“What if we moved it to another digital account? An account we own?” I asked.
Hastings considered this. “That would work. Though the bank might get suspicious—it’s a little suspect for a thirty-million-dollar account to appear out of nowhere. Unless, of course, a banker has cleared it.” He smiled again, terribly.
“Mr. Hastings, we’re not paying you to help us. You agreed to help us in return for the Runanko books,” Otter said firmly.
“Well, maybe I didn’t know how much work helping you would entail!” Hastings pouted. “What are you going to do with all this money anyway? You also want a private island?” Hastings asked, looking between the seven of us.
“That’s up for some debate,” I said.
“Space camp!” Ben said brightly.
“You mean like . . . in space? Because this is a lot of money,” Hastings said.
I smiled politely. “We’re going to use it to do good. SRS has done a lot of bad, and we want to undo it.”
“All right, all right . . . ,” Hastings said. But he was fidgeting, which wasn’t a good sign. Hastings was starting to realize how plausible it was for us to rob a bank—and how plausible it was for him to either get in on it or get in our way.
“How much do you want?” I asked suddenly. Everyone turned to look at me, surprised. I repeated the question, and added, “You help us get the cash out. What’s your cut?”
“Now you sound like bank robbers!” Hastings said in a voice that delighted him and depressed me. All this time hoping my parents weren’t thieves, and here I was becoming one. “Forty percent,” Hastings said.
“No,” Otter and I answered immediately.
Hastings shrugged. “Well, you can maybe rob the bank on your own. But if you’ve already stolen the books from SRS, I bet they’ll be on the lookout for you—so getting in without my help would be hard. In fact, I hope no one tips SRS off about your plans—”
Otter was across the room, one fist raised to Hastings, before I even realized what was happening. For an older guy, he could really move. He had Hastings’s collar in one hand, using it to pull the man closer to his face. Otter’s teeth were bared, and his eyes were lit up.
“Are you threatening us, Mr. Hastings? After all we’ve done for you? After we returned what SRS stole?” Otter hissed.
Clatterbuck cleared his throat, like he thought perhaps he should intervene, but then he didn’t. Violence wasn’t really The League’s thing, but I wasn’t particularly sad about seeing Hastings roughed up.
Hastings coughed and flailed his arms a bit until Otter released him and took a step back; Otter’s nostrils were flared like a bull’s. “No, no,” Hastings said, scrambling back into a chair. “No. Of course not.”
“Excellent. In that case, we’ll be in touch for the various account numbers. You’ll need to get to work making sure all those accounts are open and working smoothly. Ah, and the safe deposit boxes—we’ll need those numbers too,” Otter said shortly, turning to walk away.
“Wait! When do I get my books?” Hastings called out.
“When we have the account numbers,” Otter said, then to the rest of us, added, “Let’s go, everyone. We’ve got to figure out how to rob a bank.”
We rose and moved to the door, and Annabelle started to follow us. When Kennedy told her to “sit” and “stay,” the dog looked alarmed and then let out a heartbreaking, low whine. Even Otter flinched.
“It’ll be okay, Kennedy. Come on,” Beatrix said quietly. Kennedy’s eyes were big and watery; I moved so she could be first out the front door and cry without Hastings hearing. I made the mistake of looking back at Annabelle as I rounded up the end of our line. She was lying with her giant head in her paws, ears up and brows knitted together worriedly. And she was drooling, but even though I knew it was drool, it still looked like she was actually lying in a puddle of tears.
“She likes cheese,” I said to Hastings, shaking my head at him.
“What? The dog? Look—forty percent. Just remember I offered!” Hastings said.
“We don’t need your help,” I called back, then slammed the door.
At least, I hoped we didn’t need his help. Remember when I said that terrified people are the most dangerous? I take that back. Greedy people were the most dangerous. They wanted more, no matter what it was, no matter who got hurt. More, more, more. What was scarier than someone willing to work for a secret crime organization so he could get more?
