Coin Heist

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or locales is merely coincidental.

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission by the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ludwig, Elisa.

Coin Heist / by Elisa Ludwig.

ISBN 978-0-996-06660-0 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-632-95016-1 (ebook)

1. Juvenile Fiction. 2. Juvenile Fiction - Law & Crime. 3. Fiction - Coming of Age. 4. Juvenile Fiction - Social Issues - Friendship. 5. Juvenile Fiction - Action Adventure - General.

Typography by Torborg Davern

One

ALICE

Art class was
pretty much my downfall. So far I was barely hanging on to a C minus, which meant I really had to focus on what Mr. Rankin was saying as he rocked in his Campers and pointed at the digital projection of falling coins lighting up the wall of the Philadelphia Mint lobby. Something about art and language? Culture and power? Art being currency? Currency being power?

“The Design of Everything” had a reputation as one of the better electives for juniors at Haverford Friends. With his hipster cardigans and blondish goatee scruff, Rankin looked like he lived and breathed art, and his lectures proved it. He was a great teacher. And I was an otherwise excellent student. But here we were, on a field trip on a snowy February day, and try as I might, I couldn't tune in. It was all so . . . abstract. So fuzzy. Give me a bunch of numbers any day.

Also distracting was the fact that Jason Hodges was standing uncomfortably close to me, the navy blue of his parka lodged in my peripheral vision.

“Consider yourselves lucky—not many people get this opportunity,” Rankin was saying as a Mint employee appeared to his left, a guy with a thick flap of black hair and a too-tight pinstripe shirt. “Ah, here he is now. My man.”

“Sorry I'm late, Tom,” he said, clapping him on the shoulder. Then, to us, “I'm Brad Garcia, your guide for today.”

“No problem,” Rankin said. “We're ready when you are.”

The guest pass had gotten us through the security lines (longer than an airport but minus the pat-downs), where we'd signed in and were scanned for suspiciousness, and now Garcia, who said he was the operations manager, was giving us a spiel about the house rules, turning off our phones, not taking photos, and using our inside voices. This place, a hulking mass of concrete taking up a city block, was clearly no joke.

I felt Jason shift impatiently beside me. His dad was the headmaster of HF, and I'd known Jason since eighth grade. Well, “know” is a relative term. We all knew each other at HF—there were only a hundred or so kids in the junior class, and most of us had been going to school together since kindergarten. It's not like he ever talked to me, though.

It was only just recently that I'd noticed him toting his guitar around between classes and goofing around in the dining hall with his bandmates. He'd suddenly become sort of
hot
: shaggy brown hair, soulful hazel eyes, a lanky frame with just enough muscle.

The mere thought was embarrassing, though. Me? Alice Drake? Crushing on Jason? No. At a place like HF, you stuck to your own territory. And Jason Hodges was from another continent.

You could use the set theory in mathematics to explain most social realities: if
O
(Jason) was a member of
A
(his subset, a.k.a. Zack Pickering and his band friends), which was in turn a member of
B
(the HF junior class), he was technically included in
B
as a subset member. On the other hand, I wasn't part of
A
or even
B
because I wasn't a set and I had no members—though I
could be
a member of a set, if people, like, acknowledged me. (If you want to get technical, that made me a
null set.
Which wasn't even plain old nothing. It was
immeasurable
nothing.)

“Here at the Mint, we have our own special police to guard our facility, and we move our goods in armored trucks,” Garcia said. “You'll recognize our force by their badges with the eagle perched on top.”

“Do they pack heat?” Jason asked.

“Yes, they're armed,” Garcia replied politely. “They're real police, just like you see on the streets of Philadelphia.”

Jason raised his hand, but not before blurting out his next question. “Can we see their weapons?”

“Well—”

Rankin broke in. “I don't think that's going to happen, Hodges. You're lucky Mr. Garcia has been kind enough to agree to take us on a behind-the-scenes tour,” Rankin said. “Let's not make him regret that, okay? You were saying, Brad?”

“Real lucky,” Jason whispered in my ear as Garcia moved on. “That's his cousin, you know.”

I fumbled for a remotely intelligent response.

