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I was starting to get a bit annoyed. Did this guy think we were amateurs? “It’s a good thing none of us is looking to steal any money, then, isn’t it?”
Dess nudged me gently with her elbow. “Echo has broken into hundreds of secure buildings. Without setting off any alarms like we did the last time we did a major break and entry. He’s never been caught.”
I shut my mouth at the mention of the near-debacle we’d faced at the genetics storage center, an embarrassed flush crossing my cheeks—I still didn’t know where my instructions had gone wrong to trigger that alarm—and tipped my head to the other guy.
“You’re just looking to get at the safety deposit boxes,” he said. “I know. That is doable. But I highly recommend against taking anything out of them too. We can get to them and get out again, but as soon as you remove contents, you alert your target that they have an enemy.”
That consideration at least made sense. “Got it,” I said.
“Can you walk us through the steps for getting to the boxes?” Dess asked.
Echo started flicking off points on his fingers. “We need to take out the security guard, but you can’t kill him. Fred is a good man. The cameras need to be diverted from the outside. Your tech man can help with that. The motion-detecting alarms are at knee level, so we can avoid those. The control systems are turned off with a key swipe, and the guard has the key card for most rooms. We lift it from him. I can handle the inner doors and the box itself by my own means which I prefer not to share.” He looked between us. “Shall we get started?”
“Absolutely.” I pulled out my tablet. “I may be able to handle the outside cameras from right here.”
It turned out that I needed to walk a little closer for the signal to be strong enough, but then I hacked into the feed quickly enough that this dude had to be at least a little impressed—not that it should matter to me whether he was. Examining the setup, I winced. “I’ll have to ‘adjust’ them one at a time as we pass them. Mess with them all at once, and the guard in the camera room’s bound to notice something.”
Echo shrugged. “Do what you have to do. Just make sure no one sees us.”
He strode ahead of us and went straight to the back door. It opened easily in his grasp, and he glanced back at us with a twinkle in his eyes. “I took care of this one earlier.”
Okay, maybe the guy did know what he was doing.
I continued looping and resetting the feeds as we slipped into the building and made our way through the narrow, darkened halls at the back of the building. Echo pointed to four small panes low down on the wall. “Sensors.”
We stepped over them no problem, swinging our knees high, although I couldn’t see the lasers that we were avoiding. Tension wriggled down my spine. I’d never been the most coordinated of the crew. It would really suck if I somehow broke Echo’s perfect record my first time on a mission with him. I’d never live the infamy down.
“How do we know if we activate a sensor?” I asked, switching the cameras again as we hurried onward.
“We’ll hear sirens,” Echo claimed nonchalantly, continuing forward with quiet footfalls. When we reached a door, he bent next to it with some gestures I couldn’t make out and disabled the lock on that one with a faint click. He closed it behind us after we’d darted past it.
He paused before we turned a corner, and the thump of footsteps reached my ears. “Fred’s doing his patrol. You want to take care of that?” He glanced at Dess with a confidence that made me wonder again what favor she’d done for him to earn this one in return.
Dess slipped around the corner without hesitation. We waited in silence. The footsteps halted with the briefest rustling of a scuffle, and then there was nothing. Whatever Dess had done, it’d taken her only a matter of seconds.
She returned from hiding the unconscious body in less than a minute, brushing her hands together like she did this every day. Which I guessed was almost true, at least in her previous career under the household’s control. She flashed the key card she’d grabbed. “He’s fine,” she reassured Echo. “He’ll wake up in a few hours.”
Echo didn’t bother speaking again as we approached the room that we most needed to enter—the one that held the safety deposit boxes. He stopped us in our tracks and pointed to the invisible sensors that would have sent us straight to prison. Lifting his scrawny legs high, he walked through them without much effort, and I went second this time, trying to move with extra caution.
Part of me expected it not to work when Dess used the guard’s keycard to swipe into the room, but the lights flashed green. She glanced over a shoulder, giving me a look of absolute confidence. We’d made it to the room with her grandmother’s deposit box, just moments from figuring out what lay inside.
I hoped it made all this trouble worthwhile.
Echo stepped into the room first. “Which one?” he asked under his breath.
“476,” I said automatically, reciting the number I’d ingrained in my memory.
He turned to the smallest set of lockboxes on the wall and pulled a tool from his pocket. Apparently he was truly worried about someone stealing his techniques and, I don’t know, making a fortune by showing them off on TikTok or something, because he placed himself very deliberately between us and his hands so I couldn’t see what he was doing with the thing. But he jammed it into the compartment somehow or other, and the next thing I knew, it was popping open.
Echo motioned Dess over to open the drawer behind the door he’d opened. I followed her, pulling out my camera. We might not be able to take the contents with us physically if we wanted to keep our intrusion here a secret, but we could steal away any evidence we found in other ways.
Dess shone the beam of her small flashlight into the open drawer. The first couple pieces of paper at the top of the pile were nothing all that exciting: something to do with stocks or bonds, very official looking and nothing salacious. Dess nudged those aside and froze, staring.
The Polaroid photograph beneath the papers showed a little boy, no older than seven or eight, lying naked on his side. His staring eyes and the bluish pallor of his skin made it clear he was dead.
But it hadn’t been an easy death by any means. His body was mottled with vicious wounds. I’d seen a lot of gore in my life, but nothing quite like this. My stomach heaved.
Who would do something like that? Who would keep a record of it?
