The Vets (Stephen Leather Thrillers) (47 page)

Ballantine walked around his large black desk and sat down in a high-backed leather swivel chair. Chung sat in one of two smaller chairs on the opposite side of the desk. On the wall behind Ballantine were a number of framed photographs of him standing in front of different vault doors, most of which were bigger than he was.

Ballantine saw Chung looking at the pictures. “They’re the vaults we have in our various branches,” said Ballantine. He leaned back and pointed to one of the photographs. “That’s the one we have here. I’ll take you down and show it to you later.”

“They look impressive,” said Chung.

“To be honest, Mr Chung, looks can be deceptive. The size or thickness of a vault door is, more often than not, nothing more than a public relations exercise. Very few professionals would even try to go in through the door, they’d go in through the top or bottom or the sides. But people expect to see a big door, so we give it to them. Now, William tells me that you have Chinese artefacts you wish to store. Is that right?”

Chung nodded. “They’re fairly small, but there’s quite a few of them.”

“I think you’d be better off keeping them in our safe-deposit box vault. You might need several boxes, but I’m sure we’ll be able to accommodate you.”

“How is business at the moment?”

“It’s hectic,” said Ballantine. “Do you want a coffee?”

“Please,” said Chung. Ballantine pressed the intercom switch on the telephone and asked his secretary to bring in coffee for two.

“We’ve never been so busy,” continued Ballantine. “Everyone seems to be switching their savings into gold or valuables and it’s not safe keeping them at home, what with the rising crime rate and everything. They’re coming in every day with gold, diamonds, paintings, even cash.”

“They?”

“People who don’t trust bank accounts, people who remember what happened in 1949 when the communists took over China. It happened in Vietnam, too, when the South fell. Any money in bank accounts was as good as lost.”

“You’re not saying that you believe that’s going to happen in 1997?” said Chung.

Ballantine held up his hand and shook his head. “No, no, of course not,” he soothed. “But that is the perception that many Chinese have. And you know as well as I do how rumours can get spread here. Like wildfire. You must have heard the story about the tram that broke down during a typhoon. Everyone on the tram had to get off and the only place they could find to shelter was in front of a bank. People walking by assumed they were queuing to take their money out and within hours there was a run on the bank.”

Chung smiled thinly. “An apocryphal story, Mr Ballantine,” he said.

“That may well be, but the run on the Standard Chartered Bank in 1991 wasn’t apocryphal. There were rumours, just rumours mind, that Standard Chartered was connected to BCCI. There were queues of depositors withdrawing all their savings. And Citibank faced a similar run. They happened, Mr Chung. I saw the lines. The Chinese have a tendency to believe any rumour that affects their savings. You can tell them until you’re blue in the face that money can be sent around the world at the press of a button, but if they can’t hold it in their hands they don’t believe in it. It’s the old refugee mentality.”

“Once bitten,” said Chung.

“Exactly,” said Ballantine. “They’d rather have 100,000 American dollars in a safe-deposit box where they can touch it when they want to rather than the same amount in a foreign currency account earning interest. We can offer them paper gold, a sort of bank passbook which is equivalent to gold and we link the value of their investment with the price of gold on a daily basis, but they’d still rather have physical gold, either bars or gold coins. They sell more gold coins in Hong Kong than anywhere else in the world. Safety-deposit boxes have always been popular in the colony, but I’ve never seen it at this level before.”

“What do you think will happen after 1997?” asked Chung.

“To the stuff in our vaults? My personal opinion is that most of it will be moved overseas before then. Sure, it might come back, but I doubt it. These are nervous times, as you’re probably all too well aware. Mr Fielding tells me that you’ll be taking your antiques abroad before too long.” He looked at Chung expectantly, as if he’d just proved a complicated mathematical theorem and was expecting a pat on the back.

“I think they’ll be more appreciated overseas, that is true,” said Chung, not wanting to deflate the man’s pompous self-regard. The more self-important he felt, the more he’d let slip information which would be of use. “But from what I’ve seen they should be perfectly safe here.”

