Ghostman Read Online Free PDF Page B

after my last heist I barely had time to catch my breath, let alone call anybody. I was up to my neck in Vegas heat. I didn’t know who was dead, I didn’t know who got caught, I didn’t know who had the checks. I didn’t know anything. The only thing on mymind was getting to the safe house and laying low until hell and the district attorney froze over. And if you think those TV reporters know what happened, they don’t. Moreno could be out of surgery and in county jail by eleven. Nobody will know anything solid until noon at the earliest, and you won’t be able to move on any of it until the dust settles, probably tomorrow. I know you’re worried that this black guy—”
    “Ribbons. Jerome Ribbons.”
    “I know you’re worried that Ribbons is vanishing on you, but you’ve got to wait and see about it. If you go in too hard he might think you’re after him for screwing up the heist, and then he’ll never show.”
    “This isn’t one of those things that can wait,” Marcus said. “The item Ribbons and Moreno stole is extremely dangerous. I’m on a forty-eight-hour clock here.”
    “The money’s dangerous?”
    “Yes, the money. The cash money. The goddamn unmarked, shrink-wrapped, sequential, genuine Federal Reserve notes. Shipped specially from D.C. to the Philadelphia Federal Reserve branch for distribution to the casinos in south Jersey. The notes , Jack.”
    “What’s the problem with them?”
    Marcus nodded at the stack of twenties in my hands.
    “They’ve still got the federal payload,” he said.

4
    Federal payload .
    Two words nobody wants to hear.
    Especially not me, and I’ve never even dealt with a federal payload before. It’s like the perverse punch line at the end of the absurd story that’s bank security. It has to do with how the Federal Reserve transports cash. Once the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington finishes a print run, they put the freshly printed notes through a machine that lumps the money into thousand-bill wads, each subdivided into hundred-bill straps. At the end of the process, they vacuum-pack the money in cellophane to make it easier to transport. They print a half a billion dollars every day. They spend millions just on plastic wrap, because sometimes a print load can weigh as much as five hundred metric tons. The vacuum packing can bring the volume of each wad down by a quarter, which means more efficient transport. Once the money is wrapped, it’s put into trucks. The trucks drive to the Treasury, where the money is scanned by a computer and serial numbers are monetized. Then the trucks drive the money to one of the eleven banks on the backbone of the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve banks scan the money a second time, then put it on different trucks and distribute it tosmaller banks all over the world. The receiving banks scan the money a third time, then tear open the cellophane and spread out the currency to the masses. But it isn’t all inflation. The Fed exchanges older notes with newer ones, so the amount of money in circulation is almost the same, give or take a few percentage points a year. The older bills are collected by the smaller banks, shipped to the bigger banks, driven back to the Treasury, shredded and burned. One big cycle.
    To guys like me, a sixty-ton pallet of fresh hundred-dollar bills sounds too good to be true. That’s because, as far as I’m concerned, it is too good to be true. Nobody’s ever tried to rob a Fed truck, not to mention pulled it off, because nobody’s that stupid. It can’t be done. The reason is that the government doesn’t give two shits what happens to the cash while they’re moving it. They protect it like all get out with armed personnel and blind-decoy trucks and everything, but the moment they think the bad guys might actually pull one off, they’ll torch the whole load. Long story short: the Federal Reserve only pays the government around ten cents for every bill they print, which essentially