“Old-school bank at lunchtime. Now watch this,” Gibson said.
Three figures wearing masks and body-stockings rushed the front door. Wendy leaned forward. They weren’t obviously armed, but—transhumans, she figured—the body language was aggressive and the leader was shouting orders, telling the customers to get on the ground. The elderly video cameras didn’t deliver enough pixels to lip-read from, and there was no audio track.
“He’s saying, ‘This is a stick-up, you are all hostages, open the door to the back or we start shooting people.’”
Wendy drew breath sharply. In her thankfully limited experience, sane robbers didn’t do that: robbery was bad enough, but with just one sentence the leader had added kidnapping and aggravated assault charges on top. Which, under the new laws promulgated by the New Management, pretty much guaranteed a short drop with a sudden stop at the end.
The bank clerks weren’t stupid: they jumped up and fled. But a couple of seconds later the security door sprang open. Someone in a control center elsewhere, intent on avoiding a massacre, had hit the big red button. (The liability payout if a customer lost their life would be far larger than any amount of cash held in the branch safe.) Two of the robbers rushed through the door into the back office, while the one waiting out front with the hostages struck a pose.
The camera views switched. In the back room, the villains shoveled the contents of the cash drawers into laundry bags. The staff had all made a clean escape. Desks cleared out, one of the robbers turned and asked the other a question. He shrugged.
“He asked if the vault was open, if they were supposed to open it and take the contents,” Gibson explained. “He said he didn’t know, it wasn’t in the script.” Wendy squinted, suddenly getting an inkling that this wasn’t business as usual. “Now watch the next bit.”
The two supervillains stalked out of the back room and lined up beside their colleague. Then, to Wendy’s astonishment, they high-fived and bowed to the hostages.
“He said, ‘That’s a wrap.’” Gibson narrated. “Quote, ‘We nailed the shoot.’”
Half the customers stood up and scattered, rushing for the exit. The other half mobbed the supervillains. For a few seconds it was chaos in the bank, then two cops stormed through the door and tased the robbers. “Count them,” Gibson hissed. “Count everybody.”
“Pause it for me?” Wendy grabbed the Surface and began to scrub back and forth through the video. “Ten customers at first, four when it ends, plus two cops—no, wait, what am I looking for?”
“The money bags. Where did they go?”
It took Wendy just a minute to retrace the sequence. “Holy shit. Holy shit.”
“Did you see that customer’s face?” Gibson demanded.
“Nuh-no…” Wendy blinked in surprise. “He didn’t show his face to any of the cameras, not at any time.” In admiration. “That was slick. Tell me about the marks?”
“Three wannabe actors.” Gibson huffed like a frustrated dog after a snatched-away snack. “They answered an ad on Facebook offering work on an amateur video project. Cinema verité, heard of it? The pitch was that the director had rented an old bank building and had replaced the CCTV cameras with the kit they needed to film his movie. The customers and clerks were all extras. The wannabes were given a script and told to make it look good. They thought it was entirely legal and they were doing it for the exposure.”
“Except it was a real bank and the real robber was waiting to snatch the cash and do a dash while they provided a distraction?”
“Pretty much.” Gibson scowled.
“And the transhuman angle?”
“The marks all met the director. He pitched them in person, script and all, gave them an audition and screen test, and promised them a good day’s pay for a good day’s work. You’d think they could tell us who the guy that hired them was, wouldn’t you? Or that they’d have asked some questions?”
“They didn’t ask—” Wendy had a suspicious mind at the best of times, and now her inner alarm bells were ringing. “Riiight.”
“They were tampered with.” Gibson’s scowl deepened. “The loss adjusters hired a forensic psychiatrist to examine them. They were acting under a high-level geas. If it ever goes to trial they’ll probably be found not guilty on grounds of diminished responsibility. The, uh, director has supernatural powers of conviction: people believe whatever he tells them. The bag man is impossible to grab, he’s as slippery as an eel, and the getaway driver—just don’t go there. This isn’t the only job the gang has pulled in the past two months, Deere, or even the first job that’s hit one of our customers.”
“You want the director and his associates, not the fall-guy actors.”
“Yes! But it’s not going to be easy. Most bank robbers have a simple MO, which is how we eventually catch them. That, or they talk to someone and we get a tip. These guys are different. Not only do they have transhuman characteristics, but they do a variety of jobs—not just banks. They’re really good at not showing up on videos, and they mix it up creatively.” Gibson pulled the Surface over to his side of the desk. “So let’s talk about their most recent job, when they hit the cash room at Hamleys Toy Shop…”
Bernard wasn’t answering his phone, so Eve decided to pay him a visit.
She stood on his doorstep, waiting impatiently for him to answer the entryphone. After a minute, she pushed the button again.
“Dammit, Harris,” she swore quietly. She’d expected him to report back this morning—the commission she’d dangled in front of him should have seen to that. She pulled out her phone—a Caviar-modded iPhone 6S with a 24-carat gold body—and called his landline again. There was no reply, and Harris’s antique tape-based answering machine didn’t cut in.
She turned to make eye contact with the replacement Gammon.