And Hastings was basically the greediest person I’d ever met.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Here is what we had:
5 kids
2 adults
1 rental car (slow, crappy)
1 inside man (untrustworthy)
Here is what the bank had:
Laser grids
Digital cameras
Underground sensors
21-inch-thick vault doors
Armed guards
Here is what SRS had:
The jump on us
I’d actually written all that out just so I could visualize it better. I was starting to regret doing that, since I basically went from 80 percent grim to 98 percent grim before midnight. Everyone else had gone to bed ages ago, but I knew I’d just lie in the bottom bunk, awake. There had to be a way. We had to make this work.
But my head kept going in the exact opposite direction I wanted. When I couldn’t immediately sort out how The League could rob SRS, I started thinking of the many ways SRS could . . . well. Destroy us, basically. They could show up during the robbery. They could slip a GPS on us and swarm us later on, when there were no witnesses. They could move all their money early, then let us get caught by the Swiss government and thrown in jail.
They had countless options. We had none.
Of course, it was possible we could get in and out of the bank without SRS knowing, but I doubted it. Now that they knew we were in Geneva, they were probably watching all their assets here—from their agents to their cars to their money—very closely. If we so much as sneezed in public, they would come running with a tissue. And by “tissue,” I meant a pair of carbon steel handcuffs. Plus, I wasn’t so sure Hastings wasn’t planning to tip them off. He didn’t seem like the sort of guy who would suddenly start helping us for “the greater good.”
A door down the hall opened; I recognized the footsteps as Kennedy’s immediately. She was wearing fuzzy socks, like she always did in bed, and pajamas with unicorns on them.
“Did I wake you up?” I asked, my voice low.
Kennedy shook her head. “I woke up a half hour ago and haven’t been able to go back to sleep. Is there a plan yet?” She sat down on one of the kitchen chairs and tucked her knees up into her pajama top, eyes cast down toward the blueprints.
“No,” I admitted. “I think . . . I think we’re done here, Kennedy.”
“What? No!” Kennedy said.
“If it’s not safe to go in, we’re not going in. SRS responded pretty quickly to the alarm at Twinkles’s, and we still got away. You know how they are—they’ll do anything to make sure they catch us if the opportunity pops up again. You know what they always say—”
“‘No amount of firearms can turn a bad mission into a good one,’” Kennedy said glumly.
“Well, actually, I meant, ‘Assume the worst will happen.’ And there are a lot of worsts in this mission.”
Kennedy sat with me and stared at everything for a little while, occasionally opening her mouth to share an idea, but then shutting her mouth and shaking her head before she ever made it to words.
“Maybe we should start small. Think about the easiest way to get the money out of the bank, then build up to actually robbing it,” Kennedy said. This was an SRS exercise, designed to keep agents from overcomplicating things.
“All right. Easiest way to get money out of the bank is to go to the teller, hand them ID, and take it,” I said.
“Right. Except, that won’t work, because we’re taking out way, way more t
han the daily limit, and because if anyone uses Antonio Halfred’s ID, it’d tip SRS off,” Kennedy said.
I smiled at her—we’d never really planned a mission together before. I thought about telling her how she looked like Dad when she was thinking hard, but instead I said, “So in that case, let’s break it down. There’s the digital account, the gold, and the cash.”
“Let’s start with the gold. Hastings said he could put it in safe deposit boxes, right?” Kennedy said.
Another door down the hall opened—the one to my room. Walter came out, stumbling a little and rubbing his eyes. His hair was sticking up all over and didn’t lie flat even after he patted it down. “You guys planning?” he asked, his voice gravelly with sleep.
“Trying to,” I said. “We’re at the gold in the safe deposit boxes. Trying to sort out the easiest way first.”
Walter rubbed his nose and sat down beside Kennedy. “Well, easiest way to get into a safe deposit box is to have the key. Second easiest way though is to have your own box in the same room so you have a legitimate reason to be in there, opening stuff. Then once you’re there, you pop the lock on the other box and boom.”
