Chapter 1391 — The Robbery, Part Two: A Lone Vigilante Who Never Speaks, Crashing In With Brute Force and Leaving Everyone Dumbstruck
The masked man in black said nothing either. He drew a great woven silk sack from his waist and began stuffing money into it from beneath the counter. He was quite self-reliant about it, unlike other robbers: he took no hostages, made no teller do the work for him, and never uttered a single harsh word. It seemed he did not regard the people around him as worth a glance at all, treating them as so much air.
While everyone stood there dumbly frozen, in what was almost a single instant every banknote beneath the counter had vanished into the masked man's woven silk sack.
The next moment, the masked man turned and walked toward the safe at the rear. The money beneath the counter was a limited thing, but what the safe held was the bank's entire daily cash flow. What astonished them, though, was that he did not ask anyone for the safe's combination or its key; he simply strode over to it on his own!
"Crack!" The masked man gave a violent yank, and the safe door came away. The banknotes inside went into his woven silk sack as well. One sack was not enough, so he produced another, stuffing money with a speed and deftness that looked like something practiced a thousand times over.
That done, the masked man vaulted straight out over the bank counter. Not once through all of it had he spoken a word. Everyone present stared in terror at this uninvited guest.
The whole of it had taken no more than a few minutes from start to finish, and by now the bank's few security guards had finally come to their senses. Batons in hand, they watched this silent lone vigilante, trembling from head to foot.
"Don't you move! Put the money down... We've already called the police, they'll be here any second!" The guard captain was feeling hollow inside himself. This robber was altogether too eerie; a hold-up like this was truly something unheard of.
The masked man turned a deaf ear to the captain's words and simply walked on past. Seeing that the robber would not listen, the captain gritted his teeth, brandished his baton, and shouted, "Everyone, stop him together! Buy us some time, the police will be here any moment!"
"Bang!" Before the captain could even finish speaking, the masked man threw a punch, one blow to the man's chest that sent him flying into the bank wall with a tremendous crash. And when they looked at the captain's chest, his breastbone had been staved in by the strike. He slid down off the wall, and now he was drawing in little breath and giving out less; plainly he was gravely hurt.
With the captain as a lesson before them, the other guards naturally dared not move rashly again. In their hearts they were all aghast: just what manner of man was this?
He had shattered the counter glass bare-handed, broken open the safe, and with one careless punch sent a man flying and crushed his breastbone. How could any ordinary man accomplish such things?
What these people thought was no concern of the masked man's. The next moment he turned and left the bank, sacks in hand, and climbed into an unlicensed Land Rover waiting at the bank's entrance. Once he was aboard, the Land Rover started up and sped off into the distance...
Leaving behind only the bank with its alarms shrieking, and the stunned bank clerks and customers...
The Land Rover did not flee straight off, however. It circled several times through the city and then pulled up before a gold shop.
And again the masked man used the same method: he charged straight into the gold shop and began plundering the gold and silver jewelry and cash within. His methods were as violent as ever: he smashed the counters, the safe, and the cash register outright, utterly self-reliant, needing no one's help, not saying a single word.
And the guards who rushed up to stop him, after one of them was sent flying by the masked man's own hand, were all cowed into stillness.
Beneath the utter helplessness and grief of the gold shop's owner and his few guards, the masked man, having stripped the shop of everything, swaggered off...
The Land Rover circled a few more times and came to a secluded spot. Then another man stepped down from the vehicle. He brought out a set of license plates and fitted them onto the Land Rover, and the number on them was, remarkably, "tt000"!
Once the plates were changed, the Land Rover did not go looping through the city again, but headed straight onto the suburban road. After winding this way and that for a stretch, it came to a halt before the gate of a small breeding farm.
On the surface the place was a breeding farm, but in truth it had already been bought up by An Jianwen and quietly turned into another of his bases. For a man as laden with wealth as An Jianwen, buying the place was no difficulty at all. Besides, this time An Jianwen was also raking in money for the Fire Wolf Gang, so the cost of the land would naturally be deducted from the proceeds.
"Young Master Wen, everything went smoothly. Zero One's robbing speed is extraordinary. I had meant only to try one bank, but his speed went quite beyond my expectations, all of it finished in under five minutes. So I took it upon myself to rob a gold shop as well. You won't hold my overstepping against me, will you, Young Master Wen?" The speaker was the very man who had driven the car earlier and stepped out to change the plates. His name was Big Mule, a name given him by An Jianwen, of course.
Little Mule had been caught and was doing the time in his place, so the Fire Wolf Gang had sent along another man to take the fall. An Jianwen had never bothered to remember what the fellow had originally been called, but he had given him the name Big Mule.
Arranging for such a man was no trouble at all for the Fire Wolf Gang. It required a not-inconsiderable settlement fee, true, but weighed against the profits An Jianwen could bring the Fire Wolf Gang, that was a single hair off nine oxen.
"You're out raking in money for me, why would I blame you?" An Jianwen cackled. "It seems Dr. Yin's experiment has succeeded. A haul of no small size on the very first try. How much did we take this time?"
"This time we went to a fairly large bank in the commercial district, so the cash flow was considerable, and there was some foreign currency as well. The gold shop was a sizable one too, so the take should be decent." Big Mule did not actually know how much money had been stolen, but he had already sent men to tally it: "Young Master Wen, I've sent people to count it up. I expect we'll have exact figures in a little while!"
"Very good!" An Jianwen nodded. "Take the Zero One test subject to Dr. Yin for energy replenishment and thought hypnosis. Once the heat has died down, we'll go pull another job!"
"Yes, sir!" Big Mule nodded and withdrew.
And An Jianwen laughed merrily to himself: "I really am a genius. This way of raking in money not only turns a profit, it kills two birds with one stone by framing Wei Zhao. Haha, Wei Zhao, this time you'll have no way to talk your way out of it!"
An Jianwen's money-raking plan this time was simple: robbery, endless robbery. That was the only true business that costs nothing to run!
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