Surrounded

be. "Chet, I know you're not the kind of man who takes this sort of thing easily. You're not used to letting anyone get the jump on you. But now it's happened, and you have to make the best of it. My friend here," he said, pointing to Frank Meyers, "will be right out in the corridor watching over the east exit. Every once in a while he'll look in on you. He will not want to see you struggling to get loose. You don't want to make him nervous. There isn't any reason for anyone to get killed here tonight."
        Chet glared at him but said nothing. His mouth just got tighter, his eyes narrower.
        "No one's going to think less of you because you let us pull this thing off," Tucker said patiently. "You were completely surprised. Hell, anyone would have been surprised. You did everything right. But we had machine guns. And there were more of us than there were of you…"
        The watchman seemed to relax slightly. Some of the stiffness went out of him, and his lips took on color again. He stopped straining so steadily against his wire bonds.
        Tucker looked at the second man. He was only fractionally less physically formidable than Chet, but he had none of the other man's inner fire. He was pale and obviously frightened. "You don't see any reason to get yourself killed, do you, Artie?" Tucker asked.
        "No," Artie said.
        "Good for you," Tucker said.
        Chet gave the other man a cool look. Then he looked at Tucker again and said, "The way I have your faces memorized, the police will be able to work up a good composite drawing of you. Your faces will be plastered in every station house in the country. You'll never get away with this. Never."
        "Maybe you're right," Tucker said, getting to his feet.
        "I am. You'll see."
        "We'll just have to take our chances."
        "You got no chances," Chet said. But he was not genuinely belligerent now. He was merely playing out a role, winding up a performance.
        "It's twenty minutes to eleven," Edgar Bates said. "Those bank people aren't going to work all night. We'd better get going."
        Tucker saw the watchmen exchange a curious glance at the mention of "bank people," but he supposed they were so dull-witted that they were only now realizing what was to be robbed. "Come on," he said, leading Meyers and Bates out of the storage room.
        Frank remained behind in the east corridor to watch over the doors through which they would shortly leave Oceanview Plaza and to see that the watchmen remained out of action.
        Tucker and Bates hurried quietly up the hall, past Surf and Subsurface, past the Rolls Royce salesroom, the bar… In the mall lounge the fountain was still splashing, dancing on the surface of the deep pool. Evidently the water was turned off by a set of controls in the warehouse-controls that Chet and Artie had not had the opportunity to use. That was good. The splashing water covered any unintentional noise they might make. Standing by the fountain, Tucker could look down each of the other three corridors, which were well lighted and deserted. At the end of each hall the glass doors were shut. Inside the mall, three feet behind each set of those glass doors, steel-bar gates had been rolled out of the ceiling and locked into baseboard bolt holes. No one could come in or go out of those three entrances.
        "It's just like Frank described it, down to every detail," Bates said. "I'm feeling better by the minute."
        Tucker thought of the plain dark wood door and the mall's business office that lay behind it, thought of that single detail that had not been on Meyers's diagram… Then he shrugged off the unwarranted feeling that something was not altogether right. It was useless to worry until something went wrong. And nothing was going to go wrong. The whole operation was going to tick along like a clockwork mechanism.
        They turned left from the lounge and the fountain and entered the south corridor of the mall. On their right was the House of Books and Sasbury's, one of the building's two largest clothing stores. On the left was Young Maiden, Harold Leonardo Furriers, Accent Jewelry, and finally the Countryside Savings and Loan Company where most of the stores deposited their daily cash intake and where shoppers kept personal checking accounts against the times when they had overcharged their store credits.
        Having learned from experience that the bold approach was