The Great Art Heist

Party Crashers

{A/N: Photo above is Shannon's mask for Sotto Voce's party}

Shannon's POV:

Having changed into more comfortable clothes, Nolan & I sit across from Hartley.

Hartley: "Oh, I see. Nice jackets, while 'I gotta dance'."

Nolan: "All right, man. Look. Don't even start with me, ok? At least you're comfortable."

Hartley: "Well, clearly, you two have this whole thing figured out. You wanna walk me through it?"

Me: "We do. Here's the deal. During the party, the guests and the staff are required to stay on the main floor, and upstairs, the door to the egg room, well, that's locked and heavily guarded. But there's another way in. Hidden entrance."

Nolan: "Here's what we're thinkin'. We dress up in matching black pajamas and sneak past the featured extras and into the bedroom. Then we slip through the study and get our hands on his precious."

Hartley: "In case you forgot, your last brilliant plan had some kinks in it. So, what kind of security surveillance are we looking at?"

Me: "Well, the guy's an arms dealer, so, you know, every square inch of his place is gonna be on lock. Two-man guard teams at every access point are signal-rotated to keep them frosty. Once they're on the move, you only have 45 seconds until they land. It's a pretty tight window."

Nolan: "The eyes and ears are in a secure room in the west hall. 87 motion-sensitive 8k cameras with an overlapping field of vision, so there are no natural blind spots. They're always watching, always listening. Kinda like Alexa but with guns. Now, here's where things get a little tricky."

Me: "The vault door to the egg room is a military-grade, biometric portal made out of a foot and a half of solid titanium. So you can't drill it, and you can't make it go boom. The only way through it is with facial and voice recognition. And there's only one face and one voice that opens it. Sotto Voce."

Hartley: "How are we gonna get his voice and his facial?"

Nolan: "Well, first off, a positive mental attitude helps. But so does some pretty kick-ass-"

Nolan holds his tablet in front of his face, and onscreen is Sotto Voce's face, and when he speaks, it's in Sotto Voce's voice.

Nolan: *as Sotto Voce* "Deepfake technology.-*as himself*-Spooky, right? If you have more than 12 images on the internet, we can send your mom a video of you mouth-sexing a goat. I'm not saying we're gonna do that; I'm just saying we could do that if we wanted to. If we had enough time and enough pictures."

Nolan then takes photos of Hartley's face.

Me: "But wait, there's more. There's also a 12-digit randomly generated passcode that's changed every 6 minutes, and that code can only be found in Sotto Voce's phone, and Sotto Voce's phone can only be found in Sotto Voce's pants. So, yeah, easy-peasy. Oh, no, no, no! There's one more thing. Kinda important. We're gonna need his thumbprint 'cause he never upgraded his iPhone -4, so..."

Hartley: "So if we don't get his thumbprint, we can't get the egg."

Nolan: "Oh, my God. You can learn. This is amazing. You are not sparkly enough. I'm gonna get you a matching vest to go with those pants."

{Time skip; Valencia}

While at the party, Nolan's posing as a waiter while Hartley & I pose as two of the guests.