Heists and Vengeance

Twenty-Eight

Brett

Brett was bored.

No, that wasn't quite right. Brett was bored a lot of the time, often complaining to his friends that he had nothing to do (Erin's favorite response to this: 'Hello, Bored - I'm Erin!'). But this kind of boredom was mind-numbing, exhausting almost, and there seemed to be no reprieve.

His job had been to monitor the security cameras, and he'd been doing that for...four hours now. The only fun part had been figuring out how to hack into the security system, which had taken him only twenty minutes.

Brett checked the time for the fifth time in the last minute – 11:21 – and sighed. He was on the living room sofa in the empty house, and in that instant he was hit with a powerful wave of loneliness. His friends were all on a boat somewhere in the Atlantic, and he was stuck in the center of Plexmont city. He couldn't even contact them – they had decided that their earpieces were too visible to be worn the whole time, and they would wear them only during the actual heist. There was a phone number that Ryder had given him, but it was 'only for emergencies'. And Brett doubted that he would consider his 'boredom levels' to be an emergency, so that wasn't an option.

But while he couldn't talk to his friends, he could watch them through the video feeds. He'd been tracking them the whole evening, and had seen Erin spill champagne on a guest (smooth), Lana get hit by Russo (prick), and Ryder get lost on his way to the bathroom (hilarious). The only one he hadn't seen was Cole, at least for the first hour or so. Bret guessed he'd been in one of the large masses of caterers – there were so many that he'd hardly bothered to comb through all of them. He knew that if Erin had gotten on board, he would have too. He'd been proven right when Cole appeared around the time when Carmichael had been giving his grand welcome.

But now he had nothing to do because that had all been over three hours ago. Everyone had dined and retired to their rooms at ten o'clock until the only people left on the first floor were the cleaners. Through the video, Brett had followed Erin and Cole to the crew's quarters and Ryder and Lana to their room – No. 58. He'd smothered giggles as he watched them try to figure out what to do with the fact that there was only one bed, and had sighed when Ryder had volunteered to sleep on the sofa. Those two were meant to be together – Brett knew it, Erin knew it, even Cole knew it. It was only those two who were so blind that they couldn't see it for themselves.

Thinking of them bright forth the urge to see them on the screen, and so he flicked through the video surveillance until he found the one for their room. It was quite creepy, Bret thought, that Carmichael put cameras in people's chambers – it was probably birthed out of an obsessive need to know what people were doing.

As he looked at Lana's sleeping figure, he thought back to their conversation of the night before. They'd been surfing through the channels, trying to find the next movie for their binge-watching spree when he'd asked her why exactly she was doing the heist. She'd laughed, and responded with "the money". He'd chuckled alongside her, then sobered, asking her 'for real'. He'd really wanted to know for the same reason he'd researched about Ryder's dad – he liked understanding how people worked.

She'd shrugged, attributing it to a slightly warped sense of justice, but Brett had pressed, believed that there was another underlying motive. The more he'd asked, the more annoyed Lana had got until finally she'd turned to him and uttered these exact words.

"I've just told you why, Brett. And, even if there was any other reason, why would I tell you? It's not like you ever talk about yourself."