“Explosions?” Kennedy asked eagerly.
“Huh? No. Boom, you’re into the safe deposit box,” Walter clarified. Kennedy’s face fell.
“Except, we don’t need to steal something from one safe deposit box. We need to get it from twenty or thirty,” I said. I pointed to the blueprints. “There are cameras in the safe deposit room. They’ll notice if we’re suddenly picking through thirty boxes.”
“Plus, even if they don’t, they’ll notice when we try to walk out with all that gold. It’ll be heavy—we’ll need some sort of equipment to move it,” Walter said.
“How much gold is it, exactly? How big is thirty million dollars worth of gold?” Kennedy asked.
“One thousand, five hundred pounds,” another voice said from down the hall. Ben, yawning and pattering toward us.
“Did we wake you up?” Kennedy asked.
“No, I think Walter did—did you know you snore, man?”
Walter glowered at Ben.
“Anyway,” Ben went on, “there’re probably about fifty-six or fifty-seven gold bars. They weigh around twenty-seven pounds each. So, one thousand, five hundred pounds of gold. Three-quarters of a ton.”
“We can’t just carry that out the front door,” I said, shaking my head. “We’d need equipment. A vehicle that can carry that kind of weight.”
“I could probably fit one of the cars, but it’d take a few days, at least,” Ben said.
“Even if I help you?” Beatrix asked. Her nightshirt was on inside out, but she didn’t seem to care. She stopped by the refrigerator to get a can of soda before joining us at the table.
“Even if you help me,” Ben said, after thinking for a moment, “welding just takes time, is all.”
I dropped my head. “Okay. Let’s table the gold for now. The digital money—Beatrix, can you handle that?”
Beatrix winced. “Well . . . sort of.”
We blinked.
“The bank runs on a very secure encrypted network, not entirely unlike the SRS facility back home did. So, I can break into the accounts, but I’ll have to do it from inside the building, using its own network. But I think Hastings is right—without some sort of prior approval, the bank will know something’s up when a thirty-million-dollar account appears out of nowhere. The security system will allow them to pinpoint my location within the building.”
“How long would you have before they realized what you were doing and where you were?”
“Long enough to get the money out of the accounts. Not long enough to move it into a new account for us. And not long enough for me to get out of the building. Now, maybe Hastings could do it, since they expect him to be moving money around . . .”
“Without Hastings,” Otter said grimly. “I don’t trust him. We should never have trusted him. From the start he’s been all about money and power and private islands. If he knows anything at all about this heist, I think he’ll sell the information to SRS.”
“The people who stole his books?” Beatrix asked doubtfully.
“The people who will pay him the most,” I corrected. “We wouldn’t give Hastings forty percent of the cash, but SRS would—they’d probably pay anything to catch us. In fact, if I were SRS, I’d have a special team assigned to us. I’d be combing through satellite footage, looking for us. I’d set up teams all over town, plant agents at the airport . . .” I drifted off. Planning for SRS came so easily. I knew exactly what they’d do, where they’d go, what they’d want. I wondered at how simple it had to be for the agents there—for Mrs. Quaddlebaum. They were probably getting neat little folders with assignments in them, instructions to go to a café and pounce if they saw me come in and order a sandwich.
It was easier for them. It was easier for me to think like them.
“What else would you do?” Otter asked carefully.
I looked at him and shrugged. “If I had enough notice, I’d probably quietly move the money out of the bank. Replace the gold with fakes, then wait to capture us when we arrived to steal it.”
Otter was staring. His eyes were growing wider.
And suddenly I realized exactly what he was thinking.
I grinned—nervously, but I grinned. “Guys, I think we’ve got a plan.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
At SRS there are projects, operations, and missions.
The projects are the big things—the overarching stuff that involves a whole bunch of different steps. The operations are a step below that—short-term goals that all lead up to a project. And the missions are small, single-goal endeavors, like stealing the Runanko books or vetting the country club kids.
