She knelt down on the rubber floor mat in the dark, set the camera on a window seat before her, its enormous lens pointed right at the jewelry store’s iron-grilled door. Andy expected Ben and his crew along any second now. Fifteen minutes earlier, when they’d pulled up and parked in a moon-shadowed spot outside an out-of-business pharmacy, Andy had been waiting in the street to snap them. She had good pictures of Matt behind the wheel, a thick arm on the sill. Ben in the front passenger seat, his face lit by his phone screen. She’d had to wait until Engo and Jake got out of the car before she could get them clearly. She captured Jake with the hem of his balaclava still up over his forehead, tucking his platinum-blond ponytail into his collar.
It hadn’t taken long for Andy to discover what Ben and the crew had planned. A quick tour around the apartment, even before she’d made contact with the guy, told her he was a thief. The first clue had been the number of tools he owned, many of them having no purpose she could readily discover when surveying his belongings. There were wire strippers, micro-screwdriver sets, worm cameras, magnetized camera tripods. There was a lock-picking kit, not the kind a guy’s girlfriend might get him as a joke, but the expensive kind, with well-used hooks and forks. Following Engo for a mere day had given her the location of the jewelry store they were going to hit. The guy had all the subtlety of a brick to the face, practically leaning out his car window to check out the place as he drove by on the way to and from the firehouse.
Tonight, Andy had been following Engo again, knowing exactly where he was going and who he was going to meet. She had taken pictures of the men in the car, then dashed down a service driveway, up and along a fire stairwell to the side door of the gym positioned directly across from the jewelry store. To break into this place, she hadn’t needed to take any of the elaborate steps Ben and his crew had employed to get into the store. Some gentle manipulation of the deadbolt at the back, and she was in. Two days earlier, when she’d toured the gym pretending to consider membership, Andy had plotted her path through the gym to avoid being picked up by the cameras, which were mainly positioned to capture members abusing the equipment. When she left, she would pull the door shut behind her and flip the deadbolt. No one would ever know she had been inside.
The crew arrived a full twenty seconds after she got herself set up, and Andy started snapping them again. Her camera stuttered and whirred in the dark. It was Matt who clipped off the padlock on the door grille with a set of bolt cutters. Engo and Ben who pushed the grille aside. Matt who raked the front door lock. Andy assumed Jake had peeled off from the group to keep watch, probably from the rooftop of a building on her side of the street.
As the front door of the jewelry store opened, Andy watched the men pause. This was the critical moment, the first potential failure point in their plan. Andy figured Ben, the known tech-head, had bypassed the store’s security system somehow. That move had probably been facilitated by the fabric-store fire two blocks over, which she knew the men had attended. So if whatever Ben had done that night—inserted a bug, rerouted the store’s call-out system, whatever—was in full operation, the men’s entry now should be soundless. Unremarkable. No flashing lights. No screaming alarms. The men waited. Then at once, they moved. Andy smiled at the professionalism of it. The cleverness. No one but herself and the crew would know the shop had been robbed until the following morning, when the staff arrived to open up.
Andy watched the men enter the store through her lens. They had rolled the grille back across the doorway, and closed the glass door behind themselves, and a less experienced undercover specialist might have had to down tools then. But in her work Andy compromised on nothing, and her lens was the kind that could pick up the individual feathers on pigeons pecking at bread crumbs on the street from the balcony of a fourteenth-floor apartment. She knelt, swiveling gently to adjust her aim, picking off parts of the men through the grille and the glass doors as they raided cabinets. She captured Ben’s wide shoulders twisting as he worked a crowbar into the lid of a display case. Engo’s mangled three-fingered paw in the silicone glove, heaping necklaces into a black cotton bag. The camera had infrared, but she didn’t use it, didn’t need to. There was a soft glow inside the store from the headlamps strapped around the men’s foreheads, worn over the balaclavas. Andy saw as she snapped away that the bulb of each lamp had been duct-taped so that only the barest slice of light showed, enough to illuminate their work, but not enough to alert anyone who might pass by on the street.
They’d thought of everything.
She clicked and clicked.
Andy sat back on her haunches in the cool dark of the gym, admiring the crew’s many precautions, the contingencies and safeguards that, as she counted them off, began to border on neurotic. The taped-down lights, the balaclavas, the plateless car borrowed or stolen for the specific purpose of driving them to a pre-scouted spot fifty yards down from the jeweler’s. Andy felt an affinity for the crew, then. Not an uncomfortable one. She enjoyed taking down clever marks. The challenge thrilled her. She felt that this job was a good match, a meeting of similar minds. Andy, too, was overprepared. Slightly neurotic. Ready for anything.
So she was just as surprised as the men she was watching when the shadowy figures appeared at the front of the jewelry store.