Sergeant Verity and the Blood Royal (18 page)

Yet Verney Dacre was conscious of putting his neck, however willingly, into their noose. There was only one answer. He moved quickly to the long brass chain controlling the weighing-room lights and pulled gently upon it. The great central 'gasolier' faltered, flared suddenly, and then subsided to a dying glow of red mantles. It was a risk but, as Dacre reflected, a man who feared risks would hardly be in the vaults of the Federal Mint at dead of night, with the gallows as the price of failure. If the guards had a spy-hole, they would see only that the gas had gone out or that someone had forgotten to light it before leaving the weighing-room. They might call out a regiment of dragoons on the strength of this, but Dacre chose to think otherwise.

By stopping the flue and driving the acid fumes back into the corroding-house, he had got beyond the outer door with its time-lock. Now, as the second stroke of the cracksman's masterpiece, he was about to open the heavy steel door of the stronghold with its million-combination lock. He had watched and heard Willson Moore opening the lock that morning, but of course Moore was able to reset the lock automatically to any other combination when he closed it again. Dacre had not been there at the closing of the door and in any case he was sure that neither he nor Morant-Barham would have been permitted to listen to the sequence of clicks as the lock was reset. And yet, as he crossed the room towards it, Dacre had not the least doubt of his ability to open the lock and the door as quickly as Willson Moore had done that morning.

The secret was simple. The lock itself was one of the most intricate that James Sergeant of Rochester had ever devised. Yet Dacre knew that when the lock was set, the routine of the Federal Mint would require that two men, the Director as well as his private secretary in this case, should know the combination. When James Snowden had closed the stronghold the day before, he must have set it to a number known to Willson Moore. Only in this way could Moore open it to receive the 'royal treasure' in Snowden's absence. After that, Moore could have reset it to any number, since both men would be at the Mint on the following day and Moore could tell Snowden what the number was.

But, thanks to the snare which Dacre had set and Maggie had baited, Willson Moore knew that he would not be at the Mint on the following day, having promised to rescue the young woman from the house of abomination in New York. Being unable to reveal this to his employer, and knowing that Snowden must be able to open the stronghold to retrieve the Prince's alleged possessions, Moore would have only one possibility open to him. He must set the lock to the combination already known to Snowden and refer to the fact, in any note of apology, without actually giving the figures. To have written down a new set of figures in a note which must pass through other hands would have been an unpardonable lapse of security. When he closed the stronghold door that morning, Moore must therefore have left the lock on the same setting as when Dacre and Morant-Barham watched him open it. So, at least, Verney Dacre reasoned.

Moving forward in darkness, he felt for the door ahead of him, the cold flat steel of its surface with the milled conical spindle of the lock. His strong bony fingers closed over this and he began to turn it slowly to the right, as he had seen Willson Moore do. He felt the metal click as the spindle passed over the first notch of the tumbler. There was no indication as to whether this was the correct setting for the first number. If Willson Moore was to be believed, the only indication was when the would-be cracksman turned the spindle beyond the notch of the setting and triggered an alarm bell. It was not a refinement which Dacre had met before and it seemed peculiar to the security system of the Mint.

He turned further, counting the clicks until the spindle engaged the sixth of the ten notches. Then he let out a long gasp and realized that he had been holding his breath throughout the process. The engaging of the sixth notch felt no different to any of the others. But if his reasoning

about Willson Moore was right, it must be the chosen setting. With great care he now turned the spindle to the left to engage the second chosen number. Only with each of the six figures in the right order would the door open. That morning he had counted five clicks on the second rotation as he made polite and inane conversation.

He reached the fifth notch and though there was still nothing to indicate whether this was right or wrong, he heard no bell and no alarm. Six again to the right, faltering once when he thought he heard the spindle engage but knew that he must turn it once more to match Willson Moore's pattern. Still there was no alarm. Four to the left. Nine to the right, expecting at any moment as he approached seven, eight, and the final setting to hear the air burst into a clanging resonance. But the silence about him was complete as in a tomb. Three to the left, the last one, the clicks seeming incredibly far apart.

