Seb and I open the elevator doors, then I slip through. It’s completely dark inside the space. I count my steps away from the elevator door, just like I did when I was down here with Bella. Remembering where each of the sensors were located, I spray them with foam concentrate. That should block their ability to see motion. And then, fingers crossed, it won’t matter if they read a heat signature.

I spray the cameras, too. They’re triggered by light, and I don’t want to have to work blind the whole time we’re here.

Once we’ve got all the sensors covered, Seb and I can pull down the hoods of our crinkly foil suits, and turn on our headlamps.

Now we can see. At least a little bit.

I touch my earpiece, whispering, “So far so good?”

“Police radar is quiet,” Mason says.

“Everything looks okay here,” Jonesy adds.

Their voices are tinny and distant. It’s shit reception down in the vault. We can’t count on them being able to reach us, so we’ve got to work fast.

Seb and I approach the vault door, which looks like a massive porthole six feet in diameter and two feet thick, made out of dull, solid steel.

There’s just one thing left in our way.

It’s not the code to the vault—I already have that, thanks to the hidden camera I placed on my little field-trip down here with Bella. I’ve seen Raymond Page and his bank manager punch in the code thirty times since then. They’ve only changed it twice, which isn’t bank protocol, but I think Raymond is a little bit lazy.

No, the only thing left to deal with is the exterior magnetic lock.

The lock consists of two plates. When armed, they create a magnetic field. If you open the door outside of business hours, that field is broken. It triggers an alarm that even Jonesy can’t intercept. There’s no way around this—the field has to remain intact all night long.

I had to ponder on the problem for a long time. How to move the plates without breaking the field?

Eventually, I realized that I simply had to move them together, at the same time.

I had Mason make me an aluminum plate that looks like a rectangular serving platter with a handle on one side. He welded it together in his mom’s basement, using her silicone oven mitts and his makeshift welding mask that’s basically a bucket with a plexiglass window in the front. He looked like a proper idiot, but his work is always top-notch, down to the last millimeter.

Seb takes the plate out of his backpack. I cover the flat side with heavy-duty double-sided tape. Then I stick it onto the two bolts and unscrew them. Now I can lift out both bolts at once, while keeping them at precisely the same distance from each other, then move the whole thing out of the way. The field remains intact, even though it’s no longer attached to the vault.

I set it carefully down against the wall, with the delicacy of a bomb-removal expert.

Seb watches, so quiet he’s not even breathing.

When I place it down successfully, he lets out a long sigh.

“It worked!”

“Of course it did,” I say, as if I never had any doubt at all.

“Alright,” Seb says, practically rubbing his hands together in anticipation. “Punch in the code.”

“I thought you had the code?” I say, blankly.

Seb freezes by the vault door.

“What?”

“I thought you were gonna memorize it?”

“You never told me that.”

“Yeah I did. Remember? It started with 779 . . . something.”

Seb stares at me with a horrified expression.

I laugh. “I’ve got the code, ya dummy.”

“That’s not funny,” he says.

“It was for me.”

I punch in the code: 779374.

I hear four distinct clunking sounds as the bolts retract. Then I pull the vault door open.

I’m hit with the smell of stacked up bills. Cash has a distinct odor: ink, cotton, leather, grease, dirt, and a hint of metal, from coming in contact with coins.

But Seb and I aren’t here for bills. It’s too heavy to haul out that much cash.

We want the diamond.

I take the drill out of Seb’s bag so we can start drilling into the lockboxes. I drill out the locks, then Seb checks the contents. Ingots and gemstones go in the bags. Everything else stays behind.

“Don’t take anything sentimental,” I tell him. “I don’t want some gangster coming after us ‘cause we stole his grannie’s wedding ring.”

There are two hundred and eleven lockboxes in the vault.

In the hundred and eighth, I find what I’m looking for.

It doesn’t look like much: just a plain wooden box with a hinged lid.

Still, I feel the thrill of anticipation as soon as I see it. I grab the box and lift the lid.

The stone inside is unearthly in its beauty. It truly looks like it might have fallen to earth in the core of a meteor. It’s about the size of a hen’s egg, clear and sparkling, with just a hint of frosty blue. The Winter Diamond.

Seb sees my silence and stillness. He comes to stand beside me, gazing down on it.

“Fucking hell,” he breathes.

“Yeah,” I say.

We stare at it for about ten seconds. Then I close the lid with a snap, slipping the box directly into my pocket.

“Should we keep going?” Seb says.

“No. We’ve got as much as we can carry.”

Sebastian and I hoist our backpacks onto our backs. It’s much more difficult this time, because gold is heavy as hell. Not just gold—platinum bars, loose gemstones, and one original Babe Ruth baseball card in a lucite case, because fuck it, that’s cool and I want it.

We can’t go out the way we came in. It’s too slow to climb up the cables. If the cops are called when we’re halfway up, we’ll be trapped like a couple of bugs in a bottle.

The only problem is that engaging the elevators will trigger the alarms. So once we press that button, we have about two minutes to get out the front doors. And pray that Camille is waiting for us with the getaway car.

I touch my earpiece, saying to Jonesy, “We’re about to head out. You can pack up.”

To Mason I add, “You too, Mace.”

Mason will leave the ladder, strip off the coveralls, and exit the perimeter on foot. He doesn’t have anything incriminating on him.

Seb and I are a different story.

“You ready?” I say to him, my finger hovering over the elevator button.

I’m holding a stopwatch in my other hand. From the time I hit the button, I calculate that we have exactly three minutes to get away from the two-block radius surrounding the bank, before the cops block it all off.

Seb looks tense, but resolute.

“Ready,” he says.

I hit the stopwatch and the elevator button simultaneously.

The elevator starts to descend.

I don’t hear anything besides the jolt and hum of the elevator car coming down, but I know the moment that car started moving, it triggered a silent alarm to the firm that handles the bank’s security, and to the Chicago PD.

The elevator seems to take forever to come down. If I wasn’t watching the stopwatch, I would never believe it was only twelve seconds. As the doors part with aching slowness, Seb and I hustle inside. I press the button for the lobby.

The doors close again and we lurch upward. My heart is beating three or four times every second that passes.