I’d been on a number of missions, of course, and even those were difficult to plan. And yet, we were about to undergo something so complicated, so involved, that there was no way it could all be rolled into one mission.
Operation Vengeance for Annabelle
Mission 1: Steal the gold
Mission 2: Get the cash
Mission 3: Rob the digital accounts
(Kennedy titled the operation—she was really upset about Hastings being all shrug-y about Annabelle’s future.)
We returned to Hastings’s place the following day to get the account numbers and trade them for his books. Only four of us—me, Otter, Clatterbuck, and Ben—had come this time. Clatterbuck was currently maneuvering a truck around the streets of Geneva with a horse trailer attached, rehearsing his part of the plan. Kennedy and Walter were back at the farmhouse working on some sort of crazy gymnastics toss, along with Beatrix, who was working on the hacking bit of this whole scheme. I’d promised them all that I’d check in on Annabelle, so I called her name.
“Don’t bother. I had to lock her up in the bathroom because she wouldn’t stop trying to get in my bed. But then she just howled all night,” Hastings said. He did look satisfyingly sleep-deprived, I realized.
“Kennedy and Beatrix let her sleep in their beds while we had her,” Ben explained.
“Great,” Hastings muttered. “Just great—hey!”
Annabelle suddenly came bursting into the room, feet sliding on the hardwood floors. Her nails dug for traction, but she crashed into a buffet anyhow, sending its candlesticks flying. Hastings yelled at her, but she didn’t notice—she tackled me, then Clatterbuck, then Otter and Ben, and then rotated back to knock me down a second time just for good measure.
“What’s all over her fur?” I asked. She was covered in white powder and bits of . . . “Oh,” I realized. “It’s drywall.”
“Drywall?” Hastings said, confused. His face morphed to horrified; he turned and raced through the house. We followed out of curiosity, and when we caught up with him, he was staring at an Annabelle-size hole in the bathroom wall (which is to say, an enormous hole in the bathroom wall).
“She ate her way through the wall!” Hastings s
houted.
“To get to us!” Ben added, sounding pleased.
“It would seem that way,” Otter said. Even he looked touched by Annabelle’s act of destructive affection. I rubbed Annabelle’s ears, and she licked my hand. Hastings tried to balance a particularly large chunk of broken drywall back in its place on the wall; it tumbled to the ground, where he stomped on it angrily.
“Well, come along now, Mr. Hastings—you can worry about bathroom renovations another day,” Otter said, waving his hand to stave off the drywall dust. “We need to discuss the bank robbery.”
“What about it?” Hastings said, trudging away from the bathroom and casting furious glances at Annabelle.
Otter sighed. “Unfortunately, we do need your help after all. But we’re not offering more than thirty percent of the take.”
“All right, all right, thirty percent,” Hastings said, brightening a bit. “Tell me what you need.”
As we reached the kitchen, I withdrew a piece of paper from my pocket. On it we’d outlined Hastings’s responsibilities. “It’s easy, really. We’ll call in a fake authorization for the cash to be moved. All you have to do is roll it to the loading dock. We’ll be there with a truck, the same one we’re using to transport the gold. The big thing, though, is you have to do this at exactly ten o’clock on Tuesday morning. If you come any earlier, we won’t be down there to help you load it, and it’ll look suspicious.”
“Ten o’clock. Got it. What happens if I get there late?”
“Don’t,” Otter snapped. “We’re going to send four agents into the safe deposit room to steal the gold at the same time you’re getting the cash. The longer you take, the longer my people have to sit around in the loading docks with thirty million in stolen gold.”
“What about the digital money? Did you find a way to get that? Because I could help you with that too for a little more . . . ,” Hastings said wickedly.
Otter rolled his eyes. “One of our agents will be in the building lobby and hack the system from there. She’ll move the cash into one account. So, yes. If you can set up an account for us that we can drop the money into, that would be useful.”