The Getaway - By Tom Barber Page 0,1

been working together for over two years, and had set up a rota where they would take it in turns to deliver the cash, sharing the risk, giving one of them a week off whilst his partner took responsibility for the dollars in the bags.

That morning, the man in the front passenger seat unlocked his door and stepped out, slamming it shut behind him and hitching his belt as he moved to the side cabin on the truck. Back inside, his partner grabbed a copy of the New York Post and leaned back, going straight to the Sports headlines on the rear pages. He was relaxed, and rightfully so. He was sheltered behind twenty seven tons of reinforced steel and bullet-proof glass, enough to stop a firing squad of machine guns on full automatic or even an RPG. He and his partner also had a fully-loaded Glock 17 pistol on each hip, seventeen rounds in the magazine and two more clipped to their belts as extra insurance, a hundred and two extra reasons to feel confident about their safety. Chase and the armoured truck business took great care of the men inside these vehicles. They were carrying their profits and investments. If the two men got jacked, they weren’t the only ones who would suffer.

Outside the truck, the guard unloaded the supply from a cabin in the side of the truck, glancing left and right down the sunny sidewalk either side of him. Once he had the bags containing the money on a cart, he shut the cabin door and headed towards the entrance of the bank. As he approached the doors he started to relax. Another week down. Taking another look each side at the streets and neighbourhood around him, he shook off his unease as he grabbed the door handle and pulled it open. All this tension is unnecessary, he told himself. He’d been doing this exact routine for two years with no problems. And besides, this was the Upper East Side, not the ghetto. Movie stars and politicians lived up here, not bank robbers and gang members.

No one in their right mind would ever try to rob this place, the man figured as he strode inside and headed towards the manager by the vault.

He was wrong.

Across the street to the north, three men and a woman watched in silence as the man entered the bank. They were sitting in a yellow NYC taxi cab, pulled up on the street corner between 63and 64, twenty five yards behind the armoured truck. Vehicles passed them on the left as they headed downtown, but the cab stayed tight to the kerb, the engine running, the light on the roof switched off to dissuade anyone from trying to hail it. Anyone who passed it paid no heed to the vehicle. It was inconspicuous and attracted no extra attention, just another normal part of everyday New York life and scenery, as common as pizza slices and Knicks jerseys.

Which made it the perfect getaway car.

Inside the vehicle, all four passengers were dressed in pristine white paramedic uniforms, lifted straight from a hospital supply depot in Queens a day earlier. Before taking the clothing out of its plastic wrapping, each of them had pulled three sets of latex gloves over their hands, serving as triple insurance against any tears and guarding against any unwanted fingerprints that could be left on any of the equipment or clothing they used. Over the medic uniforms, three of them were also wearing white doctors’ overcoats, the kind a GP or a chemist would wear in a lab, also fresh from the packets. The driver wasn’t wearing one of the coats. He was staying in the car and wouldn’t need one.

The outfits were crisp and clean, covering every possible source of convicting DNA, not a speck or stain on any part or any piece of the white fabric. If anyone looked at them for longer than a few seconds on the street, the outfits would seem absurd. The three passengers were wearing a medic and a doctor’s uniform combined, something that never happened at the hospital or in the O.R. But to a glancing or wandering eye, the clothing wouldn’t cast suspicion. There were much stranger and wackier outfits being worn across the city at that very moment, outfits far more peculiar than these.

All the dramatic costumes were for the movies, or for amateurs for whom it was just a matter of time before they got caught.

A bank robber