Dacre stood upright with a long breath. Despite the chill of the rooms at night, the black dust of his face was grotesquely streaked white by several rivulets of sweat. He took the bar across the steel door and pulled it towards him. The door held fast. It was not that his strength was too little, he could feel the door still securely held by its massive and concealed iron bolt.

The absurdity and injustice of it struck him equally. He knew that his logic must be right, and even if he could clear the lock of the setting he had just chosen, there was no hope of finding one other combination from a million possibilities. Yet he was sure of the setting which he had seen Willson Moore use in opening the door that morning. His teeth were set with rage, when suddenly he relaxed, guessing that in his confusion he had forgotten to turn the spindle once more to the right to draw back the bolt. That must be it, surely.

The milled metal turned easily in his grasp, he took the bar and felt the heavy door move slowly. There was no need to pull it wide, a couple of feet would be space enough for what he required. The stronghold was a vast blackness before him. He realized with relief that it was unlit because there were no spy-grills into it, and nothing which he did there would be seen. Evidently, its builders had decided that any breach at this point in the massive walls must endanger the inner vault.

Dacre closed the steel door behind him without locking it. Then he felt his way forward to the corner where the six boxes had been stored that morning. He had taken great care over the order in which the boxes were loaded and as his hands examined the gloss of lacquered wood in the darkness, he knew from certain marks carefully made upon it that the first coffin-shape he had come to was the one he wanted.

He broke the wax seal and, fumbling at his belt, found the little key for the lock. The lid creaked open and his hands touched the metal shutter of a dark lantern and felt the rattle of sulphur-tipped matches. In a moment more, the rising glow of the oil lamp cast its wavering tawny light upon the walls of the stronghold. With a savage satisfaction, Verney Dacre thought that his enemies had delivered themselves into his hands. The power of the time-lock and the million combinations had fallen to his first assault. Before him in the open box lay the tools of his trade. The vault door in the stronghold wall was secured only by a Yale Double Treasury Lock, so sure were the authorities that no burglar would ever negotiate the time-lock and combination-bolt. The Double Treasury Lock would have deterred any cracksman of average skill, but Verney Dacre looked at it and chuckled.

The lock presented a steel surface, approximately a foot square, with two keyholes. It was only to be expected that this final door, behind which lay the treasure of the Mint, should require two keys to open it, each held by a different man. Dacre was acquainted with the inner working of a Double Treasury Lock. The massive bolt was held closed by the enormous pressure of a steel bit. Two levers on pivots slotted into this bit and, in turn, maintained it in position. Each lever was controlled by three interlocking cog-wheels.

The first cog-wheel, in each case, could only be moved by the turning of the correct key in the lock. When this happened, the first of the pivot levers was freed. When the second was freed as well, by the second key, the steel bit yielded to the weight of the bolt and the door was unlocked.

As a further precaution against unauthorized copies being made of the keys, the keys and locks could be altered easily. Each key consisted of a shank and the two extreme teeth. The remaining teeth of the key were held in place on a screw and could be rearranged or altered in number according to any adjustments of the lock. Dacre was undismayed. He took from the open box a key of just such description with an assortment of teeth. In the normal way, a burglar might have 'smoked' the lock, inserting a length of carbon-smeared wire to measure the distance of the tumblers. But any trace of carbon or soot in the mechanism would reveal the trick when the authorities began to investigate the theft. Moreover, a lock as sophisticated as this one required more subtle measurement.

Dacre had followed the career of James Sergeant, locksmith extraordinary, with considerable interest. The year before, he had given his attention to imitating Sergeant's achievement in the construction of a micrometre, designed for mapping the interior of a closed lock. Dacre had never seen Sergeant's device but he knew enough of it to believe that his own resembled it in general appearance. It had a watch-face as dial, the single hand controlled by two interlocking cogs on the face itself and measuring the distances of the lock, where the shaft of a key would enter, down to a hundredth of an inch. Sergeant claimed to have measured the ten-thousandth part of an inch. Dacre was less exacting.

