Chalon sur Saone, France. 1:00pm 28th July 2013
"I've just mapped out the complex from the top, it seems that the only entrance is through the front door. No other weak spots, the bottom part is heavily fortified in terms of the code that protects it's blueprints and if my assumptions are correct, the rooms inside of it. It is down below where they will be kept. Once the details for the lower ground section are uploaded, I'll update you guys again, Bentley out." The turtle message across to the hyper car following behind. Bentley is busy on the ThiefNet forums, trying to gather as much intelligence on this building as possible while his hacking code goes to work on the real thing. All replies that he gets are sullen tales of this new Director of Interpol they know not much about. Many tales of extreme rage and brutality against the respondents swell this Internet page in minutes. This interlocked and collective knowledge of all thieves has helped out a lot. What Bentley doesn't know, he can usually find out here in this dark corner of the Internet unfound by any law enforcement agency. What he gets is a brief profile of this Director.
He attended a private school in the upmarket section of Paris, and was pretty average with his marks, nothing too special to write home about. In the physical side of things he was always talented, most replies Bentley gets are about his tendency to throw punches that make people fly across the room. Strangely, he didn't do boxing or any type of martial arts. A link pops up on the screen, linking Bentley to some school reports on the Internet. Frequent references were made to his violent nature and capacity to hurt others, comments by teachers always saying about how he kept on blaming his ways on people stealing his stuff from school; pens, calculators, textbooks. However, no teacher ever saw his side of the story and recommended he'd be thrown out of school on the count of his violence. The next stop this trail is a police academy enrolment form. Aged 16 years on the sheet of paper and they happily allowed him to join at first but soon he was thrown out for getting into fights with other cadets over tiny things like the placement of items in his locker. Despite his age he won most of the fights. Down the bottom of the sheet, there is a handwritten scrawl in black stating 'keep an eye out on him, has potential if he can be controlled.'
The next logical stop for someone like him Bentley thinks is the military and sure enough a record pops up of his file, being promoted to sergeant and worked in an elite force with the French army. Numerous missions indicate this guys success, several commendations and completed missions in many different countries. He was mysteriously pulled out due to an 'adverse mental condition' when he was still at the peak of his career. There is gap for years and years where Bentley assumes he went off the radar and into obscurity while his 'condition' is being fixed. Somehow this guy makes his comeback into the world of the military, now as a team leader and not just the muscle. Going on to perform higher than before. Bentley finds some psychiatric notes of this man in classified archives, which are only too easy to crack open. One such note read 'mental illness, possible PTSD?' which the PTSD scratched out and a list of many other mental illnesses listed out such as OCD, paranoia and anxiety. The conclusion was inconclusive and nothing was ever made concrete. When Chief Barkley announced his retirement, the director was one of the first people to express interest in the job. The interview notes found him as being very keen and motivated, especially in the crime of theft. What got him the job is unsure even to the public who know him as a war hero who is now in charge of Interpol.
Finally after this research is done, the ping indicates the lower floors have been drawn out now on Bentley's plans, programs already going to work on it to find a weakness in the construction, operation or maintenance.
"I'm in now Murray." Bentley notes to Murray who is closed on the road ahead, getting safely and quickly to Interpol HQ is the most important thing on his mind, with less regard to safety than speed. On Bentley's little laptop, the security feed is being loaded up. A library of cameras, hundreds of them in fact. He will have to search through each one of them quickly to find Sly. This method is time consuming but Bentley works through each camera, scrolling through the list until he finds Penelope and Connor in the cells. They both look resigned to a long stay in there. Penelope is more resigned than Connor, she is the one who has done the most damage, and her head rests face down into her legs, which are bunched up against her body. Bentley tries to not think about her but it's the only thing he can think about. This technical mastermind has no hate chip for him; he can't sustain a steady diet of hate and jealously for long. He draws the parallel to Clockwerk, to even compare himself with the metallic owl is frightening to him. Does he feel that old love once again that he held so dearly? Not just yet, he is very reluctant to try again with her after what she did to him and the gang.
More scrolling ensues in order to find Sly, the list of cameras seems to go on forever until they reach the last four which are all centred on Sly from different angles. They see Sly on the monitor, Murray included. They see how restrained and trapped he is, with the giant metal door blocking any exit. The door is too thick to blow up with any of his bombs, even with a nuke it would struggle; it was designed to fend off such attacks in the first place. Bentley turns to the security guarding the door, it would be a cinch if Sly hadn't stolen his new keyset to beat the keycard but the other three would be very difficult to do, requiring an eye and a hand to get through. Bentley turns back to Sly for a second, hearing the beep of the heart rate monitor. They seem a little, too fast for his resting heart rate. Bentley pulls up his logs for Sly, he has done a battery of tests on him in the past, that was 8 years ago but the should hold similar for now. Sly was already in peak physical condition at the age of 21 and is the same now, Bentley knows of his workout plans during Sly's 'rest break'. The charts reveal that Sly is not at resting heart rate; Bentley times the beeps and calculates 50bpm instead of the 35bpm on his computer. This shows that Sly is not asleep like he looks, but is doing something in his head.