The business’s name was displayed prominently in five-foot blue letters on the face of the building and again in ten-foot letters on a tall double-sided sign.

GoBox.

Over the tagline: Keeping your valuables safe, secure, and close at hand!

Kruger smiled. He would have his hand on those valuables very soon. But he hadn’t been hired to steal from GoBox—this private vault company—or its patrons. The valuables he sought belonged to the United States government.

The three of them moved across the parking lot in a tight formation. The blacktop smelled like a tar pit. The heat didn’t bother Kruger. He was used to living out in the bush in worse heat than this. It was the urban smells that bothered him. The scent of mankind’s rape of the natural world and the perversion of Earth’s wonder and beauty. This was what bothered Kruger. He was more at home in a world where predators wore manes of tawny golden hair instead of Italian suits.

But predators always followed their prey, which meant Kruger needed to go where the money was. Especially under the present circumstances where Kruger needed to quickly steal enough money to retire for good. And if he intended to keep his beautiful wife in pearls for the rest of her life, he would need to hunt down and walk away with a large amount of cash without becoming the hunted.

And today, on this morning, this GoBox vault company was where a whole hell of a lot of money was hiding.

Chapter 5

This was not at all what US Army Corporal Lamar Franklin had expected to return home to. He had signed up for the military to avoid having to do things like this, but here he was, just like ten percent of US veterans, unemployed. After four years of guarding sand, he had returned home to an empty house and a now ex-wife who had run off with a wannabe rapper and all of their savings. Franklin’s gran-mama had always said that he came from the short end of the gene pool. He supposed he had done nothing with his life to prove her wrong.

He checked his M4A1 assault rifle.

He knew the plan.

Mr. K would shoot out all the cameras, and Franklin—or Sparks, as was his code name for this operation—would handle the armed security guard in the corner. Trying to treat this like any other mission, he followed the same routine he always did before entering battle. He held his St. Michael Army pendant and prayed, May I fulfill my duty with courage. If death should overtake me on this field, grant that I die in the state of grace, forgive me all my sins, those I have forgotten and those I recall now: grant me the grace of perfect contrition.

Then Franklin reached the building’s front doors, which were glass monstrosities accented with dark wood grains. He could already see a portion of the building’s lobby. It looked like most other upscale banks he had been in, but GoBox was far from a normal bank.