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However, I don’t really need the cars to use the system. All three elevators share the same ventilation system. Ignoring the cars entirely, Seb and I can climb down the shaft, then across and down to the vault itself. Assuming my oversized brother can fit through several tight squeezes along the way.
We use clamps to slide down the elevator cables. It’s like doing a rope climb in gym class, but in reverse. Also, I fucking hated gym class.
Seb, of course, excels at this part. He’s actually grinning, like he’s having fun.
“I feel like a spy,” he says.
“Oh yeah? Well just wait for the next bit. Then we’re gonna look extremely cool.”
Seb and I squirm through the horizontal air shaft between the elevators. It’s slow, tight, and overwhelmingly hot. I can feel sweat running down my face. There’s no way to hurry—all we can do is keep crawling forward, inch by inch.
Once we’re inside the third elevator shaft, we climb down the last hundred feet to the vault.
“What now?” Seb says, feet firmly planted on the ground.
“Now the moon suits,” I say.
Jonesy has temporarily disabled most of the external sensors. The seismic sensors are still running, which is why we can’t tunnel over to the vault, or blow the door open. Inside, the thermal motion sensors are still running, too.
Now, the good thing is that they won’t go off unless they sense both motion AND heat. But I need to get close enough to jam them up.
So Seb and I put on possibly the most embarrassing costumes ever created by my friend Mason. They look like giant marshmallows made out of shiny foil. They cover us head to toe, until we resemble two very reflective mascots. I can barely see through the eyeholes, but it should block the heat from our sweating bodies just long enough to disable the sensors.
Seb and I open the elevator doors, then I slip through. It’s completely dark inside the space. I count my steps away from the elevator door, just like I did when I was down here with Bella. Remembering where each of the sensors were located, I spray them with foam concentrate. That should block their ability to see motion. And then, fingers crossed, it won’t matter if they read a heat signature.
I spray the cameras, too. They’re triggered by light, and I don’t want to have to work blind the whole time we’re here.
Once we’ve got all the sensors covered, Seb and I can pull down the hoods of our crinkly foil suits, and turn on our headlamps.
Now we can see. At least a little bit.
I touch my earpiece, whispering, “So far so good?”
“Police radar is quiet,” Mason says.
“Everything looks okay here,” Jonesy adds.
Their voices are tinny and distant. It’s shit reception down in the vault. We can’t count on them being able to reach us, so we’ve got to work fast.
Seb and I approach the vault door, which looks like a massive porthole six feet in diameter and two feet thick, made out of dull, solid steel.
There’s just one thing left in our way.
It’s not the code to the vault—I already have that, thanks to the hidden camera I placed on my little field-trip down here with Bella. I’ve seen Raymond Page and his bank manager punch in the code thirty times since then. They’ve only changed it twice, which isn’t bank protocol, but I think Raymond is a little bit lazy.
No, the only thing left to deal with is the exterior magnetic lock.
The lock consists of two plates. When armed, they create a magnetic field. If you open the door outside of business hours, that field is broken. It triggers an alarm that even Jonesy can’t intercept. There’s no way around this—the field has to remain intact all night long.
I had to ponder on the problem for a long time. How to move the plates without breaking the field?
Eventually, I realized that I simply had to move them together, at the same time.
I had Mason make me an aluminum plate that looks like a rectangular serving platter with a handle on one side. He welded it together in his mom’s basement, using her silicone oven mitts and his makeshift welding mask that’s basically a bucket with a plexiglass window in the front. He looked like a proper idiot, but his work is always top-notch, down to the last millimeter.
Seb takes the plate out of his backpack. I cover the flat side with heavy-duty double-sided tape. Then I stick it onto the two bolts and unscrew them. Now I can lift out both bolts at once, while keeping them at precisely the same distance from each other, then move the whole thing out of the way. The field remains intact, even though it’s no longer attached to the vault.
I set it carefully down against the wall, with the delicacy of a bomb-removal expert.