“Rankin's cousin?” I asked.
Fail.

“Yeah. That's why we're here. My dad said—”

“Hodges,” Rankin cut in. “You with us?”

Jason mumbled some apology, and I made a mental note to ignore his presence. Rankin was notoriously tough, and talking to Jason wasn't going to help my cause.

“Okay then. FYI, there are others who might actually like to see the Mint.”

“Oh yeah. Right,” Jason said. Another tour had come in behind us, and the rest of the group had scooched to the side. Jason moved, but in an exaggeratedly slow way, hound-dogging his head, which had everyone laughing.

Everyone, that is, except Rankin, who shook his head and closed his eyes, like he was trying to teleport himself to another location. “Herding cats,” he muttered.

Also not laughing was Dakota Cunningham, who, in set theory terms, was a member of the powerset, and as such was part of everything HF. She was pretty much a living yearbook: president of, like, twelve clubs, in many of my honors classes, invited to every prep-school kegger in the five-county area, and, most nauseatingly of all, very pretty in a blonde, Swiss, muesli-eating sort of way.

“Well,” Garcia continued. “Here at the Philadelphia Mint, we print a million new coins every half-hour—that's sixteen million during our operational day.”

Garcia led us past the Mint's bald eagle mascot and over to some displays of money from colonial times. “Before 1792, people used a variety of foreign and colonial currency to purchase goods. Then Congress passed the Coinage Act, enacting a single currency and creating the Philadelphia Mint. Today, the Philadelphia Mint and the Denver Mint are responsible for all of the coins circulating in the United States. You'll know the coins that come from our facility because they have a
P
on them. We also design limited-edition, medals, bullion, and commemorative coins.”

We slipped into a theater area where three screens told us the history of the place. In the dark, I snuck another look at Jason.

I knew I wasn't the only one who found him attractive. He'd actually gone out with Dakota in middle school and plenty of others since then, including Ella Shonfield and Chloe Benezet.

I did enjoy watching all this stuff from a distance, the getting-togethers and breaking-aparts, the crushes and heartbreaks—almost like I was a scientist observing rats in a maze. At least I didn't have to be caught up in the maze myself. The truth, embarrassing to admit, was that I was as much of a romantic as anyone else.
Your time just hasn't come yet
, my mom always said. I was getting a little tired of waiting. But unless something seismic happened at HF, I might have to wait a while longer. Or become someone entirely different than me.

Garcia lined us up at a special door marked
employees only
and rubbed his hands in anticipation. “Now we'll proceed to the design studio. You guys are getting to see a part of the Mint up close that hardly anybody gets to see. Right this way, if you please.”

“I don't please,” Benny Yizar muttered, his hands shoved deep into the pocket of his hoodie, shoulders slumped. I caught his eye. He simply stared back, dark eyes glinting.

Benny was new to school this year on a football scholarship. You weren't supposed to know who had funding, but you always did. Benny kept to himself mostly, even after he helped bring our usually pathetic team to the IntraFriends league championship last fall. Not that it was saying much. All the Philly prep schools had sucky teams, and lacrosse had always been considered the sport of choice.

Maybe Benny had figured that out, because he usually looked like he would rather be anywhere else but here. The only time I saw him genuinely psyched was when he was driving around in his souped-up muscle car.

“I have a question,” Dakota announced loudly. “Who decides which president gets to be on the quarter?”

Garcia smiled broadly, revealing pink gums. “I'm glad you asked that. Elected officials, artists, and occasionally members of the public submit ideas for new coin designs.” He waved his arms to show us the people at work at computer stations all around us. “We hire our own sculptors and engravers to model new designs.”

Rankin hit the wall like he was giving it a high-five. “There you go! Just what I was saying. You don't think art is relevant in today's world? Think about this: You can make a very nice living as a mint sculptor.”

Dakota side-twisted her long, naturally golden hair and everyone watched, transfixed, as she asked about how people got picked to be put on stamps. Garcia, of course, did not know the answer. Why? Because, newsflash, the Mint did not produce stamps. Dakota and me were both good students, but she had to really work for it.

