I don’t particularly like sending Camille back to Levi’s house. Especially with only that idiot Schultz to protect her. But I trust Camille to take care of herself. And Schultz to look out for his own best interests by keeping his informant alive.
Still, I’m more distracted than I’ve ever been, heading into this job.
And that’s not a good thing.
Because this shit is complicated. In fact, I’d almost say that I’m nervous. If I were willing to admit to feeling an emotion like that.
Let’s just call it . . . tense. A tightness that runs from my scalp all the way down my spine.
I look at my watch: 10:02. Camille should be going into Levi’s house right now.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, I regret how we planned this. It seemed like the only way to make sure Schultz was occupied. But now it seems insane, pulling two jobs in one night . . .
We should have stayed together.
If we all get out of this alive, I’m not letting Camille out of my sight anymore. She can stay safe right by my side.
“You okay?” Seb says to me.
“Of course,” I reply.
I shake my hair out of my eyes, determined to focus.
Sebastian, Mason, and Jonesy are all gearing up. We’re at Jonesy’s house ‘cause we’re using his van. He’s got this nice white windowless electrician’s van, from his time working for Brickhouse Security. That was four years ago, but Jonesy hasn’t forgotten how to cut his way into most any electrical panel, including the one powering Alliance Bank.
I love Jonesy, but he’s twitchy as fuck. When he’s in a manic phase, he stays up all night hacking government websites, trying to prove his conspiracy theories. When he’s in a depressive state, he holes up in his basement and won’t let anybody come over unless they bring pizza and a six-pack, and agree not to discuss anything but Halo.
You have to catch him right in the middle of those two states, when he can actually be productive.
Today he seems in good spirits. He’s showered (always a good sign), and he’s got a new pair of glasses that make him look a bit like John Lennon during his bearded Jesus phase.
Jonesy drives us to 600 North LaSalle, where we use a stolen keycard to get into the underground parking garage.
This is a mixed-use building, with a bunch of law firms and private equity companies using the office space. It’s not the perfect access point, because lawyers and finance types like to work late at night, but it has one very special feature—a patio garden space that extends outward to within twelve feet of the Alliance bank.
We hop out of the van, taking a ladder and a couple of paint cans out of the back.
“Let me know if you have any trouble,” I say to Jonesy, tapping the earpiece nestled in my right ear.
He nods. “Don’t cut the glass ‘till I give you the okay.”
Jonesy drives off, headed for the electrical grid that powers the Alliance building. It’s about twelve minutes away, and he’s got to stay there for the duration of the job, manually clamping off the signals for the perimeter sensors. He won’t have time to drive back and pick us up again. That’s got to be Camille.
Compulsively, I glance at my watch again. 10:16. She’s is definitely in Levi’s house by now.
Mason, Seb, and I take the elevator up to the sixth floor. We’re all kitted up in paint-spattered coveralls, but I’d rather not run into anybody who might wonder why a bunch of painters are headed into work at ten o’clock at night.
Luckily, the sixth floor is quiet. I see a light on down the hall—some junior lawyer slaving away over a huge stack of files, most likely. Our little painting crew quietly makes its way over to the garden patio.
It’s a pretty space, full of outdoor lunch tables and open umbrellas to shade the lawyers from sun or rain.
I’m more interested in what lies on the other side of the railing.
We try to move in total silence. We’re six floors up, with a street right below us. We don’t want to attract any unwanted attention.
Carefully, we extend the ladder and stretch it out over the gap between buildings. It’s easy to secure the ladder on our side. On the opposite end, the legs rest only on a three-inch windowsill. The smallest jolt, and we could knock the whole thing down, with a whole lot of noise, and a shattered spine for whoever was trying to climb across.
The person is me, to start with.
Sebastian and Mason hold the ladder steady while I start to crawl across. This is the worst part, because there’s nobody to secure it on the other side. I’ve just got to be slow and careful.
It’s fine while I’m on the side being held by Seb and Mason. However, the further I venture out to the middle, the more flexible and unstable the metal struts feel. I’m not afraid of heights. But it’s not exactly pleasant to be ninety feet up in the air over cement.
I feel like a mountaineer crossing over an ice crevice. Much like a mountaineer, I’ve got on a stupid bulky outfit. Unlike a mountaineer, it’s sweltering hot tonight, so I’m sweating under the coveralls and latex gloves.
