So no drills. Or explosives. Or sledgehammers. Sledgehammers are not beige, to say the least.
The office was dark and hummed with electrical energy, computers and outlets all downloading and backing up hard drives and whatnot. I’m not sure how all that works. I didn’t inherit my mom’s computer genius. Besides, my experience in this job has taught me that most CEOs don’t know how it all works, either. They hire some guy to come in and set up security, but they have no idea if it’s actually secure. That’s why CEOs are always getting busted.
Well, that, and because of people like us.
I glanced out the windows as I slipped into the office, past empty orange-lit parking lots and homes and shopping centers and the tall steeple of a church. Everything seemed stagnant, running into the horizon with no end in sight. If I squinted hard enough, Iceland appeared to be flatlining.
If I focused my eyes differently, I could see myself in the window, looking out on the Icelandic night. I was wearing black jeans and a black sweater underneath a dark denim coat that had a shearling lining. (It may have been September in Iceland, but it was already getting cold out.) Some spies get to wear cool outfits and change their hair up, but as a safecracker, all that mattered was that I did my job. No one cared about my shoes.
My hair was just as boring as my clothes: long and brown and way past my shoulders. “You need a haircut,” my mom kept telling me, sounding like she did when I was four years old. My bangs hung directly across my forehead, and I tugged at them self-consciously, trying to make them hang straight.
When I turned around, I saw Kandinsky’s Composition VII on the wall, the chaotic bull’s-eye of the office. This CEO probably thought it was an original, but I knew it wasn’t. I knew this because I had seen the original painting at the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. This was two years ago, back when we were doing some research on local elections and their effect on Prime Minister Putin. In Russia. In the winter. Imagine sitting in a tub of ice cubes. That’s Moscow in the winter. I still shiver when I think about it.
But I didn’t care about Moscow or Kandinsky or even Composition VII. I cared about what was behind it. My mom had been cleaning these offices for the past three months, every night during the summer, and every night she would notice that the painting was off-balance in a different direction. No one moves a painting that often.
Not unless they want to get to the wall behind it.
I lifted the painting off the wall, struggling a little with the weight of the glass, and set it down before turning back to the safe that was set into the wall.
“Hello there.” I grinned. “Come to Mama.”
Okay. I’ve tried to explain safecracking to my parents several times, but their eyes start to glaze over and finally my dad says something like, “Sweetie, we’re just so proud of you,” and my mom smiles and nods, so I’ve stopped trying. But the basics are this: For every number in the combination, there’s a corresponding wheel within the safe’s lock. Find out how many wheels there are, then find out all the possible notches in each wheel and their corresponding numbers by going through the numbers on the dial in groups of three. Find out where the numbers match up by graphing them, then start trying to open the lock using all the different combinations of those numbers.
As you can imagine, if there are only three numbers in the combination, then it’s Easy Street. If there are eight numbers, it’s Oh Crap City. And since our plane was due at the airport in less than an hour, I needed Easy Street. Judging from the knockoff Kandinsky, I was about to get there. When the painting’s an original, the safe behind it is always difficult. Like the designer Mies van der Rohe said, “God is in the details.”
The office was musty from too much paper, dust, and time, and I sort of wanted to cough, but I didn’t. The last thing I needed was to blow this whole thing because of a tickle in my throat. Instead, I pulled on gloves (yes, I wear gloves, mostly because I never know who’s touched the safe before me and whether or not they had the Death Flu) and got to work.
It was a standard fireproof wall safe, thank goodness. Fireproof safes are always easier to crack, because they’re not made of steel. Steel melts too quickly in a fire, as I learned after that unfortunate incident in Prague (that fire, I would like to go on record as saying, was not my fault), which makes it useless if you want to protect paperwork.
Angelo loves to watch me crack safes. He always presses his lips together and nods his head and says, “Hmmm.” He says it’s because he’s never seen a safecracker remember all the numbers in her head without having to graph them. “How do you do it?” he once asked me, but I didn’t know how to explain it.
“I can just see them,” I finally said. “Like a picture. Graphing takes up too much time.” He thinks I have a photographic memory, which is fine by me. Whatever gets me in and out of there is great.
This particular safe had three numbers in its combination, which is terrible security if you’re ever trying to hide damning documents, just FYI. I clicked the dial back and forth, listening, listening, listening. The clicks were as soft as a mouse’s footsteps, but I could feel them against my fingers. I’ve been doing this since I was a baby.
The best is when you get into the Zone, as I call it. It’s almost like the numbers are singing to me, calling me to them. I don’t feel anything except those numbers and my heartbeat, and we work in synchronicity, like the best orchestra in the world. That dial is the baton in my hand, and we’re playing toward the final crashing crescendo, to the cymbal sounds of justice.