As soon as the agents left, Cromwell called in Miss Morgan. “Please see that I am not disturbed for the next two hours.”

“I’ll see to it,” she said efficiently.

Seconds after the door closed, Cromwell walked over and quietly locked it. Then he lifted the heavy suitcase under the desk onto the teak surface and opened it. The currency was piled loosely inside, some in stacks wrapped with paper bands.

Methodically, Cromwell began to count and stack the bills, wrapping the loose ones with bands as he inked in the amount. When he finished, he had his desktop filled with neatly piled bundles of cash, marked and counted. The tally came to two hundred forty-one thousand dollars. Then he carefully put the money back in the suitcase, slid the suitcase back under the desk, and opened several ledgers, entering deposits in bogus accounts, which he had set up previously to conceal money stolen over the years. Money that he used to build up the assets needed to open his own bank. Satisfied that he was covered by all the entries, he buzzed Miss Morgan and informed her that he was ready to deal with the day-to-day business of running a successful house of finance.

The banking hours were from ten o’clock in the morning until three in the afternoon. When closing time rolled around, Cromwell waited until the employees had all left for home and the bank was locked up. Now, alone in the bank’s vast interior, he carried the suitcase down the elevator to the main floor and into the bank vault, which was still open according to his instructions. He placed the currency, one stack at a time, in the proper bins that were used by the tellers for customer transactions. The receipts he had made up would be turned over to his chief accountant in the morning, who would record the juggled deposits without knowing the serial numbers.

Jacob Cromwell felt pleased with himself. Swindling as well as robbing the bank in Salt Lake City had been his most bold undertaking to date. And he was not about to repeat it. The evil act would throw off his pursuers, who would think he was becoming more daring, and be led into thinking he might try robbing a major city’s bank again. But he knew when not to press his luck. Such a robbery was extremely complicated. When he went out on a crime spree again, it would be in a small town yet to be selected.