The telephone rang and I grabbed it like a drowning man grabs a lifebuoy.
“Yes, send him up,” I barked. I began to breathe again. It was him, at last.
A few minutes later there was a tat-a-tat-a-tat-tat-tat on the door.
I strode over and peered through the peephole. A short figure in overalls. I opened the door just enough to let him in, then immediately locked it behind him.
“What the hell took you so long, you fucking little dwarf?” It felt good, letting the volcano erupt.
Charlie gave me a squinty-eyed look. “Calm down. Just slept in a bit, that’s all. I got here as soon as I could. I’m bloody hot, too.”
“You took your time about it. How do you think I felt, waiting all this time?”
He ignored me, tossed his tool bag aside, and stripped off his overalls. I got a whiff of stale lager mixed with fresh sweat. No doubt he’d been boozing last night and slept it off on his ratty, flea-infested couch.
I took a deep breath and forced myself to cool it. “OK, sit in that seat and tell me exactly what happened down below. I want every detail. Every single thing.”
He abandoned the overalls in a heap in the middle of the floor and sat behind the desk.
“Got any water?” he asked.
I grudgingly took a bottle from my briefcase. “Here, but make it last. I only have one more and you’re not getting it.”
He gulped half the bottle down and set it on the desk. “That’s better. I need to wet my whistle before I speak.”
“Get on with it.”
“OK, but don’t interrupt. I came in the building all business like and purposeful, just like you said. I gave that work order you made up to the sour-looking guy in the glass cage.”
“Roger.”
“I said don’t interrupt. It slows me down.” He took another drink. “Where was I? Oh yeah, the bugger in the cage. He looked at the chit like it was in Swahili and grunted something about photo ID. I showed him my driver’s license and he gave me a temporary pass card stamped with today’s date. Good for Thursday 28th only, don’t forget, he said. I swiped through the turnstile, found the elevators and came right up to twelve. Nothing to it.”
“Was there a tall, thin man in the foyer, with long grey hair and wire glasses?”
Charlie thought for a moment. “Nope.”
“Did you hang around a bit like I asked you, to see if Roger called anyone?”
“Yeah, I did. I forgot to mention that. Anyway, I stuck around, tied my shoelace and crap like that, even juked back out the elevator and took a gander at him. He seemed to have gone back to sleep, to be honest.”
“Good. Looks like we’ve got away with it. Got everything in your tool bag?”
“Take a look for yourself.”
I did. Inside the bag I found a full set of wrenches, a hacksaw, two rolls of industrial strength double-sided tape, and a long, narrow metal plate with right-angled side panels. The latter looked vaguely like a bricklayer’s hod.
“All present and correct,” I grudgingly conceded.
I left Charlie alone and sat down in the only other chair in the room, a wobbly Mission-style wreck with narrow, curved arms and a heavily stained seat. My plan to get Charlie inside the building had come off, so far at least. I’d made up a bogus invoice for Charlie to present at foyer security, showing that I’d hired his security company to install a video surveillance system in my office. Most of the other offices I’d seen already had a video camera outside their door, so I reckoned this wouldn’t arouse suspicion. It was what a normal diamond wholesaler would do.
Charlie and I had vital work to do later on, after the building closed for the night. Until then, he’d have to stay cooped up in my office, well out of sight.
A wet, gaseous sound, like a deflating balloon, came from Charlie’s direction. I looked up.
“Sorry,” he said, “I had Brussels sprouts last night with the beer.”
It was going to be a long day.
*
I threw my playing cards down on the desk and looked at my watch. Twelve thirty; lunchtime for a lot of the tenants in the building. The turnstile down in the foyer would be busy with tenants swiping out to visit various nearby restaurants and bars. I got up to join the exodus.
“Charlie, I’m going down now. We’ve gone over this already but, listen, it is really important that you call me at exactly twelve forty-five. Don’t mess that up, OK?”
‘Gotcha’ was all he offered in reply.
I stepped into a crowded elevator, went down to the ground floor and surged out among the group heading towards the front doors. I checked my watch and stepped aside. Only twelve forty. It was essential that I timed my run perfectly.
At twelve forty-four I approached the turnstile. Roger G. was casting his beady eye over the flow of tenants carding-out beside his security counter. I fingered the cell phone in my pocket and willed it to ring. It didn’t.
By now I was right at the turnstile, swipe card in my free hand, a queue of impatient tenants behind me. I managed a last glance at my watch. Twelve forty-six. The little prick upstairs was letting me down again.
The person in front of me swiped his card and moved on. I reached down to do the same. There was no way that I could delay it any longer. Already I could sense some people behind me wondering why I was moving so slowly. Roger G. would wonder too, if I overdid it.
My cell phone rang. I swiped the card and pulled the phone out of my pocket.
“Urgent business call,” I said to no-one in particular, and moved back and away from the turnstile.
I muttered a lot of incoherent nonsense into the phone, random stuff about diamonds and imports and customs duties, paying no attention to the equally random nonsense that Charlie was muttering in reply. As I gabbled, I moved away from the turnstile and edged my way along the wall, back to the elevators. I kept an eye on Roger G. but he never looked in my direction.
