How to Rob a Cash Vault   "In order to rob the Bank of America cash vault in Los Angeles, you have to do three things:  You have to get in and out in less than three minutes.  You have to kill everyone on the lowest floor.  You have to get out alive. "You have to do it in three minutes because the cops will have a barricade in front of the tunnel leading out in four.  That kind of makes everything else moot.  You can't really argue that you need longer than thirty seconds to jam the vault door because in a worse case scenario somebody's going to hit the switch and it only takes thirty seconds to swing closed. "The bad thing is having to kill everybody on the ground floor.  I'm working on that."  Towner figured out how to do it.   Will he figure out how to get out of it?

Towner Bio?

Who is Donald Towner? Piecing together the few facts gleaned from the novel, he was born in, or at least grew up in Youngstown, Ohio and attended Ursuline High School.  From his age, he would have graduated in 1961, or 62 or, possibly even in 63.  He attended a Jesuit College.  He was in the Army and in Germany.  After that, the trail becomes outlandish mish-mash.   There is the claim of being the Administrator of a State Health Department, but he had no medical training and during that time the administrator was, strangely enough, a member of the "Chicago Seven".  He says he sold machine guns but no contacts or licenses can be verified.  He has apparently invented a career as a management consultant because he never went to a business school.  He divorced at some time but never tells us why.   It is possible that the books are simply an invention, however.   Did he know Thomas Pynchon's editor?  How did he know the inside of the L. A. cash vault?  Are the stories about Nixon and Carter true?  Did he really sell machine guns to Yuppies in the Caribbean?  Who knows?