A Calculated Risk, Katherine Neville [english novels for students txt] 📗

to leave he added to himself, “The left hand knoweth not what the right hand doeth.”

“What’s that?” said the man, already preoccupied.

“A biblical quotation,” said Tor as the door clicked shut behind him.

Without biblical aid, they had no way to reconcile the daily arrivals and departures of securities like these he held in his bag, he thought as he went back down the hall. If things were handled and filed in so many places, it would be hard enough just to reconcile the gross dollars that moved in and out the door. Tor smiled.

The streets outside were slushy and dirty with snow. Tor walked over to the bicycle and threw the canvas satchel into one of the pannier-type baskets slung over the back of the frame. He unlocked the bicycle from the rack and rode away through the steel-and-concrete canyons of Wall Street.

An hour later, covered with mud and laden with many such canvas satchels, the bicycle moved laboriously through heavy traffic to the subway entrance at Wall Street.

Tor pedaled wearily to the rack at the east entrance, locked his bicycle to the rack, and hoisted the panniers over his shoulder. Groaning a little beneath the weight, he descended the steps into the subway.

Lelia flew down the corridor as soon as the maid threw open the double entry doors.

“Mein Gott in Himmel!” she cried. “Mud! Mud! Qu’est qu’il fait? Do not let him enter—he will ruin my floors! What does he want?”

“Lelia, my charming one, what hospitality,” said Tor, wiping dirt from his eyelids to clear white patches that looked like goggles.

“Oh, mon cher,” said Lelia. “What have they done with you? You are dragged in the gutters, so dirty. Where have you come by these clothings?”

“This seems to be the appropriate attire in the courier business,” he assured her. “I’ve made a study of it. The transfer agents would have taken alarm if I’d arrived in a Brioni suit. It seems they prefer couriers who are more on the seamy side.”

“You must take off these things, and we will have Nana make you a nice bubble bath,” she told him, turning up her nose slightly at Tor’s aroma.

“No time for bubbles, my dear,” he replied. “Where’s Georgian? It’s time for her to go to work.”

Georgian was in the Plum Room, setting up papers and cleaning equipment. Tor and Lelia lugged the bags down the corridor, opened them one by one, and examined the contents, listing what they’d taken from each bag and placing those securities they’d selected in a small pile on the floor.

Lelia kept a running tab of the face value of each bond they extracted for printing.

“You’d better go wash your hands before you touch those anymore,” Georgian told Tor. “Or let Mother do it—you’re making a real mess here.”

“If you do your job right,” he said, grinning with white teeth against his black face, “these won’t be going back at all.”

Georgian stared at him.

“My God, this is it—this is really it, isn’t it?” she said.

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘it.’ But these are certainly negotiable securities, and we’re going to take the dollar values and certificate numbers from them and engrave them on our blank certificates. Don’t tell me you’re having second thoughts at this late date?”

Georgian stood dumbfounded.

“Allons, allons!” said Lelia all at once. “Mach schnell! Dépêchez-vous! We have all this work to do, and you are making the reveries. You begin the photos—and I will make some potage for the poor Zoltan. He will need the food, to restore the good health.”

“Mother, my God, do you never think of anything but food?”

“It makes strength for successful criminals,” said Lelia, standing up.

Tor was looking down at the pile of securities they’d outsorted, flipping through them with his thumb. He glanced up grimly.

“We have only twenty,” he said.

“Twenty what?” asked Georgian.

“Twenty certificates—out of all those satchels—that we can actually use. They have to be types we’ve already prepared engravings for. And if all the securities we get are like these—only five thousand dollars apiece—we’ll be making engraving plates for months, just to plug in the numbers.”

“It did take most of the weekend to make the plates for those bond samples you bought,” Georgian agreed. “It might take all day just to engrave the numbers on these few.”

“We don’t have all day,” snapped Tor. He bent over quickly and retallied the amount of the pile, “Less than ten million,” he said irritably.

“What’s wrong with that?” asked Georgian. “Your bet with True is whoever can steal thirty million first! We’re well on our way, with our very first haul!”

Tor sighed and stood up.

“Not steal thirty million—earn thirty million,” he explained patiently. “That calls for a billion in collateral.”

“So borrow bigger certificates for me to copy, then,” said Georgian with her own brand of logic.

“I am doing my best,” said Tor, biting off each word. “Considering that I have to take what the houses feel like transferring, and that you’ve become the Zen master of printing—perfection or nothing—I should say we’d wind up this little caper by sometime next June!”

“You don’t understand,” said Georgian tearfully. “I have to make a completely new plate—take the photo, develop the film, do the acid etching, the works—for every damned bond you drag in the door. There are too many steps for each one. Besides,” she added, picking up a bond and waving it at him, “half the numbers on these stupid things aren’t even engraved—they’re just slapped on with a printing press. So I don’t see why I have to go through so much effort—”

“What did you say?” cried Tor, snatching the bond from her fingers and staring at it.

He smiled slowly, and looked up at Georgian.

“My little featherbrained genius,” he said wryly. “I believe you’ve just saved all our necks.”

Tor was wolfing down his second bowl of Lelia’s delicious minestrone as he finished explaining the face of the bond to Georgian.

“Just as before, we can engrave almost everything up front, before we get our hands on the