Twenty-Three

ALICE

Saturday, May 2nd. 16:00 hours: Benny arrives at my house.

“Lot of traffic getting here,” he said after we got on the road.

We’d gone so far as to pretend, as we left my house just a few moments earlier, that we were going to the prom together. My mom was thrilled, but I could tell she was wondering why I wasn’t going with Greg. Ha! Greg and my Math Team friends would never.

I'd put on a black dress with spaghetti straps I’d bought at the mall for $50 (didn’t want to spend too much on an illusion) and actually pinned my hair back away from my face instead of wearing my usual thinking cap. I even borrowed some of my mom’s heels, which would have been incredibly painful if I’d worn them longer than the thirty minutes it took to get downstairs, suffer through some fake pictures, and get into Benny’s car. Benny was wearing a suit, too.

“You bummed we’re missing prom?” I asked him, knowing full well he wasn’t.

“Never,” he said, guiding the wheel with his palm. “That shit’s overrated.”

“It is,” I agreed. “I mean, not that I would know.”

We stopped at the first gas station we could find to change out of our formal wear and into our heist-wear. Now I felt much more normal, even though I was still in disguise. Benny was wearing a white work jumpsuit, probably from his uncle’s garage, and I was wearing jeans and colorful sneakers—less Harry Potter, more my twelve-year-old cousin. We'd decided that since I couldn’t pull off the whole HVAC repairman thing, I was going as his niece. Lame, but he’d insisted this was the only way it would work.

Secretly I kind of wished we really were going to the prom, and that I was there with a guy I really liked—forget Jason, because I was over him. In fact, I didn’t regret telling him I’d had a crush on him, because it was all in the rearview mirror now. No, this would be some other, cuter guy who actually liked me back. I pictured us laughing as we stuffed a whole crowd of people in the back of a limo and snuck sips of booze from a flask, or whatever it was that people normally did. And if I was accidentally imagining Jason, he was just a placeholder until I found another crush.

Ironically enough, the prom was being held at the Franklin Institute, which was also in Center City, but on the other side of town. So we’d be passing by everyone in their limos and bedazzled nightgowns on our way back from the Mint later on.

Right about now was pre-prom time—parties and gatherings—and at the Institute they were likely just setting up the tables and stuff. Jason and his bandmates were probably still doing their soundcheck. That was another thing I was missing—their big show—but that was most likely for the best. I might be tempted to throw things. I wondered how he'd managed to get them all back together, but that part wasn’t my problem, so long as it was done.

16:15: Benny checks in with his friend LT, makes sure the van is waiting for us.

In the passenger seat, I checked the map we’d drawn with Dakota’s help. It all looked fine on paper. Simple, even. It was a matter of angles and numbers, both things I was good at.

“Get off at the Eighth Street exit, then right toward Market,” I told Benny.

16:22: Arrive at parking lot under Gallery Mall.

We parked Benny’s Mustang. He hit his clicker and his alarm beeped on as we took the elevator up to Level C. There, as promised, sat a white van two spots over from the emergency exit. hansen hvac performance. Jason had taken the logo from the website and transferred it on to a decal, which LT had just stuck on the side of the van he’d procured—none of us besides Benny knew how, exactly, because he wanted it to be secret to protect the parties involved—and voila: design skills at work. Rankin the artiste himself couldn’t have done it any better.

We assumed our positions in the van, and Benny drove us up Seventh Street, heading back north and then a few blocks east to Old City. We cruised along until the light changed in front of Independence Hall, where the National Park police in their brown uniforms were stationed outside of the gates.

Cops! That’s when the butterflies started. I slid down in my seat, trying not to be noticed.

“Are you crazy?” Benny said through gritted teeth. “That’s just gonna make you look more suspicious, dawg.”

“I am fully human,” I said. “And I don’t want them to see me.”

He was still talking without moving his lips. “Those aren’t even the same cops who guard the Mint. They’re just trying to keep terrorists out of the Liberty Bell. Check yourself.”

I looked out the window again and saw that one of the policeman was sipping on a Jamba Juice and the other was on an iPhone. Benny was probably right. I tried to get a grip. I slid up to normal position, reminding myself that this wasn’t very different from the Math Olympics. I had to stay centered and focused. At this point I’d done all the preparation, and now it was up to fate.