Ballantine smiled. “You haven’t seen the half of it, Mr Chung,” he said. “For instance, we saw you walk down the side-street and survey the building and the delivery entrance.”

“You saw me?” said Chung, expressing the desired amount of surprise.

“Upstairs in our control room, we have a team of men monitoring the screens linked to the various surveillance cameras. I’ll take you up and show you. But basically it’s impossible to get within a hundred yards of this building without being seen. The entrance you came in is one of only two ways into the building, the other being the vehicle entrance at the side. The lift we came up in stops only at this floor. To go down to the vaults or up to the control room you have to use the other elevator at the far end of the building which means going by a second reception desk, and again that involves being observed by at least three more cameras. The elevators also have hidden cameras, concealed in the ceiling lights. There is an elevator override system operated from within the control room, and the garage door can only be opened by our controllers. Basically, it is impossible to get into, or out of, the building without bank staff supervision.”

There was a knock on the door and a small, plump secretary appeared with two mugs of black coffee. Chung stirred his coffee as the secretary left the office.

“Does the bank store its own money here?” asked Chung.

“Not our normal day-to-day cash deliveries, no,” said Ballantine. “The facility isn’t big enough for the sort of through traffic we’d need. We can get armoured cars in downstairs, but no more than three at a time and the roads don’t really give us enough room outside. So far as getting cash to our various branches is concerned, we have a vault under our head office in Central and a larger vault out in the New Territories at a secret location.”

“More secret than this one?” said Chung with a smile. He drank his coffee, suppressing a shudder when he discovered it was instant and not freshly ground.

“Oh yes, it has an even lower profile than this one,” said Ballantine. “How’s your coffee?”

“It’s delicious,” said Chung, taking another mouthful and sliding the mug on to Ballantine’s desk. “So this is wholly a safe-deposit centre?” he said. “That the bank doesn’t use this to store its own resources? I find that a little troubling.”

“Oh no, that’s not what I meant to suggest at all,” said Ballantine, putting his own steaming mug on the desk. “I was referring to storage and delivery of cash, the notes which are printed by the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank and by Standard Chartered. Our gold stocks, which are considerable, are held here, as are our stocks of foreign currency. Why don’t I give you the tour? We can finish our coffee later.”

“That would be marvellous,” said Chung. He stood up and followed Ballantine out of the office and along the corridor. Ballantine walked to a second elevator and hitched up his trousers while he waited for it to arrive. Like the elevator that had ferried them up from the reception area, there were no floor indicators. When it arrived and the two men had stepped inside, Chung saw that the buttons inside weren’t labelled either.

“I’ll take you to the main vault first,” said Ballantine. “I think you’ll find it quite impressive.” He pressed the lowest button and Chung felt the elevator descend smoothly. When the doors opened they stepped out into a large lobby. To the right was a long, low desk behind which sat a man in a light grey suit and wearing a bank tie. He stood up when he saw Ballantine.

“Good afternoon, Mr Law,” said Ballantine. “This is Mr Chung. He is considering becoming a client of ours. Could you give him a badge, please?”

“Certainly, Mr Ballantine,” said Law. He took a laminated badge marked “Visitor” from a drawer and affixed it to the breast pocket of Chung’s suit.

Ballantine took Chung past the desk and stood in front of a door composed of thick, vertical, metal bars, each the diameter of a man’s wrist. Ballantine looked over his shoulder and nodded at Law who pressed a button on a control panel mounted in the top of the desk. The door slid smoothly sideways, revealing a corridor lined with steel which led to a huge circular vault door which Chung recognised from the photograph in Ballantine’s office. The door itself was about eight feet thick and it was wide open, revealing the metal-lined vault beyond. Chung could see the thick metal rods set into the door which would slot into the sides of the vault when the door was closed and the locks turned. The door itself was tiered, like a steel wedding cake put on its side, and there were corresponding grooves in the wall of the vault so that there was no way anything could slip through the sides of the door when it was shut.

“Wow,” said Chung. “It’s massive. Is it solid steel?”

Ballantine nodded. “Yes, and it has the latest in time locks. Once the door is locked and the clocks set, it can’t be opened. By anybody.”

