. Something mystery writers and conspiracy buffs would write about for years.” Swensen put up his fingers in quote marks in the air, ‘Vanished into thin air!’”
“That’s what bothered me from the beginning,” Noonan started. “I run on a two-tiered analysis on every one of my cases. Every aspect of every case has to pass that test. It’s my way of double-checking myself.”
“Interesting,” Swensen said, half-listening. “A two-tiered test?”
“Yes,” Noonan replied softly. “Every aspect of the case has to answer yes to the following two questions. First, is this action possible? Two, is this action reasonable? Take Bigfoot as an example. If someone tells me a Bigfoot was seen in the vicinity of a bank robbery, and must be the suspect, I log the accusation as possible—but not reasonable. For me to proceed down an investigative alley, the lead I am following has to be both possible and reasonable.”
Now Swensen was awake. “Is this going somewhere?”
“Maybe.” Noonan smiled and sat down on the upholstered chair in front of the desk. “When I was informed an armored car had vanished, I listed it as possible and reasonable. But when I was informed the armored truck was empty, that removed reasonable from the equation. It was not reasonable; therefore, there was something else going one, something in the background. In other words, something else was in play.”
“Interesting,” Swensen said. “Should I be taking notes?”
“Not really,” Noonan said, smiling. “Since no crime has been committed, we’re just talking.”
If the statement calmed Swensen, there was no way to tell. “Go on,” Swensen said. “I find this fascinating.”
Noonan did. “A case like this—not that this is a criminal case because, as you know, no crime has been committed—is a matter of assessing degrees of subtlety. No one is going to tell you what is really happening. You will have to figure it out on your own. Fight through the Yaupon brush, as we say on the Outer Banks.”
Swensen just smiled.
“Since I did not know what was going on, I went back to the basics. I followed the money. But, in this case, there was no money to follow. The dematerializing armored vehicle had no money. Ergo the money at risk was not in the truck, it was somewhere else. It did not take me long to pinpoint the RMD, LLC cash.”
“But it was secure. It was in the vault.” Swensen was slyly smiling now.
“Yes, it was in the vault. But there were minimal records. RMD, LLC basically had receipts. Those receipts just indicated how much money came into the vault. Your vault personnel cou
nted the money to verify the amount, but that’s all they did. What RMD, LLC was doing was similar to what the United States Post Office does. It puts mail addressed to you in a box it owns, whether it is a box in the local post office or your mailbox at the street corner. The post office only insures the delivery, not the value of the item being delivered. Swensen Armored Car Company was responsible for the storage of the cash from RMD, LLC, not the value of the cash. The Armored Car Company was not on the hook for the cash; North Carolina Mutual Indemnity was.”
“True. But we, Swensen, pay for insurance. If we use insurance, we pay more.”
“True, but only if you are on the hook. Which you are not. Neither is North Carolina Mutual Indemnity. The federal government is. And I must say the plot was admirably played. I am no slouch when it comes to subtlety, and it took me a while to put the pieces together. There were a lot of moving parts in this drama, and again, I must say, the mastermind played them well.”
“Fascinating. And how did you figure out this fantasy of a crime that was never committed, if I can ask?”
“You can ask. You’re the one who gave the answer early on. If you recall you said Swensen handled three kinds of valuables: audited moneys in the form of cash and debt-credit records, valuables along with insured items for transport, and cash being warehoused. The audited money was off the table because there were lots of people tracking that money. The valuable, insured items were being followed. Only one client was left: RMD, LLC and its cash, money. It was not being watched by auditors: private, state, or federal. But it was being watched by the feds.” Noonan looked at the ceiling as he raised and spread his hands. “I wonder who tipped the feds there was marijuana money in the vault of the Swensen Armored Car Company.”
“Whoever it was,” Swensen said, with slight raising of one corner of his mouth, “there was nothing illegal, immoral, or fattening about it.”
