I don't own this. It's the brain child of Angela Robinson and the property of Sony Pictures.
Chapter 7:
"Okay," I turned around in the front passenger seat of the car to face the two people sitting in the back seat, "today, we're after two things, one, we need to tap into the time-lock on the vault. I'll do that. Second, we need to get to the vault and try to open it. Amy, that's you. Scud, your job is to tap into the closed-circuit feed of the sixth floor. We need a full thirty minutes from the time the guard steps off the elevator to the next time he steps off of it." I turned to Ronnie, in the driver's seat, "Ronnie, you're just along for the ride, so don't get us caught." I turned back to Scud. "Scud, where do you have to be to tap into the feed?"
"Basement's best. Fortunately, the tap for the feed is relatively unsecured. I can tap in pretty much anywhere," Scud told me.
I smiled, "that and you're afraid of heights."
Scud's features scrunched, "you know, Luce, you're really putting a damper on my manly image."
"What manly image?" I countered. Scud responded with an agonized expression. I turned to Ronnie again, "you can be in the basement with Scud, or in the elevator shaft with me. Pick one, because I'm not going to be running around the building trying to find you."
"Shaft," he replied immediately.
"Appropriate," I muttered, then turned to Scud again, "you stay in radio contact. I'll need you to talk me through tapping into the power system." I took a deep breath. It had been a long time since I'd had to mentally prepare myself for B & E. Frankly, my thinking over the last four years had been tending more towards the B & B end of the spectrum. I guess we were about to find out if I still had it.
-x-
Getting into the building was actually the easy part. It usually is, especially for public buildings. I guess they're more worried about what people do once they get into the building than they are about people actually getting in. So the alarm on the basement window was a relatively simple breaker-system. If you open the window, a circuit is broken, and the alarm goes off. If you know what you're doing, it's actually pretty easy to bypass. I'd done it more times than I cared to keep track of, or maybe I didn't want to keep track of them.
Of course, getting out of the basement was where things got a little trickier. Every stairwell was rigged with cameras and motion sensors. Every elevator had a camera.
Well, the inside of every elevator, anyway.
It was dark inside, but the moonlight shafting in through the window we'd just come through was providing just enough light for us to see each other. I looked over at Amy, "how much time 'till the guard's next trip upstairs?"
"Twelve minutes," Amy replied, looking down at her watch.
I looked over her with a slight smile, "how do you like being on this side of the law for a change?"
"Not my thing," she admitted with a tilt of her head, "but I can see how it could be."
"Ronnie, you're with us, Scud, you get on tapping the closed-circuit grid," I ordered. "We've got an elevator to catch," I grabbed Amy's elbow and together the four of us walked deeper into the basement.
-x-
The elevator didn't actually go into the basement, but there was a small maintenance crawlspace that the Ronnie, Amy and I could just barely crouch in without the elevator crushing us. Elevators arrive at a floor based upon which car is closest. So at night when the building was empty, the odds were that the security guard would just be riding the same car up and down all night. That made our lives a lot easier, since we had two of them to choose from. The one we wanted was already on the ground floor.
"Check your harness," I told Amy, "I'm not planning on losing you on this one." I quickly checked her climbing harness. I turned to Ronnie, "you can take a six-story freefall if you want to." I opened the com, "Scud? Where are you with that camera feed?" The throat microphone I was wearing allowed me to subvocalize anything I said, so that nobody who wasn't listening in on our comline would be able to hear me. Sadly, Ronnie was among the people who were. That made plotting behind his back a lot harder.
"Ready to record," came Scud's reply, slightly distorted, through the earphone I had slotted in my ear.
"You comfortable?" I asked.
"Yeah, I got everything here I need," Scud replied.
"Okay, let us know when the guard's on the move, and be ready to record when I tell you," I told him.
The wait was actually pretty short. We had plenty of time to clip a pair of carabiners onto the bottom of the elevator and wait for the security guard to come by on his clockwork rounds. I was about to remind Amy to make sure she locked the gates of the two 'biners, and to make sure that the gates were on opposite sides of the metal bars that criss-crossed the bottom of the elevator car, but noticed that she'd already done both. I had to silently remind myself that she had done this kind of thing before. Bennie hadn't, so with a little luck, he'd screw up. No such luck, unfortunately. I glanced over at his setup, and he was as firmly tied in as Amy and I were.
It was a little more cramped for me. I had a small duffel bag hanging off the back of my harness; it held, hopefully, everything we were going to need for this trip.
The secret to stealing just about anything is to be just a little crazier than the person who designed the system to keep you out. Whoever built this had put cameras inside the elevator, but not the outside; they'd put cameras in the stairwell, but not the elevator shaft. I guess the reasoning is that you had to be a little bit crazy to what we were about to do. The elevator moving up and down made motion sensors impossible.
