Money Run (4 page)

Opening his eyes, he saw that the fern closest to the window had a plastic nozzle among its green fingers. His vision sparkled as he neared it, and he gasped. He stumbled back towards the desk.

“You have three options,” Buckland said. “One: wait for the gas to knock you out. You'll be taken from the room, locked up in a holding cell in the basement, then I'll use you as a bargaining chip against the government. Two: call for backup. Your employers might send someone for you, and that person might arrive in time, and they might be instructed to rescue you instead of executing you. But I wouldn't count on it.”

Peachey exhaled, expelling the gas from his lungs. He clamped his jaw shut and pinched his nose. He'd never held his breath longer than three minutes, and he could already feel the sedative in the gas spilling through his brain.

“Your third option is to throw your gun into the spa. There's a pair of handcuffs on my desk; put them on. If you do exactly as I say, the doors will unlock themselves, the gas will be fanned out, and you'll be escorted from the building. Then you'll be free to go.”

Peachey kicked the monitor off the desk. The LCD cracked, and Buckland's face vanished. The speakers kept talking: “No hurry. You have until you lose consciousness to decide. One minute and thirty seconds.”

Peachey gritted his teeth. He didn't negotiate with his targets. He never surrendered. Buckland would pay for this.

He ran to the door, his lungs already aching. He leaped into the air, right foot first, and tried to break it down.

Thud
. It was like kicking concrete. The wood didn't give at all. Peachey fired his Glock into the panelling. The shot sounded like a shovel hitting granite, and Peachey saw steel in the bullet holes. The door was wood-panelled metal. Impossible to get through.

Peachey fired five more shots,
blamblamblam! blamblam!
One into each of the walls, one into the floor, and one into the ceiling. He got the same reaction from each surface. Buckland's office was a steel tomb.

His head was becoming light. He tried to focus. It was obvious that he was never going to find the hidden passageway in time. So what were his other options? Think!

Then he saw something. Something that could get him out of this.

Peachey pointed his Glock at the double-glazed windows and pulled the trigger.

The glass disintegrated, shards curling outward into the daylight like the teeth of an eel as it opens its jaws. The wind outside blasted Peachey's hair back, roaring in his ears, but he could still hear the hissing of the pot plant. The gas was coming into the room faster now. Peachey dropped the gun; he hated leaving it behind, but one hand was covering his nose, he needed the other one free, and he didn't have time to reholster it.

He ran towards the window, and threw himself into the void.

The two steel cables he'd seen were about two metres apart. Peachey reached for the left one and grabbed it with one hand, still unwilling to uncover his nose with the other. He squinted against the wind, which pushed up from the alley far, far below. The cable burned his palm as he slid down it.

Bang!
The window washer whirled around in alarm as Peachey crashed down onto his platform. Peachey grabbed the platform for support as it wobbled crazily underneath him. He gulped air desperately, and it flowed swiftly into his lungs, cold and sweet.

“What the hell are you doing?” the window washer screamed. “Are you crazy?”

Peachey grabbed the top of the man's head with his free hand and twisted. With a muffled
crick
, he broke the window washer's neck. Peachey squeezed each of the buckles on the man's harness, popping them loose. Then he looked down, took aim, and pushed the body over the side.

A few seconds later, the window washer landed in the alleyway dumpster between HBS and the KFC. The faint crash leaked back up through the air to Peachey. Good thing the lid was open, he thought. It's tall enough that no one will see in without standing on tiptoes. The cleaner should be buried in batter crumbs during the dinner rush. Peachey turned to the window the platform was facing.

I could lower this down to the ground, he thought as he buckled himself into the washer's harness, and walk away. Skip town, and hope the government doesn't come looking for me. That would be the smart thing to do.

But he wouldn't do it. Buckland had tricked him. Peachey was lucky not to be arrested or dead. And that infuriated him.

Peachey started winching the platform back up to the roof. He would find Buckland, and he would kill him. In his last moments of life, Buckland would realize that he'd been defeated, and he would wish he'd never messed with Michael Peachey.

“Met my match, huh?” Peachey grunted as he twisted the winch. “We'll see about that.”

The Hammond Buckland Operation had started when Ashley and Benjamin were planning a robbery at an HBS National in another city. Their first draft of the plan involved Ash drilling into the bank's vault from above, where the walls were thinnest and where the cameras weren't pointing. They knew how to cut the power to the cameras and the rest of the grid simultaneously when she got inside so that it wouldn't look like sabotage. And they knew that the money in the vault was only counted once every two days, so provided they only took a few bricks of cash, they'd be back in their hometown before anyone even realized there had been a robbery. Their problem was working out how to cover the noise of the drilling. Ash had suggested placing a few layers of insulation on the roof and drilling through them. Benjamin had suggested waiting for a thunderstorm.

They forgot all about the bank when they received a new tip-off from the Source.