We stopped in front of an empty station. “While in the past, coins were modeled with clay, we currently rely on 3-D modeling software, the same kind that Hollywood uses for movies such as
Frozen
,” Garcia said.

I felt my phone buzz in the front pocket of my jeans. Probably Greg, wondering when we would meet for Math Team.

Garcia invited us to huddle closer to the computer, so we could see the software he was describing. I was stuck at the back so I had to stretch up on my tiptoes. Being five feet (on a good day) was no picnic, and I had been mistaken for a lower-school boy on more than one occasion in the quad. Draw your own conclusions about my chest size.

With a few clicks Garcia logged into the application. On the screen, a 3-D coin design flipped and spun, as though someone was about to make a bet. And then he was in. I wondered how much of this info was stored on the server—it seemed insecure for such a serious operation. Just out of curiosity, I picked up my phone and looked at the network settings.

“I don't believe it,” I murmured, shocked by what I was seeing. A hacker's field day.

“What?” Jason asked. I startled a bit—I hadn't realized I was speaking out loud. He was so close, I could actually smell him—a little hint of pot smoke mixed with laundry detergent.

“The network,” I whispered, because Garcia was still talking. “I mean, really, guys? That's the best you can do?” It was WEP-encrypted, which was a joke. It was basically the same thing as a home wi-fi network. I would have expected way more from any federal building, let alone the one in charge of most of our nation's currency.

“What about it?”

“It's just old-school,
super
crackable. If someone wanted to break in and start counterfeiting coins, it wouldn't be hard.” The whole process unfurled in my mind. It was like when I was on the Math Team, sitting in front of my computer—I could always see six steps ahead to how everything would eventually play out.

He angled his head in disbelief. “Really.”

“Really,” I insisted, maybe overstating the case a teensy bit. “A breeze.”

My cheeks were hot. Ridiculous, I told myself. It wasn't even like he had a great personality. This was strictly hormonal.

Garcia showed us how the computers calculated tool paths to manufacture the design precisely. “We now have the precision of a laser. Specially designed cutters reproduce every detail of the image, and the final product needs very little hand-cleaning.”

He led us into the die shop, where the tools that make the coins were created and maintained. A wall of windows close to the ceiling allowed the official tour groups above us to look down at the action. I saw some young kids, maybe third-graders, jockeying for the best view. Jason was waving to them and pretending to crank a gigantic metal press. I had to laugh. He was like a mime on steroids.

“We start with a steel blank on which the design is imprinted as the master hub. The hub creates the die. The die blanks are put through the assembly line to create a stamp. And then robot arms give them a polish.”

“I heard about those online—they're big in Japan,” Jason said.

More laughs all around us. “Dude,” Dylan Sanders said, giving him a high five.

Dylan Sanders, lax goalie, was the son of a state senator and current man-piece of Dakota. He spoke strictly in monosyllabic words.
Dude.

“What about mistakes?” Dakota asked, rolling her eyes at the two snickering guys. “Are there ever coins with mistakes?”

“Yes, occasionally we find errors in the design. The digital model might be missing lettering or design elements.” Garcia said, running a hand along the back of his neck in a way that made me think it was a sore subject. “We try to catch them early. A machine called a waffle will scrap the coins before they go into circulation, and then we recycle the metal. But on rare occasions, an error coin does slip through the cracks, and it can be very lucrative for coin collectors, some selling for millions of dollars. Bad news for us, though.”

The plant floor was divided into two sections—one for coins and a smaller area for the special medals and commemoratives. Garcia stopped us at the coin area, where we saw the waffle in action, high-pressure rollers pressing together to reduce coins into a mutilated, distorted mess. Any remainders were tossed into a scrap heap on the floor below.

“I wonder why no one's tried it,” Jason said loudly, so I could hear him over the deafening sound. He'd been standing next to me, by my count, for at least twenty-five minutes. Only on a field trip would this even be possible
.
“Hacking in, I mean.”

“Who knows?” I yelled back. I wasn't a big-time hacker, but I knew enough to get information when I needed it. “But it's not just getting into the system. You'd have to come back for the goods. That would be the hard part.”