From the outer cog there projected a thin probe, more slender than the barrel of a key, with a single tooth at its far end. Dacre cased it into the first opening of the Double Treasury Lock, the movement of it turning the little cogs and the hand on the watch-face until it met the obstruction of the first tumbler. He made a mental note of the reading. Turning the shaft on its side and then upright again, to negotiate the tumbler, he eased it forward until it encountered the next tumbler. Again he noted the reading. By the end of his investigation he had determined the position of the five tumblers which must be raised to turn the key and open the lock.

Next he took his key and fitted it with the smallest teeth, all of the same size. None of them even encountered the tumblers. He worked up, one size at a time, until one of the teeth raised the lever of the first tumbler. He could tell which one it was, partly by the feel of the key as he turned it and partly by the bright scratch-mark on the tooth of the key where it had scraped its carefully-polished surface against the other metal.

Keeping that tooth in place, he increased the size of the others until all five matched the tumblers of the lock. Last of all, he turned it and felt the wheels of the lock move. It was still impossible to open the vault door, until the second lock had been treated in the same way. Dacre worked, silent and intent, hearing occasionally a distant sound which might have come from as far away as the street or as close as the outer corridor of the Mint, on the far side of the fortress-like wall. The vault door set into it was about five feet high and Verney Dacre guessed he would be lucky if he could so much as stand upright in the interior.

He turned the second makeshift key and felt the door set free by the opening of the bolt. The yellow lamplight shone into a space which looked more like a sepulchre than anything he had ever seen. Like the coffins of the dead, though large enough only for dead children, the locked boxes of finished coin awaited despatch to the banks of New York or Washington, St Louis or Philadelphia itself. Each one was secured by Linus Yale's inset cylinder lock. As Dacre told himself, a man who had come this far could hardly afford a glance at the chests of mere silver coin, assembled to one side. A fellow must pay his way in gilt. Somewhere else, in another stronghold and another vault, there was no doubt a stock of uncoined gold and unstamped planchets, but even these were nothing in comparison with the treasure before him.

Dacre had promised Joey a couple of million in coined gold, not believing in so much but hoping to keep the youth's spirits high. Now, as he surveyed the bank boxes, counting twenty-eight of them, Dacre swore that he must have spoken truer than he could have known. Golden Eagles at twenty dollars a touch! Two or three thousand dollars in each pound's weight! Twenty-eight boxes with thirty pounds or more in each! He cursed aloud in his joy!

The boxes had not yet been bound with steel bands and sealed across the lock with the Mint's stamp. That would happen when they reached the weighing-room on their departure. But the weight they now held would already have been checked, and Dacre knew that it must not alter.

First he examined the locks, and once more confronted the skill of Linus Yale. Each box had its individual lock, opened by a flat metal key. Instead of the conventional tumbler mechanism, the entire lock turned with the key to open the box. But the edge of the flat key was a mass of peaks and indentations, indicating an array of pins of different lengths, all of which had to be lifted simultaneously to free the lock. To have picked twenty-eight such locks would have taken even Verney Dacre a very long time. But he had twice dissected such a device, bought for the purpose, with the loving care which a student of anatomy might have given to a choice cadaver. The locks would not be closely examined again until they reached the banks. That being so, he could open them in a few minutes.

Returning to his array of tools, Dacre chose a craftsman's drill and fitted a small diamond-headed bit to it. He crouched before the first box with its black-painted lock-plate. The chosen point was quarter of an inch above the slit of the key opening. The tip of the drill was no more than a millimetre in size. Supporting himself on one knee, his left elbow steadied on his other thigh, Dacre wound the drill against the metal plate with all his strength. The stark pattern of veins and sinews in his face and neck, the racking pain in his wrists, bore witness to the exertion. But it was at this point that a tiny hole drilled through the mechanism would cut through the pins holding the lock closed. Once they had been defeated, a plain flat strip of metal inserted in the lock would turn it and open the box.