Free Relentless by Brian Garfield Page A

chance to get a fix on their course.
    But when all that was done and they had gone over the last verbal runthrough there was nothing left to think about but the risk of failure, and nothing left to do but think about it.
    It had a complete unreality about it. You heard about such crimes, you read about them. You saw a dapper, good-humored, aging fellow being interviewed on a late TV talk show and you were enormously amused to realize that this engaging little old man was Willie Sutton, giving his classic answer to the interviewer’s straight-man question: But what made you decide to rob banks, Mr. Sutton? Well, Dick, y’know, it’s because that’s where the money is, see? And as audience to a trivial television entertainment you were amused by Willie Sutton’s quiet sparkling understatements about how he’d broken out of Sing Sing—he made it sound absurdly casual—how he’d disguised himself as a bank guard one time, a cop another, an armored-car guard yet another. But when you turned the set off and thought about it you saw that Willie Sutton didn’t have all that much to laugh about. He’d spent two-thirds of his life in prison.
    It was depressing to think about. Walker wondered why he’d let them talk him into this. He went through Wednesday night and all day Thursday with a hard knot in his throat and a dry coppery taste on his tongue. On the face of it the whole caper was absurd. None of them knew anything about banks and the only one with any criminal experience was Hanratty—and Hanratty’s batting average was a lot worse than Willie Sutton’s. Hanratty had never tried anything above the level of petty crime before but just the same they’d nailed him three times running and he’d spent fifteen of the last twenty-three years of his miserable life behind bars. Here they were, a grounded pilot, three ex-soldiers, and a petty thief, hoping to bring off a million-dollar score without a ruffle. It just didn’t make sense. The percentages were wildly wrong.
    Three things kept him from clearing out. One: Hargit, and Baraclough in his erratic way, appeared to know what they were doing. The plan seemed workable, the escape system was ingenious, and the Major had a self-confidence that was infectious. When he told you it was going to work you believed him, partly because of his personality and partly because you knew his record in the Army. Hargit knew guerrilla operations as well as any man alive. Two: if Walker tried to bug out now they’d probably kill him; they couldn’t let him walk around loose knowing what he knew about them. Nobody had uttered any threats but it was too obvious to ignore. The risk of quitting was at least as volatile as the risk of carrying it through.
    And Three: There wasn’t anything else Walker wanted to do. He wanted the money—he had 10 percent of the take coming, and it looked now as if that would be closer to one hundred thousand dollars than to the fifty thousand that the Major had mentioned in the beginning. With that kind of money in the right South American country you could buy a lot of silence, you could buy all the licenses and certifications you wanted, you could pick up two or three serviceable airplanes and build the beginnings of a workable international airline. In a way he realized his ambitions weren’t all that much at odds with the Major’s. They each wanted the money not for itself but for the jobs it could buy for them.
    In the end he knew it was the only chance he was going to have—one last grab at the brass ring before they shut down the merry-go-round. And so after all the panic and all the considerations of what might go wrong, he stayed with it.
    9
    Thursday night—H-hour minus eighteen—the Major gathered them together in the log-paneled front room for a precombat pep talk. Walker, who was scared but had made a kind of peace with himself, sat in one of the leather