So far, so good. I’d successfully swiped out of the building, as its computer records would verify, without actually leaving it.
I was moving slowly and by the time I reached the elevators the crowd at the turnstile had melted out the doors. I noticed Roger G. pick up the phone in his cubicle and speak into it. For one awful moment I thought he was calling security about me. As I watched, he exited the cubicle, locked the door behind him and walked off in the direction of the video room.
My brain raced along at a hundred kilometres an hour. This was a rare occurrence indeed. I could have waited for this for days and never happened upon it. It was too good an opportunity to miss.
I had intended to swipe both my own and Charlie’s temporary card at the turnstile, but had abandoned that plan when I saw how rapidly the queue moved and how closely Roger G. had invigilated the whole process. My back-up plan was to send Charlie down later to repeat my performance at the turnstile. It was risky, but there didn’t seem to be any other way to do it. We both had to stay behind inside the building after closing time and yet be recorded on security as having left it. I thought about Charlie’s acting abilities and knew in my heart he would botch it up.
I watched Roger G.’s back disappear around the corner. My fingers found Charlie’s temporary pass in my pocket. It was now or never.
I strode up to the turnstile, swiped Charlie’s card, turned and walked away.
In the elevator I went over it in my mind. I’d achieved what I’d set out to do. At what cost? My actions would, like everything else in the public areas of the building, be recorded on videotape. But as long as the guards on duty in the video room hadn’t noticed it – and with several screens active it was unlikely that either of the two guards would happen to be paying close attention to the right one at the precise moment – then I was okay.
I filed a mental memo to remember to steal that particular videotape on the night of the heist.
*
The day dragged on and the hands on my watch crawled around as if moving through treacle. At six o�
��clock I stood behind the office door and listened to various sets of footsteps pass by as the building emptied for the night. When nine o’clock came I got up, did some press-ups, reached for water and found it was all gone. I couldn’t leave the room now to get more. There was still a long way to go, so I flopped down in the rickety chair and stretched out my legs. Charlie was bizarrely sprawled backwards over the desk, snoring loudly. I didn’t think that I could sleep, but eventually nodded off.
I woke up with a stiff neck from slouching sideways on the chair and saw that the window was pitch black. The room was dark too, as I’d kept the lights off so as not to show under the door. I got up and stretched, checked my watch.
Eleven thirty-five. Perfect. I stood for a moment and went over what I was about to do. Everything rested on tonight. Get caught and I’d immediately be sent to prison and the heist would be scuttled.
I shook Charlie and roused him. He gave me a squinty, puzzled look.
“Time to get going,” I hissed.
We each pulled on a pair of thin rubber gloves and Charlie shouldered his workbag. I opened the door as quietly as possible, locked it behind us, and we slipped down the hallway. We crept the short distance to the elevators, but ignored them, and went on to the stairwell. It was possible that there were a few tenants still in the building working late, and it was important that we didn’t run into any.
There were also two night security officers and we didn’t want to run into them either. With any luck they were holed up in their room on the third floor, drinking coffee and watching the sports channel. Or, better still, dozing.
We glided rapidly down fourteen flights of stairs, pausing briefly at each floor to listen for sounds of anyone else moving through the dark building. On the seventh floor I snuck into the washroom at the end of the corridor and refilled our empty water bottles with cold tap water. Continuing down the stairs, I paid special attention to the third floor and main floor but heard no-one.
At the stairwell door into the vault floor I paused and calmed myself. I turned the handle slowly, inching the door open, as if there might be some wild beast or monster awaiting us. But there was only the dank gloom of the unlit room, broken by even darker rectangles of elevator doors opposite.
There was also a large white video camera protruding from the ceiling, its red light indicating that it was active and able to record anything that moved. I hadn’t been able to establish how well these cameras worked in darkness – I suspected that they were useless, but it was just possible they had some infrared capability. In any case, we needed light to do our night’s work.
I’d scouted and recorded the exact location of this camera soon after I’d infiltrated the building. Fortunately it was placed right above the stairwell door. Even if it had been somewhere else, it wouldn’t have presented an insurmountable problem – there would just have been one more videotape on my ‘be sure to steal later’ list.
I reached up on tiptoe and was just tall enough to be able to cover the camera’s lens with a hood made from double-thickness baize cloth. I taped it on tightly and lowered my over-stretched arms. Now there was no chance of someone watching the tape and discovering our activities before the heist itself.
With the camera obscured, I flicked on the light switch, squinting when the stark fluorescent tubes came alive. On the far side of the room stood the enormous vault door, a great steel shield silently proclaiming ‘Strictly No Admittance’.
I led Charlie over to it and pointed out the magnetic alarm. He put his tool bag down and examined it from all sides.
“Anything there I didn’t see?” I asked him. This was my single greatest fear – that there was an alarm somewhere I had overlooked, that I just hadn’t noted, and that would send us both to jail.
Charlie stood on his tool bag to get extra height and I feared he might damage the contents. He eyeballed the magnetic alarm, his face a study in concentration, then jumped off the bag and peered closely at the rest of the circumference of the door. I waited impatiently for his diagnosis.