The light changed and we moved on. “Sorry,” I muttered.

“S’okay.” He revved the engine and we turned, with something like peace settling between us.

16:45: Arrive at Mint.

Here we were at the back entrance, right on schedule. I was pretty sure this building had to be one of the ugliest known to man—why the architects couldn’t have come up with a secure place to manufacture money that actually looked remotely decent was beyond me.

We were at the call box now. “Ready?” Benny whispered.

“Yeah,” I said. What else could I say? This was it. If anyone was gonna screw up this whole thing for all of us, it wasn’t going to be me. Not again.

“Can I help you?” a voice asked.

Benny rolled down his window and spoke into the box, surprising me with his air of authority. “Yeah, Hansen HVAC? We’re here for scheduled maintenance.”

I looked over and imagined the electric eye of the camera staring at us. In the pause, the butterflies started to flap their wings again. Forget my analogies. This situation was way worse than any Math Olympics. You couldn’t factor your way out of it.

“Go ahead,” the electronic voice said, and just like that, the orange and white striped barrier arm lifted.

We drove into the maze of ramps spiraling down down down. The parking garage was mostly empty, it being a weekend with hardly anyone working. There was, of course, the fleet of security officers onsite to worry about. I’d gone into the system and traced their whereabouts during a Saturday evening, using their RFID cards as they opened doors around the building. I’d also done a little recon on the officers themselves. All three were retired Philly police, assigned to the weekend shift. I even knew their names and where they lived.

We got out of the van and Benny grabbed his toolbox, which was loaded with everything we needed. We proceeded toward the gray metal doors, where a guard in a dark blue uniform stopped us with his open palm.

Butterflies. Mega butterflies.

“Who’s this?” the guard asked, referring to me. I recognized him as Joe. The others were Tony and Glen.

“Hope you don’t mind, I brought my niece along,” Benny said, showing Joe the guard the doctored ID we’d scanned from his file, then printed and laminated.

Joe looked up from the card. “Your niece?”

Oh God. He wasn’t buying it. I knew it was a stupid idea, but Benny had insisted that I looked a lot younger than him.

Benny laughed. “Keeps her out of trouble. She’s a bit of a handful, if you know what I mean. If it’s a problem, she can wait in the van.” A handful? Where was he getting this stuff?

Joe looked at me, squinting. I was dying over here.

“No worries,” he said finally. “Just keep her with you at all times.”

Benny put down his toolbox, and the guard had us lift our arms as he traced us with a metal detector.

“I’ll leave you to it, then.”

Joe walked us to the Race Street side elevator, then used his RFID to unlock the keypad and pressed the button for us to get to the next level. We had our copy of Garcia’s ID, of course, but we’d use that later.

Inside, the building was just as grim and prisonlike as the outside, with endless overhead florescent lighting and an echoing cement floor. No windows, of course. We continued down the long hallway of closed doors, following the clanking sounds to the huge mechanical room, which took up almost the whole floor. I was impressed how well Benny had nailed the proportions on the model. This was where the boiler, backup generators, sprinkler system, main distribution piping, and other machinery were all housed, a red and white labyrinth of hissing pipes, catwalks, and ductwork. And where we were supposed to be working.

16:50: Fix cameras.

First things first: I had to do my technical bit and scramble the signals. I pulled my laptop out of Benny’s toolbox and logged into the Mint system. I’d remotely recorded twelve clean feeds. Now I just had to stream and substitute them for the twelve cameras the guards were watching. As they changed over, anyone watching closely would see a single line of static—barely even noticeable. A few keystrokes. Done and done.

One of them was of the boiler room, from a previous Saturday evening when the two official Hansen guys had attended to some duct work. That footage, like the rest of the “blank” streams, was on a loop of thirty minutes, which was all we would need to do our thing.

Now, time to go upstairs. We walked back down the hallway the way we’d come in, toward the Race Street fire stairs. We paused on the first landing, which opened out on the pavement, one of those heavy metal doors we’d seen on our stakeout that couldn’t be broached from the outside. I left that door, and the one at the top, barely ajar with rubber stoppers Dakota had given me. This way if, God forbid, we had to run, we could get out quickly, no van needed. Meanwhile, Benny already had the alarm panel cover off, and with a flick of his soldering iron, he quickly removed the circuit.