The security guard was going to be nice enough to give us a ride up to the sixth floor. I'd played with the idea of tapping into the elevator control and sending it up ourselves, but I'd finally vetoed that on the grounds that the guards could notice the elevator moving up and down without anyone inside. So the most reasonable answer was to let it go up and down with someone inside. In this case, the security guard.
"He's in the box," I heard Scud announce. I could just barely hear the soft thud of the security guard's boots on the floor of the elevator a few inches above the top of my head.
"Yeah, I can hear him," I told him.
"Just let me know when to start recording," Scud said.
I was about to respond when with a loud, metallic groan, the elevator began to lurch upwards. I never really appreciated the soundproofing they have in elevators until that moment. In the long, narrow shaft, the machinery was loud. And it echoed like crazy.
I didn't have much in the way of time to focus on that, though, as the three of us were jerked off of the ground and lifted effortlessly into the air.
Now that, I've gotta say was a little off-putting. A big metal box above you, and a slab of concrete below you getting farther and farther away by the second. Heights, I'm usually okay with, as long as I have something underneath me. As long as I'm actually standing on something, I'm fine. But just hanging there… ugh. It gave me shivers.
I glanced over at Amy. She looked just fine; which meant that she was either hiding it really well, or she was used to this kind of thing.
I felt the elevator slow and come to a stop "start recording," I told Scud. I heard him acknowledge it.
Above me, I heard the elevator door open and the guard leave the car. The elevator hung in space, and we hung underneath it. "Okay, top floor, everybody off," I told them, trying to hide my own nervousness underneath a cavalier attitude.
Huge girders ran between the two elevators, providing strength to the structure. It also provided us with a place we could sit tight without fear of being detected. It wasn't completely flush with the elevator car, but there wasn't exactly a lot of room to stretch ourselves out. It would be a little on the cramped side for the next few hours.
I carefully swung myself over to one of the girders, and clipped a carabiner onto it. That way, even if I slipped, I'd still be okay. I then removed the 'biners from the bottom of the elevator. The I-beam I was standing on was narrow, only about eight inches wide. There was enough room to sit comfortably, but only just.
In a moment, Amy was sitting right next to me. "You okay?" She asked me.
"Yeah," I frowned, "mostly," I added as I looked up at Ronnie, perched on one of the diagonal I-beams just above us. I rolled my eyes, secretly wishing that both carbiners he'd clipped to the I-beam would fail, right at the moment he'd slip; dropping him a good 200 feet straight down. Unfortunately, the odds of that actually happening were pretty remote. Dammit.
"Okay," I took a moment to center myself. I'd given up this life four years ago, but I'd be lying if I said I hadn't been tempted in that time. I'd walk by a jewelry store and I'd practically be casing the joint. Go to an art museum, and I'd ask myself what could be stolen and how. I guess stealing is the one thing I've ever been good at; and no matter what your reasons, it can be hard to give that up. I guess Amy was more than a little right when she said that it was hard watching me do something I loved. It had to be even harder when that something happened to be illegal.
"Okay," Scud began, "on the north wall, you should see a ventilation duct. That's where you're headed.
"The vents? You're kidding me," I replied. "That's such a movie cliché."
"Electrical lines run alongside it," Scud explained, "so I'm sorry if it injures your criminal ego, but that's just the way it works."
"What do I need?" I asked.
"The oscillator, a laser stripper, some wire cutters, and the BinA," Scud listed.
"Check, check, check and check," I carefully unscrewed the wire grid from the front of the ventilation duct and handed it over to Amy. "Don't drop this," I told her. Then I dug around in the duffel bag. The oscillator was a pretty nondescript black box with four colored wires hanging out of it. I hoped that meant that it would be easy for me to rig it. I slid it into the vent, then dug around further. The laser stripper was about the size of a pen and I clipped it into the neck of my black shirt. That would let me strip a hot wire without electrocuting myself. Wire cutters: self-explanatory. And finally, I dropped a pair of ketchup bottles in the vent.
"You're gonna tap into this thing using ketchup?" Amy asked.
"Oh, come on, Amy, a girl's gotta have a couple of secrets," I flashed her another dazzling grin. I unclipped the duffel bag from my harness and clipped it onto hers. "Hang onto this," I said, "we'll be needing it later.
-x-
When I gave up this life of crime, one of the things I didn't miss was crawling around in ventilation ducts. You'd be surprised how often a heist requires it.
I'm not a big person by anyone's measure, but I found those ducts to be cramped. It's a good thing I'm not claustrophobic, or that would put a huge damper on this heist right there. The vent wasn't even wide enough for me to put my arms by my side. They had to be stretched out in front of me just so that I could fit in.
"Okay, tell me where to burn," I told Scud.
