Paper Money by Ken Follett Page A

management expertise. We'll raise the development money, rather than
    supply it out of our own pocket. Others in the team offer engineering
    skills, oil experience, marketing facilities, and so on."
     
    "So you've a good chance." Hamilton smiled again. "Socrates."
     
    "Why?"
     
    "He always made people answer their own questions." Hamilton lifted his
    heavy frame out of the chair. "I must go."
     
    Fett walked to the door with him. "Derek, about Ellen, I hope you don't
    mind my saying ..."
     
    "No." They shook hands. "I value your judgment."
     
    Fett nodded, and opened the door. "Whatever you do, don't panic."
     
    "Okey-do key As he went out, Hamilton realized that he had not used that
    expression for thirty years.
     
    Two MOTORCYCLE police parked their machines either side of the rear
    entrance to the bank. One of them produced an identity card and held it
    flat against the small window beside the door. The man inside read the
    card carefully, then picked up a red telephone and spoke into it.
     
    A black van without markings drove between the motorcycles and stopped
    with its nose to the door. The side windows of its cab were fitted with
    wire mesh internally, and the two men inside wore police-type uniforms
    with crash helmets and transparent visors. The body of the van had no
    windows, despite the fact that there was a third man in there.
     
    Two more police bikes drew up behind the van, completing the convoy.
     
    The steel door to the building lifted smoothly and noiselessly, and the
    van pulled in. It was in a short tunnel, brightly lit by fluorescent
    tubes. Its way was blocked by another door identical with the first.
     
    The van stopped and the door behind closed. The police motorcyclists
    remained in the street.
     
    The van driver wound his window down and spoke through the wire mesh
    into a microphone on a stand. "Morning," he said cheerfully.
     
    There was a large plate-glass window in one wall of the tunnel. Behind
    the window, which was bulletproof, a bright-eyed man in shirtsleeves
    spoke into another microphone. His amplified words resonated in the
    confined space. "Code word, please."
     
    The driver, whose name was Ron Biggins, said "Obadiah." The Controller
    who had set up to day's run was a deacon in a Baptist church.
     
    The shirt sleeved man pressed a large red button in the white-painted
    wall behind him, and the second steel door slid upward. Ron Biggins
    muttered: "Miserable. sod," and eased the van forward. Again the steel
    door closed behind it.
     
    It was now in a windowless room in the bowels of the building. Most of
    the floor space was occupied by a turntable. The room was otherwise
    empty. Ron steered carefully onto the marked tracks and switched off his
    engine. The turntable jerked, and the van moved slowly through 180
    degrees then stopped.
     
    The rear doors were now opposite the elevator in the far wall. As Ron
    watched in his wing mirror, the elevator doors parted and a bespectacled
    man in a black jacket and striped trousers emerged.
     
    He carried a key, holding it out in front of him as if it were a torch
    or a gun. He unlocked the van's rear doors, then they were opened from
    the inside. The third guard got out.
     
    Two more men came out of the elevator, carrying between them a
    formidable metal box the size of a suitcase. They loaded it into the van
    and went back for more.
     
    Ron looked around. The room was bare, apart from its two entrances,
    three parallel lines of fluorescent lights, and a vent for the air
    conditioning.
     
    It was small, and not quite rectangular.. Ron guessed that few of the
    people who worked at the bank would know it was there at all. The
    elevator presumably went only to the vault, and the steel door to the
    street had no apparent connection with the main entrance around the
    corner.
     
    The guard who had been inside, Stephen Younger, came around to the
    left-hand side of the van; and Ron's co-driver, Max Fitch, lowered his
    window.