Ash and Benjamin had been career thieves for eighteen months now. Their plans had become more elaborate and diabolical as their procurements had gotten bigger and more valuable. They moved up from the surgical art of safe-cracking to intricately choreographed thefts of luxury cars, from daylight robberies of small mansions to moonlit incursions into posh art galleries. They never went for the easy targets. They liked a challenge.

The point wasn't just acquiring material things. It was identifying the impossible, and doing it.

The first thing they told Ash when she started at Narahm School for Girls was that each student had limitless potential. They could run for office. They could be famous artists. They could compete at the Olympics, or win the Nobel Peace Prize. There was nothing they couldn't do.

The next thing they told her was to always wear the school blazer, and keep her socks pulled up. To never leave the premises during school hours. To walk, not run, through the school corridors. To only work on her personal projects after all her homework was done.

They gave her all that potential, and then they took it all away.

Ash could pick a Lockwood padlock in under twenty seconds. She could scale a chain-link fence with less than 8 decibels of noise. She could hit a 10-centimetre bullseye from 20 metres with a dart from a blowpipe. She could rewire any back-to-base alarm system so it went off as she was leaving, rather than arriving – and therefore wouldn't be replaced when the robbery was discovered.

This was the appeal of her work. Knowing that she was using her full potential, and that she was really good at what she did.

They had first started stealing because Ash had needed the money. Her mother was a divorce lawyer, and had managed to take most of the family's money with her when she left Ash's father. She'd twisted the law so that she wasn't required to pay child support either, and Ash's dad was barely making enough to keep the phone connected. Ash had decided it was better to steal to support herself than watch her dad go bankrupt trying to keep her comfortable.

Benjamin had first started because Ash was his best friend. He would follow her anywhere, do anything for her, and if she was going to be a thief, he was going to be one too.

The Source had first contacted them through Benjamin's gmail account. He or she sent a list of the locations and dates of all the jobs Ash and Benjamin had done in the past six months. And at the bottom, there was one location they'd never been to, with a date that wouldn't arrive for three days. After that there was one word – “
Interested?
” – with a link to a secure server.

They had panicked. No way were they clicking the link – the police were obviously on to them, and were trying to lure them into a trap. What should they do? How could they save themselves?

But four days later, they saw a story on the news about federal agents finding $700,000 in a storage unit. Apparently the drug lord who rented it had died of a heart attack months ago, leaving his lease to expire.

The storage unit was the location in the Source's email.

The Source sent them a few more emails. Each had a location, a date and a link. At first, Ash and Benjamin were still suspicious – even if it wasn't the police, someone was playing games with them. Who, and why? So they started clicking the links, in order to investigate. Behind each one, they found a description of something valuable. Something that would be in a specific place, at a specific time, briefly exposed. Vulnerable. And there was always a bank account number, to deposit 15 per cent of the profits after the job – the informer's cut.

They didn't know how the Source had found them. But they knew he or she was offering them a fortune. And it wasn't long before they received an email about Hammond Buckland.

The place? HBS. The prize?
Two hundred million dollars
.

The link led them to a document that detailed Buckland's financial history, including all his exploits, corporations, profits and expenses. The information was mostly on the public record, but there were a few things, like account balances from Buckland's bank statements, that must have been stolen. And the Source had highlighted one spot where the numbers didn't add up. At exactly the time Buckland purchased what was now the HBS building and started refurbishing it, $200 million mysteriously disappeared. There were no other expenditures. No acquisitions. No other infrastructure. There was only one place the money could be.

Benjamin and Ash were excited. There was a fortune hidden somewhere in the HBS building, and only they knew it was there. So they started planning.

Benjamin went into HBS one day, with a cover story about an economics project. It didn't get him beyond the lobby, but he was able to take a few snapshots of the vacuum bots – the squat, circular robots that rolled quietly around each floor, sucking dust out of the carpet and polishing the floor tiles. Having established the make and model, he ordered one on eBay. When it arrived, he took it to pieces and planted a tiny camera next to the motion sensor and a transmitter behind the wheels. Then he repackaged it, went back into HBS, and poured a cup of coffee into the motion sensor of one of theirs. Without a working sensor, the bot started bumping into walls and people. Benjamin went back home, and waited.

It took three days for HBS to notice the fault. It took two days for them to establish it couldn't be fixed and order a new one. It took one day for the company that made the robots to send a delivery driver with a replacement. And it took twenty-two seconds for Ash to steal the robot out of the truck, leaving Benjamin's modified version in its place.

Ash hadn't asked why they didn't just switch one of the robots at HBS for theirs. Benjamin told her anyway.

“Firstly because the robots map out each floor as they move so they can clean with the most efficient route,” he said. “Our one wouldn't know the floor plan, because it was new. This would cause the engineers at HBS to believe it was faulty and open it up, then they might spot our camera and transmitter. And secondly, because HBS puts chips in everything they own, so it sets off the alarms any time someone tries to take it outside the building. It had to be a new one.”

