Each step of
a complicated campaign had been quietly engineered. Trotter could
even decipher a series of electric wires festooned from the
little tunnel's top. He could see where the passage had gone
around obstacles, where it had curled about a dishearteningly
heavy buttress base, where it had dipped lower to underrun a
cement vault bed, where it had sheered off from the tin-foiled
surface of a "closed-curcuit" protective system, and where it had
dipped and twisted about to advance squarely into a second blind
wall at right angles to the first.
A portion of this wall had been torn away. With equal care an
inner coating of cement had been chiseled off, exposing to view
an unbroken dark surface.
As Trotter held the candle closer, he could see this dark surface
marked off with chalk lines, sometimes with crosses, sometimes
with figures he could not decipher. On it, too, he could see a
solitary depression, as round and bright as a silver coin, as
though a diamond drill had been testing the barrier.
He knew, even before he touched the chill surface with his hand,
that it was a wall of solid steel, that it was the steel of the
bank vault itself, the one deep-hidden and masonry-embedded area
which stood without its ever-vigilant closed-circuit sentry.
Pages:
542
543
544
545
546
547
548
549
550
551
552
553
554
555
556
557
558
559
560
561
562
563
564
565
566