The ladder creaks and twists to the right, making my stomach lurch. The legs cling to the window ledge, just barely. I keep inching forward, until I’m up to the glass.
Touching my earpiece, I say, “You all set, Jonesy?”
“Mm-hmm,” he grunts. It sounds like he’s holding something in his mouth. “Window sensors should be off.”
“Should be?” I say.
“Only one way to know for sure.”
I start to cut through the glass, careful not to upset my precarious position on the ladder. I slice out a perfect circle, suction the glass, and push it through into the bank. Then I crawl through the hole.
I drop down into an office. This isn’t Raymond Page’s office—that’s two floors up. This is just the plain, boring space of a regular drone, who has three mugs of half-drunk cold coffee on their desk, and a depressing motivational poster on their wall—a picture of a kitten in the rain with the caption, “It Will Get Better.”
I wait for Seb to follow after me. He makes it across the ladder alright—getting through the hole is a bit harder. He’s so damn tall and he’s filled out enough that he almost gets stuck halfway, like Winnie the Pooh when he ate too much honey. His backpack isn’t helping.
“Cut it a little smaller why don’t you,” Seb grunts.
“I forgot I had Groot coming after me,” I say.
Mason won’t be following us—he’s got to pull the ladder back, and then he’s going to hang out a while on the patio, in case something goes wrong and we’ve got to come back that way. Plus, somebody’s got to listen on the police scanner to give a heads up if any unwanted company is headed our way.
“You nervous?” I say to Seb.
He thinks about it for a second.
“Actually . . . no,” he says. “I was before. Threw up twice this morning. But this is like playing in a big game—once you’re on the court, you’re not nervous anymore. You just do it.”
“Good,” I nod. “Well, let me know if that changes.”
I check my watch again—10:32. With any luck, Camille will be out of Levi’s house and on her way over in our getaway car. I wish I could text her. We have to stay incommunicado in case Schultz has her phone.
We strip off the painter’s clothes—nobody’s gonna be fooled by the get-up in here, and it’s too hot with all the other gear underneath. Then we head to the closest elevator. I don’t press the button to call the car to our floor. Instead, Seb and I force the doors so we can climb down into the empty shaft.
The building has three elevators—two that serve the main floors, and one that only runs from the ground floor down to the vault.
Disabling the cameras and sensors on that elevator would be difficult. But it could be done. The one thing we can’t do is disable the alarm. If the elevator car moves, it triggers a remote alarm directly to remote security. There’s no way around it—the elevator cars can’t move outside of business hours.
However, I don’t really need the cars to use the system. All three elevators share the same ventilation system. Ignoring the cars entirely, Seb and I can climb down the shaft, then across and down to the vault itself. Assuming my oversized brother can fit through several tight squeezes along the way.
We use clamps to slide down the elevator cables. It’s like doing a rope climb in gym class, but in reverse. Also, I fucking hated gym class.
Seb, of course, excels at this part. He’s actually grinning, like he’s having fun.
“I feel like a spy,” he says.
“Oh yeah? Well just wait for the next bit. Then we’re gonna look extremely cool.”
Seb and I squirm through the horizontal air shaft between the elevators. It’s slow, tight, and overwhelmingly hot. I can feel sweat running down my face. There’s no way to hurry—all we can do is keep crawling forward, inch by inch.
Once we’re inside the third elevator shaft, we climb down the last hundred feet to the vault.
“What now?” Seb says, feet firmly planted on the ground.
“Now the moon suits,” I say.
Jonesy has temporarily disabled most of the external sensors. The seismic sensors are still running, which is why we can’t tunnel over to the vault, or blow the door open. Inside, the thermal motion sensors are still running, too.
Now, the good thing is that they won’t go off unless they sense both motion AND heat. But I need to get close enough to jam them up.
So Seb and I put on possibly the most embarrassing costumes ever created by my friend Mason. They look like giant marshmallows made out of shiny foil. They cover us head to toe, until we resemble two very reflective mascots. I can barely see through the eyeholes, but it should block the heat from our sweating bodies just long enough to disable the sensors.