“We could have thrown the old robot in the garbage inside the building,” Ash said.

“Then the alarms would go off when they emptied the bins. They'd find the robot, and wonder why they had one too many.” Benjamin winked at her. “But you're thinking. I like that.”

“Don't patronize me,” Ash said.

It took a few days for the robot to be used on all of the 25 floors. Once it was done, Benjamin and Ash watched about five hours of footage in total. They watched it do a full lap of every floor. They didn't see anything that looked like it might be worth $200 million.

“That was like a
Lord of the Rings
marathon,” Ash said. “I can't believe we watched all that for nothing. Could the money be on a high shelf, where the robot can't see?”

Benjamin was smiling. “I doubt it.”

“What are you grinning about? Do you know where it is?”

“No. But we know where it's not.”

Benjamin instructed the transmitter to send the robot's absorbed map to them. A few seconds later, his screen filled up with files – a floor plan for each of the 25 floors. He opened them, one at a time.

Ash was starting to understand. She rubbed her hands together in anticipation. “There are places it doesn't go,” she guessed.

“Yep. Four of them.” Benjamin sat back in his chair. “Buckland's office, on the 25th floor. The car park in the basement. And two rooms on the 24th floor, one in the north corner, one in the south. One of those rooms will make us rich. So how do we get inside to check them out?”

They came up with several plans, including applying for internships, pretending their parents worked there, breaking in just before dawn, when security was lightest and escaping would be easiest. But they needn't have bothered. Less than a month later the essay competition was announced. A month after that, they'd won. And two weeks later, Ash was standing in the corridor on the 25th floor, talking to Benjamin on the phone.

“Well, the first on our list was Buckland's office,” Benjamin was saying. “Could the money have been in there?”

“There was a painting,” Ash said. “There could have been a wall safe behind it. And there could have been a floor safe just about anywhere.”

“Not a deep one,” Benjamin said. “The floor isn't thick enough.”

“True. But if the money's in bearer bonds, it might fit.”

“Can you go back and check?”

“He'll leave for dinner,” Ash said. “If I haven't found the money by then, I'll try to get back in.”

“Great,” Benjamin said. “In the meantime, there are three more places to search. The north room, the south room and the basement car park. What do you want to do first?”

Ash thought about it as she walked to the lift. The security around the north room was lightest, so it was the least likely. But she didn't want to deal with the south room or the basement unless she had to.

“The north room,” Ash said. “Eliminate the least likely first.”

“Okay. Let's do this.”

Ping
. The lift doors opened, and Ash stepped out onto level 24, the floor below Buckland's office. There were white plaster walls around the offices, and blue-grey barriers between the cubicles. The air held the burbling of quiet chatter, the occasional chirp of a phone. The carpet smelled like a new car.

Ash glanced around to check that no one was in sight. Then she reached into her pocket and extracted a black box with a 3.5 mm plug. She reached up and jammed it into the back of the security camera above her.

The box contained a virus that Benjamin had programmed. It would spread from this camera through to almost all the others in a matter of minutes. All the infected cameras would function normally – except when Ash came near them. She was wearing a transmitter on her belt which broadcast a high frequency EMP, tuned to the wavelength of the cameras. The virus made them susceptible to it, and programmed them to loop the past sixty seconds instead of shutting down.

From now on, Ash would be a ghost, not showing up on any of the security footage.

Ash plugged her iPod headphones into her phone with the converter Benjamin had made. She bobbed her head to an imaginary rhythm, moving just enough to convince someone she was listening to music but not so much that she drew attention to herself.

“You remember the floor plan?”

“Of course,” Ash whispered. The right speaker was also a super-sensitive condenser microphone – Benjamin could hear everything she could. She could speak as softly as she liked and he would still hear her. It was like her lips were almost touching his ear, thought Ash. Gross.

“Turn right once you leave the lift,” Benjamin said, undeterred by her assurances that she knew what she was doing. “Then take the third left.”

“Already done it,” she said as she turned. She stared up the corridor. It had the same wood panelling and dark blue-green carpet as the corridors leading to Buckland's office. It was empty.

Bing!
Her headphones made a sound as Benjamin sent an image to her phone. It was the map absorbed by the vacuum cleaner, featuring Benjamin's labels and illustrations:

“The security consists of two electronic locks,” Benjamin was saying, “one requiring a key and the other requiring a code, two thermal-vision cameras outside the door, and one—”

“And one guard, I know. I remember.”

“Never hurts to double-check,” Benjamin said. “Speaking of which, how about dinner and a movie on Saturday?”

“Nice try, Benjamin.”

Ash peered around the corner. She could see the guard, a tall guy with huge hands, staring straight ahead. That was good. He didn't look too suspicious. He looked more like the type who ask to see inside your bag when you leave a department store – they're not expecting to find anything, so they're not even really looking.