Paper Money by Ken Follett

John Wayne fan. “How do you know?” he asked.
    “Watch. Here he comes.”
    The clerk came to Ron’s window and said: “Move ’em out!”
    Max spluttered and tried to cover his laughter. Stephen went around to the back of the van and got in. The clerk locked him in.
    The three bank employees disappeared into the elevator. Nothing happened for two or three minutes; then the steel door lifted. Ron fired the engine and drove into the tunnel. They waited for the inner door to close and the outer one to open. Just before they pulled away, Max said into the microphone: “So long, Laughing Boy.”
    The van emerged into the street.
    The motorcycle escort was ready. They took up their positions, two in front and two behind, and the convoy headed east.
    At a large road junction in East London, the van turned onto the A11. It was watched by a large man in a gray coat with a velvet collar, who immediately went into a phone booth.
    Max Fitch said: “Guess who I just saw.”
    “No idea.”
    “Tony Cox.”
    Ron’s expression was blank. “Who’s he when he’s at home?”
    “Used to be a boxer. Good, he was. I saw him knock out Kid Vittorio at Bethnal Green Baths, it must be ten year ago. Hell of a boy.”
    Max really wanted to be a detective, but he had failed the police force intelligence test and gone into security. He read a great deal of crime fiction, and consequently labored under the delusion that the CID’s most potent weapon was logical deduction. At home he did things like finding a lipstick-smeared cigarette butt in the ashtray and announcing grandly that he had reason to believe that Mrs. Ashford from next door had been in the house.
    He shifted restlessly in his seat. “Them cases are what they keep old notes in, aren’t they?”
    “Yes,” Ron said.
    “So we must be going to the destruction plant in Essex,” Max said proudly. “Right, Ron?”
    Ron was staring at the outriders in front of the van and frowning. As the senior member of the team, he was the only one who got told where they were going. But he was not thinking of the route, or the job, or even Tony Cox the ex-boxer. He was trying to figure out why his eldest daughter had fallen in love with a hippie.

12
    Felix Laski’s office in Poultry did not display his name anywhere. It was an old building, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with two others of different design. Had he been able to get planning permission to knock it down and build a skyscraper, he could have made millions. Instead it stood as an example of the way his wealth was locked up. But he reckoned that, in the long term, sheer pressure would blow the lid off planning restrictions; and he was a patient man where business was concerned.
    Almost all of the building was sublet. Most of the tenants were minor foreign banks who needed an address near Threadneedle Street, and their names were well displayed. People tended to assume that Laski had interests in the banks, and he encouraged this error in every way short of outright lying. Besides, he did own one of the banks.
    The furnishings inside were adequate but cheap: solid old typewriters, shop-soiled filing cabinets, secondhand desks, and the threadbare minimum of carpet. Like every successful man in middle age, Laski liked to explain his achievement in aphorisms: a favorite was “I never spend money. I invest.” It was truer than most dicta of its kind. His one home, a small mansion in Kent, had been rising in value since he bought it shortly after the war; his meals were often expense-account affairs with business prospects; and even the paintings he owned—kept in a safe, not hung on walls—had been bought because his art dealer said they would appreciate. To him, money was like the toy banknotes in Monopoly: he wanted it, not for what it could buy, but because it was needed to play the game.
    Still, his lifestyle was not uncomfortable. A primary-school teacher, or the wife of an agricultural laborer, would have thought he lived in