Money Run (5 page)

The guard wasn't standing with his back right against the door, which was also good; there was a space of perhaps 60 centimetres. Ash couldn't see the camera, which meant it must be on the opposite wall, facing the door. “Won't the virus loop the camera feeds?”

“Nope,” Benjamin said. “It's not attached to the rest of the network. And you can't block it from there, either. That's why they used a thermal camera. Heat can still travel through anything you could paint over the lens, so it will be able to see you. And you can't cut the power to it, either – the alarms will go off.”

This one was going to be tricky. “At least we have the code for the door.”

Once they had identified this room as a potential candidate, they had gone back to the footage taken by the vacuum cleaner. The camera's battery was good for six months, so it was still filming. They recorded the footage onto Benjamin's computer, then fast-forwarded to where it passed the door with the security guard each day.

Eventually they hit pay dirt. The vacuum cleaner was passing the guard just as he was opening the door at 7 a.m. He was supposed to inspect the room three times a day – once when he arrived at 7, once when he returned from his lunch break and relieved his replacement at 1 p.m., and one more time before he left at 7 p.m. The vacuum cleaner saw him punch in the code: 72269. They had waited for the robot to catch him in the act again, so they could be certain the code didn't change each day. It didn't; he hit 72269 again the second time.

Ash glanced at her watch. It was 4.43. Plenty of time before the guard gave up his post. She stared at his belt. There was the key to the second electronic lock, gleaming in the fluorescent glow from the ceiling. Part of the reason the north room was a candidate was because of the two locks. If the door led to an office, it might be key-locked. If it led to a server lab, it might have a key code. But if you were hiding $200 million behind it, you'd probably want both.

“I have no idea how you're going to pull this off,” Benjamin said.

“You say that every time,” Ash whispered.

“Towchi.”

“It's pronounced
touché
,” she said. Benjamin often mispronounced words because he'd only seen them written down. But sometimes he did it on purpose. Ash could never tell when he was kidding.

“Anyway, it's always true,” he said.

“What is?”

“That I have no idea how you're going to pull this off.”

“But I always do,” she said. Benjamin always challenged her like this. Ash worked best when someone was telling her the task was impossible. “Shut up for a second,” she said, “I'm thinking.”

Timing, Ash thought. Timing will be the crucial thing.

The locked door was roughly halfway down the corridor, in a shallow alcove. As soon as Ash rounded the corner, the guard would see her. A few steps later, the camera would see her. She stared at the other end of the corridor. She knew from the blueprint that around the next bend was a short passage leading to a maze of offices and cubicles.

“Seriously,” Benjamin said. “How are you going to do it?”

“You'll see,” Ash said.

She backtracked, taking the other way around to the cubicles. A guy carrying a binder walked past her, staring curiously. Forty-five thousand, she thought. When Ash was twelve, her mother had trained her to guess the value of strangers by checking out their clothes, haircut and bag. Shoes were the best indicator; how expensive they were, how old. This guy had no bag, but wore a designer shirt and trousers. His hair was short and practical, and he was wearing running shoes. Clean and new, made locally rather than in Taiwan or China. He would have about $45,000 in the bank, minus some credit card debt, and maybe a rotating mortgage.

It wasn't until after her mother left that Ash realized she had always said “value”, not “financial value”. To her, they were one and the same.

Now, every time Ash caught herself playing the guessing game, she was disgusted. But she couldn't stop – it had become instinctive. A reflex.

The guy looked like he was going to say something to her, like ask if she was lost. Then he saw her name badge, with LEVEL 25 SECURITY CLEARANCE printed on it. He averted his eyes and kept walking.

Nice, Ash thought. This really is an all-access pass. What makes big corporations so easy to steal from is that there are so many people working for the company that it's impossible for anybody to know everybody else or everybody else's business. Sometimes you can just walk right in and take what you want in plain sight, and no one will stop you because everyone assumes you're doing what you're supposed to be doing.

