Chapter 2

Just inside the entrance to the San Diego Museum of Art, Cyrus and his partners approached the Admissions desk. Two women behind the desk were helping customers, but a third was tapping away on a keyboard.

As usual, it had been decided earlier that he would do the talking.

"Excuse me," he said very politely to the lady working the keyboard.

The woman looked up at him.

"I'm sorry to disturb your work, but we're with Overlord Security," Cyrus said. "We were told there's a problem with the system."

The woman nodded.

"Yes, I was told to expect you," she said. She picked up a phone and pressed a button on its base. After a moment, she said, "Erwin? The guys from Overlord are here." She listened, nodded, and then said, "OK, see you soon."

After hanging up the receiver, she told Cyrus, "The security shift manager is on his way."

"Thank you very much," Cyrus said. He normally wasn't this polite to most people, but it was important to not cause anyone to scrutinize him and the boys too closely at this point in the job.

It took about three minutes for a balding and paunchy man dressed in a security guard uniform to emerge from one of the Authorized Personnel Only doors nearby.

"Hi, Erwin Mitson," he said to Cyrus. "Head of security." He looked at all five of them. "Wow, this many guys? Usually, it's just one or two."

Cyrus smiled.

"Because of the issues you described, they sent a whole team," he told Erwin. "We're going to need to spread out in the IDC. That should allow us to troubleshoot the problem faster."

Cyrus was impressed…

Their boss—the mysterious lady who only communicated with them via voice—had predicted that the head of security would remark on how many men had been sent. She had also told Cyrus exactly what to say in response. He wondered again if he would get to meet her face-to-face once she paid them their money. He liked her criminal mind.

"That makes sense," Erwin said with a sigh. "And I hope you can get it fixed quickly. It's driving us nuts. Anyway…follow me."

He led them into the same restricted-access door he had emerged from. Cyrus already knew that it led to the security command center. Boss Lady had provided him and the boys with detailed information about this room…from how many staff would be manning it, to the types and even the models of the equipment that would be in here. As he and his crew followed Erwin through the room, Cyrus looked around and again was impressed.

She had been right once more. Everything was exactly as she had said it would be.

Erwin led them to an elevator at the back of the command center and pressed the Down button. The elevator opened immediately, and they all packed in.

"Jeez, you guys are big!" Erwin commented. "How about you quit Overlord and come work for us as guards?"

Cyrus and the boys laughed. Laughing at stupid jokes was part of the job.

"We get that a lot," Cyrus replied.

They rode the elevator down to a level called SB1, the sub-basement, where—Boss Lady had told them—all of the electrical and technical guts of the museum were.

On that level, Erwin led them to a door marked IDC. The Information and Data Control room.

"Here you go," Erwin said, unlocking the door. It revealed a large server room with racks and racks of computer servers and drives. Erwin pointed to the left. "I believe your guys' stuff is over there," he said. "Also, there's a phone on the wall." He pointed to it. "Press the star button to get me directly if you have any updates."

"Will do," Cyrus said. "Thanks." He turned away, as if to get to work, but then quickly turned back, as though suddenly remembering something. "Oh, listen," he said, "do you have enough guards on staff today?"

"Fully staffed," Erwin informed him. "Why?"

"The cameras," Cyrus said. "Based on what you told us, we may need to reboot the entire system a few times in order to run debugging software or to install patches. When that happens, the cameras may go off intermittently."

Cyrus knew there was no reason for Erwin to distrust what he was telling him. After all, as far as the security chief was concerned, Cyrus and the boys did work for Overlord. The phone call that had been placed from the command center summoning them here had instead been rerouted to a phone Oleg had in his pocket right now. What's more, they were wearing Overlord uniforms, and had Overlord badges clipped to their shirts.

Erwin nodded solemnly.

"Everything's computers now, isn't it?" he asked with a chuckle. "You know…my wife just bought a brand-new Mazda. The damn car is basically just a big computer. If it breaks down, I don't know if I need to take it to a mechanic or to NASA."

Cyrus and the boys laughed.

"Anyway, no problem about the cameras," Erwin said. "I'll tell my guards to be extra vigilant. Call upstairs if you need anything."

"Will do," Cyrus said. He turned to the boys. "Okay, guys…let's get to work."

***

As soon as the door to the IDC closed behind Erwin, Cyrus and the others got busy.