“Correct. The money was legal. If it had not been legal, the feds would have swooped down and snagged it right away. But that was the point. The mastermind needed the feds to know about the money but kept from legally seizing it. This forced the feds to do the only thing they could reasonably do. They got a third party, me,” Noonan tapped his chest, “to confirm it was there.”
“Hmmm . . .” was all Swensen said.
“And I performed admirably. I was played on a Stradivarius. The mastermind knew I could not and therefore would not confirm the RMD, LLC money in the vault was the property of RMD, LLC. All I could say was what I knew for sure: there was about one thousand pounds of cash on a palette in the vault that I had been told, but could not confirm, was the property of RMD, LLC. That didn’t make the feds happy, but it made the mastermind ecstatic. A third party had confirmed the existence of about ten million dollars in cash in the Swensen vault that was not part of the regular audit scheduling. If it disappeared, Swensen did not have to answer to any auditors—private, state, or federal—but only to the insurance company.”
“This is getting interesting,” Swensen said. “But just one thing: if the money had been stolen, which it has not been, Swensen would still be on the hook, to use your term.”
“Such was the beauty of the entire operation. The key to success was to stick someone else with the loss. The way to do that was have someone else take control of the money. But control had to be on paper and not on the cash itself. The cash had to remain in the vault, but the responsibility—on paper—had to be on someone else’s shoulders. Those FinCEN agents never knew what hit ’em. They were not worldly. They seized the responsibility for the cash but not the possession of the cash. Brilliant!”
“If someone were planning on stealing the money, I suppose.” Swensen was now openly smiling.
“Once FinCEN took control of the money on paper, the second phase of the operation went into effect. And I must credit the mastermind with his—or her—genius. The Sandersonville Police, the logical law-enforcement agency, who might have thrown a monkey wrench into the game, was busy looking for a dematerializing armored truck that never existed. The FinCEN agents were filing paperwork with their department, which left the mastermind free to complete the operation.”
“Interesting. You said the dematerializing armored truck never existed. It had to exist because it reappeared.”
“Ah, the genius of the entire operation. It wasn’t done with smoke and mirrors but with a combination of high-tech and low-tech ingenuity. Everyone believes the GPS tracking system is high-tech primarily because it takes a high-tech system to monitor the movement of the GPS. In an operation like Swensen’s, there are more than twenty vehicles. I bet they all have GPS. I’m also willing to bet no one is tracking the individual vehicles in real time. The system is just kind of on. There is no reason to monitor the vehicles in real time. If there is suddenly a problem, yeah, there will be real-time monitoring. But, for the most part, the system is like a light switch. When you need light, you use the switch to turn the light on. When you don’t need light, the switch stays off.”
“But the GPS on the dematerializing armored truck went ghost!”
“It went ghost in the garage. The GPS itself is just an electronic device. You unplug it, it goes off. I’m speculating because I cannot prove it; Steigle took the alleged dematerializing armored truck out of the garage on Saturday, the day before the truck went missing. The GPS was disabled in the garage, so the last-known location of the vehicle was there. Where it was supposed to be. Then he drove the armored truck to the warehouse garage where we found the other missing armored car. Sunday morning, he drove the fake armored car to Swensen’s, right here, where the Jacksons were waiting. They immediately got into the fake armored car. It was Sunday; there was no cash to deposit into the truck, so the only person doing the checking was Steigle. Off the truck went. John and Ramon didn’t give the fake truck so much as a glance. They were looking forward.”
“Well, what about Charlie Schanche? He was behind the armored truck. Wouldn’t he have seen the fake armored car?”
“He did because he was in on the deal.”
“Well, if he was in on the deal, where is the money he was supposed to get for being in on the deal? The Jacksons are gone, and who knows where Steigle is.”
“My bet—and of course I don’t know for sure because, as I keep saying, no crime has been committed—is that Charlie got a piece of this business. He is probably very happy here in Sandersonville and didn’t want to have to run. You’re getting out of the business. Maybe he got a piece of the pie as you are leaving.”
