Marriage or Espionage?

“Hurry up, Daniel!” Osman muttered under his breath. “If we don’t leave soon, the damn place’ll be open before we step foot through this door.”

I held my breath and tuned out the beeping of the various instruments whirring in my bag. “Just one more time, Osman. I need to know it’s right.”

“It’s always right. You are never wrong. Let’s go before we get our asses handed to us.”

“Fine!” I relented, as my computer spit out a confirmation. “But if we get caught, you owe me big. That last one might be wrong.”

“Never wrong,” he reminded me. “Now let’s go.”

I pressed my gloved hand into the number pad. “Six, three, seven … two, four, seven, zero.” My hand lingered above the zero half a second longer than it should have, and I held my breath waiting for the shoe to drop.

But nothing happened.

Osman pressed his keycard into the terminal and input the second security passcode and the door swung open. It was all so easy.

Too easy.

My breath caught in my throat, waiting for a sound. Searching for any signs of life.

But there were none. I could have sworn…

“Daniel, now is not the time for daydreaming! We have five minutes to get in and out before we risk becoming roadkill.”

I rolled my eyes. He was worse than me at making up threats. But he was right, we had to be quick and quiet if we wanted to avoid using our weapons to get out of this mess. No one was coming to back us up. We were entirely off-book in this one. We will deny all knowledge…

Letting the door close gently behind us, I followed Osman through the gate and into the large safe. There had to be millions of dollars in cash, but that wasn’t why we were there. That wasn’t why we’d knocked out three guards and spent six hours disabling a security system in a way that wouldn’t trigger the alarm.

No, the reason I’d stayed up all night working on that was a whole lot more valuable than the cash, and a lot smaller, too. Which is good when you’re trying to get something out unnoticed.

“Hand me the…” I started, holding out my hand toward Osman. Before I could finish, the small notebook was in my hands.

“I don’t know why you always make me carry that around when we all know you won’t let me use it.”

I left his unasked question without an answer, but we both knew what it was. He’s the only person I’d trust with my calculations if I ended up six feet under. He’s the only one besides me who can even read them.

I flipped through the pages at record speed, following my directions until I had located the small box that held the small drive we were there to collect.

This was the dangerous part. It was dangerous because it wasn’t predictable. And I pride myself on making even the least predictable into a certainty, but the shifting nature of this security and the complete lack of time I’d had to prepare had sweat dripping down my forehead with alarming intensity.

My sleeve was almost soaked through just from keeping my eyes clear as I followed the steps we knew of, inserting the keys, turning the locks at the same time, extracting the small box from the interior. I stared at the cryptogram before me. It wasn’t alphanumeric. Or, if it was, it wasn’t alphanumeric in any language I had ever seen.

“The code!” Osman reminded me.

“What?” I stumbled back a little, almost dropping the box to the ground. Something is wrong.

“Put the code in and let’s get this copied so we can get out of here.”

“Oh, yeah. That code.” I stared down at all the scribbles on the page in front of me. None of it would help me unless I could figure out what I was looking at. I spun the box in all different directions, trying to find some semblance of a pattern I could exploit to input the fourteen digit code we’d intercepted that morning.

A clatter sounded above us.

“We must have missed one of the guards,” Osman whispered. Our breathing seemed so loud as we strained to hear any other signs of their approach.

“We might have to take the whole box. I’m not sure I can crack this in under a minute.”

“Keep trying,” Osman whispered. “I’ll go check it out.”

If I didn’t know him so well, I wouldn’t have been able to hear his footsteps crossing the floor after he exited the vault. I had to trust I was the only one who could hear him and that he would be okay, because my brain power had to go into solving the strange pictogram in time.

You can do this, I thought. You have done more with less.

My eyes flitted across the box, finding patterns that showed themselves as unimportant. Lines. Angles. Points. Directionality. Patterns were everywhere, but none of them made any sense. Until I remembered who we were dealing with.

“Of course!” I spun the center piece counter-clockwise and the pattern suddenly came into focus. It was laid out randomly, but I deftly punched in the fourteen characters in order -- or what I hoped was in order -- until I finally depressed the last of them.

Nothing happened. And I was getting really tired of that, to be honest.

Maybe if I turned the center piece back. It wouldn’t budge.

Maybe if I…

“Come on, Daniel, we gotta go!” Osman’s breathing was heavy and his voice uneven.

“What?” I started, but the wide eyed look he gave me told me this wasn’t the time for questions. Stuffing the box into my bag whole, I slid the outer shell back into the wall and removed the keys.

“I hope you’re right about this,” I whispered. “Because if we bring this whole box back and it turns out we were in no danger, Ambrosini will have our heads.”

“I’m right.”

I don’t believe you.

I strapped the bag closed and drew my weapon. “Let’s get out of here.”

“You go up that way, I’ll go make sure the guard doesn’t come down to greet us and meet you out front.” His hand waved towards a back staircase that would lead up to the main floor and directly to a rear employee exit.

“I don’t have the code for that door.”

“Once we’re out, the alarm won’t matter. Just get out.”

“How will I know when you’re out?”

His eyes bore into mine before he turned away toward the end of the hallway.

He didn’t need to say it. I won’t.

At the end of the hallway, Osman turned back to face me. “Just follow protocol. Get out of here and get that back home. I’ll do my best to meet you there.”

We both know there are no promises in this line of work. “See you later.” I nodded and followed his directions toward the back staircase, my mind whirring with the eighteen exits in the building. Was there another way out? Was there time to calculate an escape strategy that included us both?

We will deny all knowledge. There had to be a way. Because that was the only way we were both getting out of this alive.

The faintest sound from the bottom of the stairs drew my attention. It could have been anything, but I have to assume it’s a threat. My surroundings gave me the advantage, but if I could get to the top, I’d be better off.

Don’t engage if you can evade. The smaller the trail, the safer you are. Amelia’s words from all those years ago still rang in my head every day.

Keeping my weight on my toes I slipped up the stairs and through a doorway into the back hall. Boxes of paper lined the hallway and a recycling compactor framed the exit. I could slip through the door and avoid whomever was coming up the stairs, but there was no way Osman had enough time to get himself to an exit.

Leaving through that door meant he would almost certainly be captured. But staying put meant I would almost certainly have to engage. Without taking more than a split second to think, I took the third option: move to the nearest door I had the code for.

I had weaved through the last of the boxes and there was only one hallway between me and a seamless exit. Sliding my camera around the corner, I could tell there was no one in eye shot.

I stepped out into the hallway and sped down the carpeted center towards the door at the end of the hall. I should have known it was too good to be true. Just as I had entered the fourth digit into the keypad, I heard a gun cock behind me.

“Hands up. Slowly turn to face me and no one has to get hurt,” came the deep voice I could only assume belonged to the gun’s owner.

I wanted to say, we all know I have to get hurt if I see your face, but instead I put my hands into the air. I carefully pulled myself to a standing position and stepped toward the door, turning my body as though I were complying. But before I turned my head around to face him, I pushed the door open with my hip and slipped out into the night.

The ping of the bullet hitting the doorframe behind me was far from the only reminder that tonight hadn’t gone off without a hitch. I just had to hope I’d given Osman enough time to get out of there in one piece, because there was no way I could go back to help him now. I had to get out of this guy’s line of sight and back home fast.

Another bullet whizzed past my head as I dove into a nearby crowd and swung my head around, searching for the alley I knew to be nearby.