There was a cubicle doorway peppered with Post-it notes to Ash's left. Clearly the owner of this cubicle was away today. Ash was in no danger of being interrupted.

She grabbed a rubbish bin from the floor and put it on the desk. There was a hole punch beside the computer. She picked it up, pressed it against the rim of the bin and clicked it repeatedly until she'd made a small hole in the metal. Then she started filling the bin. She took paperclips and pens and dumped them in. She tossed the hole punch inside. She scrunched up documents to make balls of paper, and threw them into the bin. She snatched a blue plastic binder off the desk, snapped it into pieces, and sprinkled them in. She cracked open a stapler, poured in the staples, and dropped the stapler in after them.

She grabbed a roll of sticky tape, ripped off a strip with her teeth, and stuck a glass paperweight to the inside wall of the bin, right under the hole she'd made. Now it was off balance; the slightest nudge would knock it over. She dropped the sticky tape into her handbag, along with a few A4 sheets of paper and a whiteboard marker. Then she picked up the bin and left the cubicle.

A minute later she was back in the corridor with the security guard, but at the opposite end. She placed the bin carefully near the wall at the bend. She stared at it with a critical eye. It should tumble right out into the middle of the corridor when it fell.

Time for the next part of her preparations. She walked back out towards the cubicles and turned into the break room. It was fully equipped; there was a stainless-steel sink, a huge refrigerator, plenty of cupboards, a few tables and a dozen chairs. There was no one inside. She took some foundation out of her handbag and put it in the freezer. Then she went to the women's bathroom.

Before she went in, she stuck a sheet of A4 paper to the door with the sticky tape, and wrote
Cleaning in progress
with the whiteboard marker. Then she went inside.

Ash took off her jacket, her blouse and her jeans, put them in one of the sinks and turned on the tap. The water rose quickly to cover the clothes. Bubbles floated up out of the creases. She turned off the water and lifted the clothes, wringing them out just enough to stop them dripping. She held her jacket over her head so that the water poured down onto her hair. Then she put all the wet clothes back on and left the toilets.

The break room was still empty. Maybe everyone had gone home early because it was Friday. Ash hoped there'd still be someone left to walk into her trap. She opened the fridge, removed the shelves, put them on the bench, and climbed in, shutting the door behind her.

She held her arms across her chest in the suffocating darkness. She needed to keep her core temperature as close to normal as possible, while still cooling the water on her clothes. She shivered.

“Ash, your signal is weakening. Is everything okay?” Benjamin's voice startled her in the darkness.

“I'm in a fridge,” Ash said.

There was a pause. “You're kidding.”

“Nope. This is going to get me past the thermal cameras.”

“All that'll do is give you goosebumps!” Benjamin insisted.

“I wet my clothes first. That should maintain the temperature a while.”

“You're in a fridge with wet clothes? You're insane! You're going to die of hyperthermia!”

“Hyp
o
thermia,” Ash corrected. Her teeth were starting to chatter. “Hyperthermia is where you get too hot. And I'm not going to die. I won't be in here long enough to change my core temperature.”

“And the guard? You think he'll let you past out of sympathy just because you're cold and wet?”

“I can handle the guard.” Ash hugged her knees. “Trust me.”

Benjamin sighed. “Just don't get hurt, okay?”

“It's a deal.”

“Hey,” Benjamin laughed. “Does the fridge light really go off when you close the door?”

The darkness was so complete that grains of imaginary colour were sparkling around her. She tried to touch her face, and wasn't sure if she succeeded – her fingers and cheek were numb. “You bet. I—”

Snick
.

The door handle outside. Someone was coming into the break room.

Ash's heart pounded in her chest. If they opened the fridge, the game was up. It all depended on the kind of person who had walked in, and how curious they were. An average person might just take something from the cupboard, pour a glass of water at the sink, or take what they wanted from the fridge shelves, which were lying on the bench. But a curious person might wonder why the shelves weren't in the fridge, and open the door.