“Odd you should mention that.” Swensen smiled. “Part of the reorganization involves Charlie. Because of its complexity, we are severing the mechanical shop from the armored-car operation. Charlie will own that operation and provide mechanical services to the new Swensen’s.”
“Amazing and quite a reasonable business decision.”
“We at the new Swensen’s agree with you.”
“I thought you would feel that way.”
“Go on. This is a fascinating fantasy story.”
“I guess the Jacksons kept practicing the removal and destruction of the balsa apparatus on the dematerializing armored truck until they could do it in just a few minutes. At the same time, Steigle, who was providing pro bono services to hospice patients, was snagging identifications. We don’t know how many identifications he took, but we know he snagged at least two fake accounts. One was the name he used for his passport, and the other was for the woman who drove the fake truck out of the Pamlico Tunnel. The fake armored truck went into the tunnel, the last in the line of the convoy. When the truck came to the alley, it stopped. The Jacksons levered the false back off the truck, and the woman with the fake identification switched license plates and took off. While John and Ramon were trying to figure out what happened to the armored truck, the Jacksons were destroying the balsa back and hiding the winch in the storm drain. Then they went over the side at the back of the alley and down to the river below on ropes. By the time the stat
e troopers were called, the Jacksons were long gone. The identification of the woman—as yet unknown and will probably never be known—held up as did the license for the truck. The roadblock came up, and the woman and the fake truck disappeared, neither to ever be seen again.”
“What about the Jacksons? Why didn’t they just leave Sandersonville?”
“They couldn’t. The RMD, LLC money had not been stolen yet. I’m betting they didn’t trust Steigle. There was going to be ten million dollars showing up in the warehouse garage, and for that kind of money, no one is to be trusted. Besides, it was going to take at least three people to package the money quickly. I’m even willing to bet the two Jackson wives were there as well. Five people packing can go faster than three.”
“Assuming what you are saying is true, which is speculative, how did the RMC, LLC money get to the warehouse garage?”
“Easy. The same way the dematerializing armored truck got to the garage. Steigle drove it. Steigle went to the garage and drove the supposedly missing armored truck back to Swensen. He didn’t have to check in; he just drove it in. But the truck was not empty. The Jacksons were in the back. He parked the truck in the garage as far away from the vault entrance as he could. The Jacksons scurried over to the armored truck that Steigle was going to be taking out in an hour or so. Steigle then plugged in the GPS from the supposedly missing armored truck. It was spotted on the monitor or,” Noonan let the sentence play out and then, after a long pause, added, “or you spotted the reappearance of the missing truck after Steigle had left. After all, you were the one who notified me.”
“Oh, I can’t remember details like that,” Swensen said with a smile.
“Maybe not. But once the missing armored car appeared, everyone went over to see it. Including the vault personnel who, at that time, were a staff of two: you who were over with the reappearing truck and Steigle. Steigle probably opened the vault door, and the Jacksons went in and took out the RMD, LLC cash. There was one thousand pounds of cash, twenty trips of about fifty pounds apiece. The Jacksons had been weightlifting for a year by then, so fifty pounds wasn’t much of a load. While everyone else, including me and the Sandersonville police, were ogling the now-reappeared truck, Stiegel with the Jacksons drove right out the front gate. Steigle drove directly to the warehouse garage where the money was put in UPS, FedEx, and United States Post Office If it fits, it ships boxes. It’s a good bet the Jackson wives were there as well. When they finished packing the boxes, the Jacksons and their wives scattered to drop off the boxes in UPS and FedEx offices. All those boxes were for delivery to a hotel in Freeport, where the Jacksons would be staying. I’ll bet you’ll find the Jackson vehicles at an airport where they took a private flight to the Bahamas. The Jackson men were already on an APB alert, so they had to fly out on a private plane.”