Bob Carpenter, who was tall and intimidating, went over the counter and held his pistol on the three young women. They were so terrified that Lee Wolf could see their shallow breathing. One of them was wearing a purple silk blouse, and he could see the vibration of her heart beating. None of them was crying, which he took to be good news. He loved terror, but he hated emotions that would slow things down. The three tellers emptied their cash drawers into the laundry bags, and Carpenter looked inside all the bags before he took them and tossed them over the counter to the floor of the foyer.

Lee Wolf said to the nearest teller, “Now you and I are going to the vault.”

He went around the counter with his gun aimed at her. She opened the counter to let him step in. He took her by the arm and steered her into the vault. When they were inside, he handed her the fourth bag. “Fill this bag with the cash from in here. The more big bills, the better.”

Leah was staring at the map on her phone again. The car had stopped. It was parked behind a building on Second Street. The map on her phone showed a few names of businesses, and the nearest was a bank. A bank robbery? Of course it would be. That was the way several of these homegrown militias had made up for deficits. Why not the SSS?

The intersection was Second and Bullock.

* * *

As Lee Wolf stepped to the door of the vault, he caught some movement in the corner of his eye and pivoted toward the glass surface beside him, which was the upper part of the separate room containing cubicles where people went to examine the contents of their safe deposit boxes. The lower part was wood. On the inside was a man in a dark blue uniform. He was kneeling on the carpeted floor of the room, where he had been lying in wait below the glass level where people couldn’t see him. Wolf knew bank cubicles like this all had automatic locks that would lock whenever the door shut.

Wolf looked at him, and the man raised a big model 1911 military .45 pistol and fired. The bullet hit the clear wall and pounded a white impact mark on the glass with a circular spiderweb crack around it, but didn’t penetrate it. The man realized instantly that the glass, which he must have seen a thousand times if he worked here, was bulletproof. All he had done was alert Lee Wolf to his presence.

When Lee Wolf moved a step to the side to see the guard better, the guard fired again, pulverizing the glass in another spot, blocking Wolf’s view. As Wolf stepped along the glass, the guard fired again and again, turning large sections of the pane into white opaque circles so Wolf couldn’t see him clearly.