"About five yards in, there's an intersection to the right; take it and go another few yards," Scud told me.
Actually taking that intersection was more difficult than it sounds in such a tight space. I'm not entirely certain my body was meant to bend in that shape, and I grunted with the effort.
"You okay?" Scud asked.
"Yeah, I'm fine, why?" I replied.
"I dunno, you just sound like you're constipated or something," Scud told me.
"It's just been a while since I've been in the game," I told him. "What's next?"
"Okay, you want to cut a square, about eight inches, in the bottom of the duct," Scud told me.
If there's such thing as a universal solvent, Scud had figured it out. Okay, that's a bit of an overstatement, maybe. Scud had worked out an acid that could eat through just about anything. We'd almost had to abandon our lair when it ate through the container he was preparing it in. Being the bright guy that he is, he'd figured out how to make the stuff useful. He divided it into two different chemicals. Either one was completely tame on its own. You could bathe in it without any problems (Scud had done it to prove it to me); but when you mix them together, they'll burn through just about anything. On the occasions when we were less worried about making the heist quiet, we'd used it to burn through the lock on a safe. Worked beautifully, worked silently, and left no trace of anything any forensics experts could identify.
With one of the two ketchup bottles, I sprayed a roughly square shape in the floor of the ventilation duct, then followed exactly the same path with the other one. I backed off a few feet, covering my nose with my glove. This stuff could burn through just about anything, but couldn't Scud have made it smell a little nicer?
I waited about thirty seconds, then lifted the cut section free of the rest of the duct, careful not to touch the edges. They were probably safe, since the acid had already reacted; but I figured better safe than sorry.
"Okay, I'm in," I said, "what now?"
Actually, with Scud guiding me through it, wiring the system was a lot easier than I'd expected. I'm not exactly an electronics genius by any stretch of the imagination, but Scud was. In a lot of ways, we're the perfect team. He made my whole evil empire work, back when I had one. He was the perfect complement to me. He could figure out the techno-stuff and the human resources, I took care of the planning and implementation.
"Okay, is that it?" I asked when we finished.
"Yeah, that's everything," Scud told me. "In about thirty seconds, the safe will be convinced that it's 8:00 am, then time will stand still for it until it actually is 8:00 am."
"Where's our guard?" I asked.
"He just took the elevator back down," Scud replied.
"Okay, keep recording. We're going to need all twenty minutes of footage of nothing happening," I told him.
"Confirm that," Scud replied.
I gotta admit I loved and hated doing this. I loved being back in a setting that seemed so familiar. Crime is easy, once you get the hang of it, and I guess the fact that Ronnie went to all this trouble to recruit me showed that I was still one of the best out there. At the same time, I hated it because it was so familiar. This wasn't who I was anymore. I was Lucinda Reynolds. I rented sailboats to tourists and was a freelance model for one Amy Bradshaw; artiste extraordinaire.
I mean, my life was pretty weird before I got out of the crime business, but the thing is, after I met Amy, I wanted normal. I wanted to go to the movies and hold hands. I wanted our fingertips to "accidentally" touch when we both reached for the popcorn at the same time. I wanted long walks on the Riviera and late nights watching the stars drift from one horizon to the other. I wanted late nights staying up watching bad movies on TV, and early mornings with eggs on the griddle. I wanted to walk into a store and actually buy something, rather than stealing it after closing. I wanted all those things that couples do to annoy their single friends. I wanted the pet names, the shared smiles, the soft touches and the inside jokes. I wanted it all.
I wanted normal; and I guess some part of me figured that maybe, just maybe that wasn't too much for someone like me to ask for.
"Um, Lucy?" Amy's voice dragged me out of my reverie, "you can come out now."
"Yeah, I'm coming," I replied. That's part of the reason why I hated working in ventilation ducts. With nothing around to distract you, your mind drifts; and I have a pretty active mind.
I slid backwards back out of the ventilation duct, and strapped myself back into the I-beam the three of us were perched on.
"You okay?" Amy asked as I screwed the grate back over the opening.
"Yeah, I'm fine," I answered. A little too quickly, it turns out.
"Lucy…"
"Amy, we're in the middle of doing the one thing I promised you I'd never do," I explained, letting out a long, aggravated breath, "so you'll excuse me a little if I seem a bit on edge."
"Hey, I get it, okay?" The thing is, she actually did get it. Not many people would have. Scud probably wouldn't. Ronnie definitely wouldn't. Even Ashley, my ex-; the one who left me so screwed up I had to run to Reykjavik to get un-screwed-up; she probably wouldn't have got it either.
"Sorry," I muttered, not really knowing what else to say.
"Hey," she leaned in closer, "we'll get through this, okay?"
I tried to look confident as I nodded my agreement.
"So what's next?" She asked.
"Now, we wait."