An hour later the Kincaids pulled into a McDonald’s parking lot for lunch on the outskirts of the city. Sue left to change the baby while Dick ordered cheeseburgers, fries, and Cokes. Christina had been breast fed while Dick was in the bank.

The Kincaids arrived in Chicago too late to visit the Chase Bank, just off North State Street, near W. Kinzie Street, so Frank picked a mid-priced motel just outside the city. A stiff wind was blowing and the temperature was forecast to drop to 30 degrees before morning. If he could get out of the Chicago bank by 10:30 a.m., they could make Cleveland before the banks closed for business. He hoped for decent driving weather tomorrow. He couldn’t push the speed limit. Their credentials, while good, would not hold up to an in-depth police inquiry.

He had heard a few senior officers at the KGB School talk about how much complexity was added to an operation if any family members were included. They were right, he thought. I’ll need a lot of luck to pull off this escape. The KGB will never stop hunting for me. This is a very large country with scores of cities large enough to hide in. It is also a country full of immigrants. The sensitivity of the police to avoid any charges of police abusing anyone’s civil rights also helps people like us.

After the Kincaids were settled in their motel room, Frank took Jack with him to pick up Chinese takeout from a place near the motel. Both Christina and Alice were sound asleep when they came back. Frank let them sleep. Tomorrow would be a hard day. He wanted to hit the Chicago bank as early as he could, rush to Cleveland, and then take off for Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C. Frank was certain the KGB would have some alerting system when he went into a safety deposit box. In the last five months he had opened all the boxes but took nothing more than a few hundred dollars. If the KGB had an alerting system and had checked the boxes back then, they would have found he had taken nothing.

If the KGB safety deposit box monitoring system worked, they would note that he went to the bank in Minneapolis and then went on to Chicago. A red flag would go up and they would guess that Cleveland was next. In a few more days they may also know his house in St. Cloud was empty with no forwarding address left behind. That would be enough to cause alarm bells. The next nearest bank was Cleveland, Frank thought, going through all this in his head. Someone might be waiting for me there after I hit the Chicago bank. The Cleveland bank held the smallest amount of greenbacks, gold, and diamonds. He quickly devised a plan to try and throw off the KGB once he hit the Chicago bank. He would call the assistant manager at the Cleveland bank tomorrow, whom he had taken to lunch during his last visit, and tell her he would be coming in tomorrow or the next day and ask if they could have lunch together.

Then, instead he would go straight to Pittsburgh where the largest amount of dollars, gold, and diamonds were stored. He knew emptying the Washington, D.C., bank box would be too dangerous. There were enough KGB agents in D.C. to be waiting for him during banking hours. If he could get the valuables from Pittsburgh, he could pass on Cleveland and D.C. and would still have an estimated four million dollars in currency and an unknown value of diamonds and gold. With this new plan, Frank managed to get some sleep.