"Radios," he ordered, checking his G-Shock digital watch. They were still on time. Besides, they always factored in a buffer…to account for things like traffic jams, having to take the stairs instead of a broken elevator, or a doofus security guard talking about his wife's stupid Mazda.

All of them removed their radios and earpieces from their pockets, put in their earpieces and tuned the radios to the right frequency.

Next up was taking care of the second floor. He dispatched Vinny to take care of that, which meant that Vinny was going to have to leave the IDC room and make his way to the environmental power plants at the other end of the sub-basement. Vinny knew what to say if he encountered anyone, but according to Boss Lady, the place should be a ghost town at this time of day.

"Alarms," Cyrus instructed Oleg. The alarm system the museum used was neither more nor less sophisticated than those used at other places they had hit over the years. Boss Lady had provided them with everything they needed to know about it, and once Cyrus and the boys had examined the schematics, they had scoffed at how easy it would be to bypass it.

The main things they needed to deactivate were the alarms on all of the emergency exits, the maintenance crawlspace alarms, as well as all of the so-called "jiggle" alarms.

The jiggle alarms were sensitive devices placed behind the most high-value works of art in the museum. If anyone touched or otherwise attempted to move one of those, the motion sensor in the jiggle alarm would be triggered, sending an alert down to the security command center. This museum only had such alarms placed on a relative handful of works, however…the Rembrandt in Gallery 16 being one of them.

While Oleg worked on the alarms, Luis got to work on deactivating the security department's connection to the police. Meanwhile, Cyrus told Jeff to go stand over by the door to guard it. Boss Lady had insisted that this job be done with no one getting hurt, and the way Cyrus saw it, technically that was possible. But if anybody did come into the IDC and threatened the job, then whatever happened, happened. He and the boys would make sure no one got killed, sure. That had never been their style to begin with. But hurt might be unavoidable.

With Jeff stationed, Cyrus got started on the cameras…

Over the past three months, they had "met" with Boss Lady many times, always in different places, and never actually seeing her. The meetings allowed Boss Lady to give them refined instructions for the job, or for her to deliver things like blueprints, wiring schematics, and even the Overlord uniforms and badges. The meets were also opportunities for Cyrus and the boys to tell her what they needed to pull this heist off. Boss Lady always came through, because the next time they would meet, the equipment would be there.

Some of this gear was not what anyone would call mainstream. Joe Schmo couldn't exactly order it off of Amazon. You had to know some pretty shady people in order to get your hands on it, and Cyrus wondered who Boss Lady's contacts were, because she never failed to deliver top-of-the-line gear. Real Mission Impossible-type stuff. It only made him want to meet her more. Perhaps they could work together. With her access to money and equipment…Cyrus almost got an erection imagining the types of jobs they could pull off.

The gear she had provided for taking over the cameras was simple and elegant. It was a small metal box, about the size of a deck of cards. It plugged into the camera control server and then, using Overlord's own security bypass codes, took command of the cameras. The best part was that it could be operated remotely using a cellphone. This meant that he and the boys could be positioned just outside Gallery 16 before killing the cameras once and for all, giving them that much more time to get what they were after without being seen.

It took a few moments for the box, once plugged in, to do its thing. Cyrus checked the progress on the phone Boss Lady had provided him. Finally, the phone showed that he had command of the cameras.

"Cameras ready," he said to the others. "I'm gonna get them comfortable upstairs…"

Boss Lady had suggested that he do a series of quick shutdowns of the cameras, just to let the folks up in the command center get used to the idea.

He went to the wall phone Erwin had pointed out, lifted the receiver and pressed star.

"Hi Erwin," he said in his Beer Buddy voice when Erwin answered, "this is Bill from Overlord, down in the basement. I just wanted to give you a heads-up that your cameras will go dark for about thirty seconds while we access the BIOS and change a few settings. They should come right back on afterwards."

"Not a problem," Erwin replied. "Thanks for the warning; I'll pass it on to my team."

"Of course," Cyrus said. "Like I said earlier, there will be other outages frequently while we're working." He gave a dramatic sigh. "It looks like something is really jacked up with the software. A bad update that wasn't properly debugged."

"Computers," Erwin said wearily. "I hate to think what my wife's Mazda is gonna cost us the first time we need to take it into the shop."

"Yeah, good luck with that," Cyrus said with a chuckle. "Talk soon."

He then tapped the button marked Kill on the phone's screen, and checked his watch.

Still on time…