Seb and I open the elevator doors, then I slip through. It’s completely dark inside the space. I count my steps away from the elevator door, just like I did when I was down here with Bella. Remembering where each of the sensors were located, I spray them with foam concentrate. That should block their ability to see motion. And then, fingers crossed, it won’t matter if they read a heat signature.
I spray the cameras, too. They’re triggered by light, and I don’t want to have to work blind the whole time we’re here.
Once we’ve got all the sensors covered, Seb and I can pull down the hoods of our crinkly foil suits, and turn on our headlamps.
Now we can see. At least a little bit.
I touch my earpiece, whispering, “So far so good?”
“Police radar is quiet,” Mason says.
“Everything looks okay here,” Jonesy adds.
Their voices are tinny and distant. It’s shit reception down in the vault. We can’t count on them being able to reach us, so we’ve got to work fast.
Seb and I approach the vault door, which looks like a massive porthole six feet in diameter and two feet thick, made out of dull, solid steel.
There’s just one thing left in our way.
It’s not the code to the vault—I already have that, thanks to the hidden camera I placed on my little field-trip down here with Bella. I’ve seen Raymond Page and his bank manager punch in the code thirty times since then. They’ve only changed it twice, which isn’t bank protocol, but I think Raymond is a little bit lazy.
No, the only thing left to deal with is the exterior magnetic lock.
The lock consists of two plates. When armed, they create a magnetic field. If you open the door outside of business hours, that field is broken. It triggers an alarm that even Jonesy can’t intercept. There’s no way around this—the field has to remain intact all night long.
I had to ponder on the problem for a long time. How to move the plates without breaking the field?
Eventually, I realized that I simply had to move them together, at the same time.
I had Mason make me an aluminum plate that looks like a rectangular serving platter with a handle on one side. He welded it together in his mom’s basement, using her silicone oven mitts and his makeshift welding mask that’s basically a bucket with a plexiglass window in the front. He looked like a proper idiot, but his work is always top-notch, down to the last millimeter.
Seb takes the plate out of his backpack. I cover the flat side with heavy-duty double-sided tape. Then I stick it onto the two bolts and unscrew them. Now I can lift out both bolts at once, while keeping them at precisely the same distance from each other, then move the whole thing out of the way. The field remains intact, even though it’s no longer attached to the vault.
I set it carefully down against the wall, with the delicacy of a bomb-removal expert.
Seb watches, so quiet he’s not even breathing.
When I place it down successfully, he lets out a long sigh.
“It worked!”
“Of course it did,” I say, as if I never had any doubt at all.
“Alright,” Seb says, practically rubbing his hands together in anticipation. “Punch in the code.”
“I thought you had the code?” I say, blankly.
Seb freezes by the vault door.
“What?”
“I thought you were gonna memorize it?”
“You never told me that.”
“Yeah I did. Remember? It started with 779 . . . something.”
Seb stares at me with a horrified expression.
I laugh. “I’ve got the code, ya dummy.”
“That’s not funny,” he says.
“It was for me.”
I punch in the code: 779374.
I hear four distinct clunking sounds as the bolts retract. Then I pull the vault door open.
I’m hit with the smell of stacked up bills. Cash has a distinct odor: ink, cotton, leather, grease, dirt, and a hint of metal, from coming in contact with coins.
But Seb and I aren’t here for bills. It’s too heavy to haul out that much cash.
We want the diamond.
I take the drill out of Seb’s bag so we can start drilling into the lockboxes. I drill out the locks, then Seb checks the contents. Ingots and gemstones go in the bags. Everything else stays behind.
“Don’t take anything sentimental,” I tell him. “I don’t want some gangster coming after us ‘cause we stole his grannie’s wedding ring.”
There are two hundred and eleven lockboxes in the vault.
In the hundred and eighth, I find what I’m looking for.
It doesn’t look like much: just a plain wooden box with a hinged lid.
Still, I feel the thrill of anticipation as soon as I see it. I grab the box and lift the lid.
The stone inside is unearthly in its beauty. It truly looks like it might have fallen to earth in the core of a meteor. It’s about the size of a hen’s egg, clear and sparkling, with just a hint of frosty blue. The Winter Diamond.
Seb sees my silence and stillness. He comes to stand beside me, gazing down on it.
“Fucking hell,” he breathes.
“Yeah,” I say.
We stare at it for about ten seconds. Then I close the lid with a snap, slipping the box directly into my pocket.
