Egress Point

Chapter 22: The Heist

Arebecca did not get a good night's sleep. She took the top bunk above Em and worried as much about falling out of bed as she did about the robbery. In the middle of the night she carefully climbed down pulled the thin mattress onto the floor. Then, just as she'd nearly drifted off, Max barged in with a photographer to take all their pictures for fake IDs. Arebecca was not amused with the lack of warning.

It was cold and the mattress had done little to soften the hard concrete floor. Arebecca woke early and kept her eyes closed even though she could tell that the morning light was already filtering through the high windows. Max was up early too. He brought them breakfast -- takeaway pizza -- and had a smile on his face. He tossed a bunch of new plastic shopping bags down by Arebecca's bed.

"We are ready. I have your documents, phones, clothes and this," He placed a small metal box on the desk next to the pizza. "Two terabytes of encrypted cards. Now get dressed. We move in half an hour."

Nobody was very chatty. Patey spent time making sure all the information they needed was in their phones. Nick sat at a computer with a slice of pepperoni pizza in one hand, while logging remotely into servers to make sure they were ready. Em was at another computer, looking at schematics of the secure facility. Arebecca tried her new clothes on for size.

"These are far too big!" she said to the others. "Will they even let me into the hotsite looking like this?"

All three of them looked round at her. She lifted her shoulders and shrugged them down hard. The skirt was too big, the blouse collar would have fitted a horse and the shoes were at least a size too big. Max must've been paying a trick.

None of them said anything. Then Em cleared her throat and broke the silence.

"You look fine."

"Yeah, you'll be fine."

"You do know that a hotsite is just a big warehouse full of computers? You look perfect!"

Arebecca didn't feel perfect. She spent the last few minutes before leaving trying to adjust the clothes to be a little more flattering. She failed. Max came in.

"Time to go. Now."

Nick wished them luck, and they followed the Russian card thief out into the cold morning air.

There were two cars waiting for them at the front of the old warehouse. Both black Audis. Max watched carefully. Patey and Em climbed into the back of the lead car. Arebecca saw two of Max's gang in the front seats as they drove off.

She got into the front seat of the remaining car and smiled at the driver. He was an enormously fat man with a shaved head. His legs were so huge they filled most of the gap between the front seats; the gear stick could barely move. Neither could the steering wheel, without carving a deep groove in his belly. The German with the gun climbed into the back.

"Ready?" he said in Russian.

"Yes," she answered in German.

They drove back through the city, past her nice hotel, past the Tiergarten, to the edge of a quiet industrial estate. The driver pulled over into the car park of an electrical wholesaler. The hotsite was a few units over. They waited.

She checked her phone. They had at least 30 minutes until Em would have the hard drive in place. Then Max's DDOS attack would begin and Nick would transmit the encrypted cards to the HSM. Then the DDOS would really get going and force the secure facility to fail, and the HSM would send the decryption keys to the hotsite. Nick would be ready for them and remotely copy the keys onto a different server and THEN Arebecca would saunter in and remove the hard drive with the tools she had in her backpack.