“You’re fast,” I said with a grin.

“You know it.”

Maybe we weren’t such a bad team after all.

The ID Benny had rigged opened just about every other door automagically—whoosh, whoosh, and whoosh. We were in.

The guards had already come and gone on their previous round—that gave us a good forty-five minutes to complete the job and get out of here, from start to finish.

17:00: Production starts.

On the production floor, the machinery was just starting to click into gear for the scheduled run. Robots moved the 6,000-pound coils of metal strips to the weights that punched them into blanks. Conveyors carried the blanks to be annealed and upset, then on to the nine lines with seven presses each, which looked like enclosed gray metal cabinets. Once everything was moving, the sound was deafeningly loud—a high-pitched whirring, thrumming, buzzing, overlaid with the clanks of metal planchets being tossed together. The coins piled up before they were transported to their next destination.

We popped in our earplugs—another thing we’d stashed in the toolkit, along with heavy-duty gloves so we could pull the coins hot off the presses (of course, they would also conveniently keep our prints off everything)—and sat back to watch. It was kind of amazing to think we’d made this happen. In this room everything was moving and shifting and making things, while in the adjacent medal area, separated by a glass door, all was dark and still.

All we had to do was wait for the cycle to finish—ten minutes, tops.

17:12 (rough estimate): Production ends. Pick up stash, deposit in toolbox. Exit through stairs and out the garage, removing stoppers and fixing alarm panel along the way.

I would switch the feeds back just before we drove out of the garage. Then we’d finish the last piece of the plan—the final bit of inspiration that we had come up with that night in the woods. We would leave the coins in the van, melted down and soldered to the inside of the engine hood, and Benny’s friend would take it back to his shop, paint it, and switch the plates back to its owner. No traces. No money for any of us, either, but freedom was priceless, wasn’t it?

But as we sat there and watched the machines cranking and whirring, ten minutes passed, then fifteen, but the coins were still being stamped and pressed and cut. Production kept on going. Thirty minutes left until the guard’s next round.

Benny grabbed my arm, so I took out my earplugs. “Shouldn’t this be done by now?”

“Yeah,” I murmured with wide eyes. The pounding of my heart in my ears started to drown out the machines.

It was supposed to be a small handful of coins, so few that we could carry them all out ourselves—that was a key part of the original Operation EagleFly, and what had made the whole plan doable. But something was wrong here, I was starting to realize with a sinking sensation. Really wrong.

The machines kept spinning and whizzing, the coins moving along, dozens at a time. By now there had to be a thousand of them, more every second.

I got out my laptop and furiously searched through the network to see if it had any answers. But it was unclear, just looking at the system, how many coins had been ordered. And it just kept going and going.

“Ho-ly,” Benny said, dread creeping into his voice. “This is effed up. Make it stop, Alice.”

My eyes bounced from my monitor to the assembly line and back again, my mind racing. “I don’t know how,” I said finally. “I’m trying, but—I can’t believe this. How could it . . . I don’t see . . . why . . .”

“What do you mean, you don’t know how?” He was practically yelling, even though I could barely hear him over the noise. I felt tears springing to my eyes.

“If I’d known how to stop it, I never would have let this order through in the first place. Seems like with this system, there’s no command for stoppage. It must be a security thing. Once it’s in, it goes through until the order’s complete. And even if we could stop production, it would clue in the guards that something was up.”

“Let me get this straight. You know everything about everything but you don’t know how to hit stop?”

FAIL.

“I don’t, okay?” I paced back and forth, panicked sobs closing my throat. I could barely breathe. My brain was just beginning to compute the extent of the mistake. My mistake. This was the second mistake, and it was way worse than the first.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

I never make mistakes.

“Okay, you’re sorry, but snap out of it. We have to figure this out.”

My whole world was going black. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t hear. And I certainly couldn’t figure out what the hell to do next, because all I could think about was how freaking dead we were. And how it was all . . . my . . . fault . . .