“Should we keep going?” Seb says.
“No. We’ve got as much as we can carry.”
Sebastian and I hoist our backpacks onto our backs. It’s much more difficult this time, because gold is heavy as hell. Not just gold—platinum bars, loose gemstones, and one original Babe Ruth baseball card in a lucite case, because fuck it, that’s cool and I want it.
We can’t go out the way we came in. It’s too slow to climb up the cables. If the cops are called when we’re halfway up, we’ll be trapped like a couple of bugs in a bottle.
The only problem is that engaging the elevators will trigger the alarms. So once we press that button, we have about two minutes to get out the front doors. And pray that Camille is waiting for us with the getaway car.
I touch my earpiece, saying to Jonesy, “We’re about to head out. You can pack up.”
To Mason I add, “You too, Mace.”
Mason will leave the ladder, strip off the coveralls, and exit the perimeter on foot. He doesn’t have anything incriminating on him.
Seb and I are a different story.
“You ready?” I say to him, my finger hovering over the elevator button.
I’m holding a stopwatch in my other hand. From the time I hit the button, I calculate that we have exactly three minutes to get away from the two-block radius surrounding the bank, before the cops block it all off.
Seb looks tense, but resolute.
“Ready,” he says.
I hit the stopwatch and the elevator button simultaneously.
The elevator starts to descend.
I don’t hear anything besides the jolt and hum of the elevator car coming down, but I know the moment that car started moving, it triggered a silent alarm to the firm that handles the bank’s security, and to the Chicago PD.
The elevator seems to take forever to come down. If I wasn’t watching the stopwatch, I would never believe it was only twelve seconds. As the doors part with aching slowness, Seb and I hustle inside. I press the button for the lobby.
The doors close again and we lurch upward. My heart is beating three or four times every second that passes.
As soon as the elevator stops, Seb and I push through the doors, hustling across the dark, empty space. Our footsteps echo on the polished marble. It’s still deathly silent, but I know that our presence isn’t a secret anymore.
When we get to the glass doors, I pick up the closest brass stanchion and I launch it through the window like a javelin. The glass shatters, splintering down like so many jagged icicles. It doesn’t matter how much noise we make anymore. The point is to get outside as quickly as possible.
Seb and I step through the glass, hurrying out onto the steps leading down to the street.
I look down to the curb, where Camille should be waiting for us.
There’s nobody there. No car, no, truck, nothing but an empty street.
“Where is she?” Seb says, a note of panic in his voice.
“She’ll be here,” I tell him.
The seconds tick by. The road remains empty.
“Should we just run?” Seb says.
We’re halfway down the stairs. We could just sprint off down the street.
But I told Camille to meet us right here.
At that moment, someone barks, “DON’T MOVE!”
Slowly, I turn and look over my shoulder.
A security guard is standing behind us, his gun pointed at Seb and me.
Not just any security guard—my good buddy Michael, who let us down into the vault a couple weeks back.
Michael is not supposed to be working tonight. No security guards are supposed to be working tonight.
The question of why Michael is here at 11:00 pm is a mystery. If I had to guess, I assume he was doing something less-than-legal for Raymond on one of the upper floors. That’s not what I care about, however. I’m concerned solely with the gun pointed at my face.
Seb and I are wearing Kevlar vests. I really don’t want to test their functionality, or Michael’s aim.
“Take it easy,” I say, keeping my voice low and calm.
“Don’t fucking talk, and don’t fucking move, or I’ll put a bullet between your eyes,” Michael barks.
“What do you want to do?” Seb murmurs to me, so quietly that even I can barely hear it.
I can see his body coiled like a spring. He wants to try to get the jump on Michael, thinking he’s just some rent-a-cop. That’s a bad idea—I doubt Raymond Page picked a schmuck as the head of his security team. This guy is probably some ex-navy SEAL or worse.
Carefully, keeping my body turned to hide what I’m doing, I slip my hand in my pocket. I intend to close my fingers around the handle of my switchblade. If Seb can distract this dude, I might have a chance . . .
My hand grasps at nothing. I don’t have my knife anymore—I gave it to Camille.
Well, shit.
At that moment, I hear sirens—distant, but getting closer by the second.
Michael chuckles.
“You’re fucked now,” he says.