“Nah, you got everything. Key, combination, magnetic alarm, everything on a timer, that’s about it.”
He reached into his tool bag and took out the long metal plate. If my idea worked, this item would become a key feature of the heist. It was designed to fit perfectly over both halves of the magnet. Charlie had custom-made it according to my measurements and I watched anxiously as he lifted it up to the alarm. Had I got it right?
He positioned the plate over the magnets. It should have just slipped over them but instead sat out from the magnets quite a bit. As I watched, Charlie used the flat of his palms and whatever muscle power he possessed to press it into place.
“Tight fit,” he grunted.
He pushed harder and there was a satisfying metallic click as the plate finally snapped snugly over the magnets, covering them so that only the upper and lower bolts holding them to the door and door jamb remained exposed.
Charlie turned to me and grinned. “Better tight than slack,” he said. I expelled a tense breath and nodded.
Charlie wiped his forehead, rummaged again in his bag and this time extracted a wrench.
“Hurry up,” I said.
He must have sensed my state of mind as he gave me a concerned look.
“Relax. This will take a while.”
I sat on the floor behind him and watched as he unscrewed the eight bolts that held the magnetic alarm in place. It was hard, tense work. The bolts were old, had sat unmoved for years, probably decades, and were high up above Charlie’s head. He had to be careful not to yank too hard and risk accidentally dislodging one of the magnets, which would set off the alarm. Just as bad, if he wiggled the magnets too much and separated them even by a centimetre, the connection would be broken. That too would set off the alarm.
The most frightening aspect of making a mistake would be the unknown. Triggering the alarm wouldn’t set off any clanging bells or flashing red lights in the vault foyer or, indeed, anywhere else in the building. It would ‘merely’ alert the security company monitoring the vault somewhere completely off site, which in turn would alert the police.
That meant cops could be tearing down the street outside and into the building at this very moment and I had no way of knowing. The elevator doors would open and they’d come pouring in to arrest us. If we screwed this up, getaway was impossible.
Charlie wisely took his time, pausing twice for five-minute rests and a drink of our, now lukewarm, tap water. I offered to ‘take a shift’, but he refused and I didn’t protest. He was better at this kind of thing than me.
At last he had all eight bolts unscrewed. Despite myself, I got up and moved to the side to get a better look. I didn’t want to put even more pressure on Charlie, but I had to see this. There was now nothing holding the magnets in place except Charlie’s outstretched arms.
“Need any help?” I heard myself say.
“Nope, I’ll take it real gradual.”
“Yeah, you do that.”
Although both magnets were now separated from the door and jamb, they stayed connected to each other because of the tight metal harness around them. And they were still attached to the flexible steel pipe that led from the top of the door jamb magnet up into the ceiling. To anyone monitoring the alarm, nothing had changed.
Very slowly, Charlie moved the encased magnets away from the safe door and to the side, far enough to allow the door to open when the time came to do so. Would the hollow pipe, with nothing more than electrical wiring inside, be strong enough to support the weight of the heavy twin magnets?
“Careful,” I hissed.
Charlie’s hands seemed to move in slow motion as he relaxed his fingers and eased them away from the magnet casing. He held his hands poised just beneath the magnets, his eyes and mine glued on them, watching for the slightest movement. About a minute ticked by, everything in the room frozen in time.
Finally, he turned and grinned. “Solid as a rock, mate, solid as
a rock.”
We’d been successful in our first, crucial task, but our evening’s work was far from over. We didn’t want to have to repeat this slow, laborious and nerve-racking job of unscrewing the eight long bolts on the night of the heist. After taking precise measurements, Charlie took a hacksaw from his bag and started sawing the end of each bolt in turn. In about half an hour he had drastically shortened all of them. He held them up to the magnets and tested his handiwork.
“Perfect,” he proclaimed. “They go through the magnet casing and slightly out the other side. Just what we want.”
“Did you leave them long enough for a few turns?” I asked him. I could barely see the bolt ends from where I stood. It would be just like Charlie to cut them too short.
“Hmmm . . . they should go a turn or two each,” he replied.
“That’s not enough! Those magnets are heavy!”
He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. The tape will hold them.” He took one of the rolls of double-sided tape out of his bag. “This is heavy duty. I’ve tested it with weights. Trust me, you could stick a horse against the wall with this stuff.”
I felt like screaming at him. We’d agreed to leave enough length for half-a-dozen turns of each bolt in its hole. Now we’d have to rely on the industrial tape.
He unwound the tape and applied several short strips to the magnets until he had covered the backs completely. Then he moved them back into position and pressed them against the door and jamb, tightening each of the bolts a turn or two so that they sat completely snug. When he was finished, he removed the metal plate and put it back in his tool bag.
“Impossible to tell, eh?”
I had to admit that Charlie was right. He had done a good job. No-one could possibly tell that tape, not the steel bolts, now held the magnets in place.
They just had to stay that way until Saturday night.
*
We weren’t done in this room yet.
“Where do you think the best place is for the camera?” I asked.
Charlie examined the suspended ceiling above our heads. It was composed of typical narrow criss-cross slats with large white ceiling tiles between.
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