She screwed her eyes shut. She should have stuck an
Out of order
sheet to the fridge door. She hoped the mistake wasn't about to cost her $200 million dollars.

“How long have you been in there?” Benjamin asked.

She didn't dare reply. She was listening.

“Ash?” There was rising panic in Benjamin's voice. “Ash!”

“Someone's here,” she breathed softly.

She heard the tap running at the sink. The clink of a glass against the bench.

“I just looked up hypothermia on Wikipedia,” Benjamin said. “Most fridges operate at about five degrees Celsius. The human body can only maintain its core temperature for a few minutes unprotected at that temperature.”

Ash said nothing. The tap stopped.

“You have to get out of the fridge,” he said. “Right now, before you go into stage one hypothermia.”

Footsteps. Approaching the fridge.

“Now, Ash. You could die!”

Ash gritted her teeth. I'm not getting caught now, she thought. Just a few more seconds.

The door handle clicked. Twice – once opening, once closing. The visitor was gone.

Ash tried to shove the fridge door open, but it was stuck. Air molecules shrink in low temperatures, so the pressure was sucking the door closed. She braced her back against the wall and slammed her foot against the door. It popped open and she tumbled into the empty break room, coughing. It was like falling into a hot bath. The outside air burned her skin and the inside of her throat.

“It's okay,” she coughed. “I'm out.”

She wanted to lie there on the floor for a while. It felt like it would hurt more if she moved. But her precious cold aura was already dissipating. Soon she would be visible to the camera again.

She opened the freezer and grabbed her foundation.

Then she left the break room, cold wet clothes sticking to her skin, and pulled the whiteboard marker out of her purse. Below the
Cleaning in progress
on the toilet door, she wrote
Use other bathroom
and drew an arrow pointing to the corridor with the security guard. She didn't know where the nearest other bathroom was, but people always follow those signs. Her handwriting was a little wobblier the second time. She was shivering in the burning room-temperature air.

When she reached the corner where she'd placed the bin, she pulled what looked like a dental-floss dispenser out of her handbag. It was filled with a thin, strong, nearly invisible elastic thread that was sold over the internet by an Israeli illusionist. Ash cut out a few strands of it and started winding them together. Her fingers were cold and stiff.

She tied one end of her elastic rope into the hole she'd punched in the bin. She stuck a piece of adhesive tape to the other end, and placed it sticky side up on the floor, as close to the centre of the corridor as the elastic would reach without stretching. She took a second to study her handiwork. Perfect. Her trap was nearly invisible.

She strode quickly back towards the cubicles, then froze. Footsteps, up ahead. Soft, whispery against the carpeted floor. Someone was coming.

Her level 25 clearance badge wouldn't protect her from suspicion now that she was soaking wet. She ran forwards, ducking into one of the cubicles, where she pressed her back against the wall, and waited.

Then she realized that the cubicle was occupied.

A young guy was typing at his computer with one hand, clicking his pen with the other. He was facing away from her. Apparently he hadn't heard her enter.

The footsteps outside were drawing nearer.

The typing guy hit SAVE.

A puddle of freezing water spread across the carpet from Ash's feet.

Goddamn it, she thought. I'm trapped! This guy's about to turn around, and I can't leave until—

The guy's phone rang. Ash stifled a yelp. He picked it up. “Hello?”

The footsteps passed by outside the cubicle, and Ash heard the break-room door swing open and shut. She slipped back out into the corridor.

That was way too close, she thought.

She paced quickly through the remaining cubicles, returned to her original vantage point at the other end of the corridor with the locked door in it, and waited.

She glanced at her watch. It was now 4.59 p.m. She guessed that she had about five minutes before she had warmed up enough to disturb the camera. But she wouldn't need to wait that long. At five o'clock, most of the remaining cubicle-dwellers would head home; but before they did, they would go to the bathroom.

The security guard was standing as rigidly to attention as before. He wasn't looking towards her, but he wasn't looking away either. He would see her as soon as she rounded the corner.