Then I see something so odd that it looks like an optical illusion. The shadow behind one of the bank’s marble pillars peels away from the wall, looming up behind Michael. In one swift motion, it grabs the guard’s wrist, wrenching his gun upward, and wraps one massive forearm around Michael’s throat.
The security guard squeezes his trigger three times in a row, but the bullets shoot harmlessly up into the air. Meanwhile, my big brother Dante puts Michael in the most painful-looking headlock I’ve ever witnessed. Dante chokes him out in about eight seconds, until Michael slumps over unconscious.
Dante drops him on the top of the steps.
“Hey!” Sebastian greets him, cheerfully.
“What are you doing here?” I demand.
Dante shrugs his heavy shoulders.
“I thought you might need help.”
“We had it covered,” I tell him.
“Clearly,” he snorts, stepping over the security guard’s slumbering frame.
The sirens are getting closer. Now’s the time to leave.
Dante must have a car somewhere around.
But I don’t want to leave without Camille . . .
“Let’s go,” Dante grunts.
“One more second . . .” I say.
A white police van screeches up in front of the bank.
Seb and Dante are about to take cover behind the pillars.
“Wait!” I say.
Camille pokes her head out the driver’s side window.
“Come on!” she shouts.
We book it down the stairs.
Dante and Seb climb into the van. I grab the last of Mason’s inventions out of my bag. I fling one of the grenades up the north end of the street, and one south. Then I jump in the passenger seat, shouting to Camille, “Go west on Monroe!”
Cop cars are zooming up La Salle from both directions. I can see them closing in on us from two sides.
Then the grenades explode.
Not in the normal way—there’s no charge inside. Instead, the grenades release two smoke bombs of massive proportions. They create dual pillars of dense black smoke, twelve feet in diameter and a hundred feet tall. This blocks the view in either direction with apocalyptic panache.
Camille floors the gas pedal, shooting the gap between the pillars of smoke. She zooms down Monroe Street, taking us out of the financial district, out toward the river.
She’s driving fast and aggressive, handling the van like it’s a sports car. I can’t help grinning, watching her. The only thing I don’t like is the gash on her chin, and the ugly marks around her neck. Not to mention the fact that her shirt looks like it was cut off her body.
“Are you okay?” I ask her.
Camille gives me a quick smile, before turning her eyes back to the road.
“Never better,” she says.
I feel myself grinning too, a bubble of elation building inside of me.
We’re doing it. We’re fucking doing it.
I can hear sirens everywhere. Probably twenty cop cars, headed toward the bank from all directions. It’ll take a miracle to get through them all without being spotted.
Camille is headed toward the bridge, to cross over the river.
Instead, I say, “Turn right here. Then turn right again.”
“But that’ll take us back—”
“Trust me,” I say.
Camille wrenches the wheel to the right, then takes the next right again.
Now we’re headed back toward La Salle on Washington Street. Sure enough, two cop cars are racing down the road after us, sirens blaring. Camille’s hands are stiff on the wheel and her face is pale.
“What do I do?” she says.
“Just keep going,” I tell her.
The cop cars shoot past us on either side, zooming down Washington.
Camille lets out a startled laugh.
“They think we’re with them,” I tell her. “It’s way more suspicious to drive in the opposite direction.”
We keep driving back toward the bank, letting another squad car pass us by. Once we’re sure the bulk of the cops have passed, we take a left to head north instead.
The sound of sirens fades away. Seb and Dante start laughing. Camille joins in, her voice higher than usual, and a little skittish.
“We did it,” she says, like she still can’t believe it.
“Did you get what you were looking for?” Dante asks me.
“Of course I did,” I tell him.
Now Dante and Seb are looking curiously at Camille.
“Thanks for the lift,” Dante says, in his rumbling voice.
I can see Camille’s cheeks turning pink. She hasn’t officially met any of my family yet, but she knows who my brothers are, like everybody does in Old Town.
“Sorry I was late,” she says.
“How did it go?” I ask her.
“There were a couple . . . bumps along the way,” she says.
“But you’re okay? Really okay?”
“Yes,” she says, her dark eyes flitting over to me again.
I can feel my brothers watching us. I don’t give a shit.
I grab her hand and bring it up to my lips, kissing it.
“You’re incredible,” I tell her.
