Try Harder

7:30pm

Up on the top floor, Buff had to strain to hear N-Dig's voice. It sounded soft and muddled coming out of his radio's tiny speakers.

"Uh, hey, there's some dude down here breaking through the front door," N-Dig said.

Everyone standing in front of the vault room stopped for a moment and looked at each other, a mix of shock and confusion on their faces.

Buff was neither. He was annoyed, and as he spoke into his radio, it showed.

"What the hell are you waiting for?" he screamed. "Get him! Stop him! Go!" He threw the radio down and shook his head in frustration.

Doug went back to work, progressing well with the vault room door. Things moved a lot faster once Beka had disabled that distracting alarm. Having already bypassed the card reader, he moved on to decrypting the six-digit numerical password. He had a small device that latched over the keypad. With the push of a few buttons, it scanned the individual keys to determine which six were pressed last. It took a while for the device to cycle through all possible permutations, but within a few minutes, he had the code for the door.

He shook his fist triumphantly, removed the device and punched the code into the keypad.

There was an electronic chime and the metallic sound of a latch sliding into place. The thick door swung to one side automatically, and the vault room was open. Everyone anxiously stepped forward to see what was inside.

The enormous Strongbox safe took up most of the room. It was larger than most of the offices in the building, and looked almost exactly like the pictures Buff had shown the group. It was all polished steel and smooth edges, like an exceptionally large freezer. One side of it was taken up by the vault door, which had a silver-plated, five-point spindle wheel on it, the kind you'd find in a bank.

Everyone stood in front of it, staring in awe. The sheer size of the thing was overwhelming. People don't use a vault this size unless they're protecting something worth a lot of money.

Marcus was positively giddy. He threw his arm around Buff's shoulder and squeezed.

"She's a thing of beauty, me b'y," he said.

"Do you need a moment alone with it?" Buff cracked, which made Marcus laugh.

"That's a big Twinkie," Doug said. Beka was the only one in the room who got the reference, but didn't laugh.

"We've got a lot to do," said Buff, in a commanding voice, "so let's get down to work. Doug, you bypass the sensors, and Beka, you disconnect the vault's network connection. We'll finish moving the drill."

He clapped his hand together, and everyone broke off to their respective jobs.

Both Beka and Doug walked over to the vault door and knelt down in front of it. Doug began pulling tools out of his duffle bag. Beka grabbed her tiny laptop, flicked it on and waited for it to boot up.

Buff, Marcus and Fou grabbed two straps each and continued dragging the hefty drill into the vault room.

Suddenly, their radios squawked and chirped again. The panicked, wailing voice of N-Dig came shrieking out.

"He shot me!" he screamed, in intense pain.

Again, everyone stopped, this time genuinely concerned.

Buff grabbed his radio. "What? Who?"

"The guy's got a gun! He fucking shot me! Get somebody down here!"

"N-Dig, slow down. Who's got a gun? Who shot you?"

"I don't know, man. Some old dude. The guy who was trying to break through the front door. He shot me, bro! Believe!" He let out another agonizing scream.