“Surely there must be some way? What if someone is locked in by mistake?”

Ballantine laughed. “Mr Chung, you’ve been watching too many movies. It would be impossible for anyone to be locked in. But – and it is a huge but – if anyone were foolish enough to get themselves trapped, the vault has its own air supply. He would just have to wait inside until the time locks open the vault door. There is no way to open the doors any sooner. If he were to be locked in on Friday evening, it would be Monday morning before the door opens. He would be very thirsty and hungry, and the vault would probably stink to high heaven, but he’d be alive.”

“So it’s locked right through the weekend?”

“That’s right. That’s one of our best safety features. Even if anyone were to get into the building, they wouldn’t be able to open the vault door.”

Ballantine stepped into the vault and motioned for Chung to follow him. The vault itself was about the size of a basketball court, with the floor and ceiling composed of seamless metal. Around the walls were racks containing polythene-wrapped parcels which Ballantine said were foreign currency stocks. “Sterling, Deutschmarks, yen, dollars, francs,” he said as he walked around the vault. In the centre of the vault was a line of four blocks, each as high as a man’s stomach and each covered with a light green cotton sheet. “And here,” he said, indicating one of the piles, “here is where we keep the gold.” He pulled back the cloth to reveal a steel rack filled with gold bars which gleamed dully under the subdued lighting. The stack was ten bars wide and ten bars deep and the rack was ten bars high. There were 1,000 bars in the single stack, and each bar weighed one kilo. “This is where we keep the bullion; the various coins we sell are in the racks over there.”

He picked up one of the bars with both hands. “This is a one kilo bar, 99.99 per cent pure,” he said. Chung took it from him and lifted it to his chest.

“There’s something so powerful about gold,” said Chung. “It has an aura about it that you just don’t get with money.”

“I know what you mean,” said Ballantine. “I can understand why you Chinese are so attracted to it.”

Chung looked at Ballantine coldly and wondered if the man knew how offensive he found his racist comments. Almost certainly he didn’t. And Chung had no doubt that if he were to tell Ballantine, the man would put his hand on his heart and say that of course he wasn’t racist and that some of his best friends were Chinese. Chung smiled. “This is all the bank’s gold?”

“Some of it is kept on behalf of our customers, private investors and companies who wish to keep some of their assets in gold. But most of it is the bank’s. Of course, we have no idea how much gold is stored in the safety-deposit boxes upstairs. It’ll be tens of millions of dollars, I’m sure. I would think that the gold exceeds the cash.”

“How much gold do you have here?” asked Chung, waving his hand at the cloth-covered stacks.

“You’d have to ask Mr Law for an exact figure,” said Ballantine. “But I would think it would be of the order of thirty-five million pounds.” He said the figure slowly, as if wanting Chung to be impressed.

Chung whistled softly. “Wah!” he said, hating himself for playing the dumb Chinese but knowing that he had to play along with Ballantine. There was still information he needed.

“So you can see, the bank is more than happy with the security arrangements here. And I’m sure you will be, too. Let me show you our safety-deposit area. I think it should be suitable for your antiques, but if not we can arrange to have them stored here.”

They went out of the vault and Chung handed his badge back to Mr Law, smiled and thanked him, and followed Ballantine to the elevator. Their next stop was the floor above the vault. The elevator door opened on to another lobby which was identical to the first, though this time there was a young girl with shoulder-length wavy hair wearing a white blouse and dark blue skirt behind the low desk. Like Mr Law she stood up when she saw Ballantine, and she pinned a security badge to Chung’s breast pocket. She patted the lapel of Chung’s suit after she’d attached the badge and she gave him a warm smile. Ballantine didn’t introduce her, he walked past her without a word and stood in front of the barred door. She pressed the button to open the door and it slid open. The two men walked into the waiting area. Along the wall were a number of booths, each with two metal chairs with padded leather seats in front of a wooden shelf. Several of the booths were occupied with customers, all Chinese, Chung noted, bent over their safety-deposit boxes. Opposite the booths was another vault door, almost as big as the first one.