The Pitch

Nadia Quist never pitched a job sitting down. Sitting down was for people who wanted to be talked out of things, and she had not driven across two counties and rented a function room above a carpet showroom to be talked out of anything. There were five of them in the room and a sixth chair, empty, which everyone noticed and nobody mentioned. She liked an empty chair. It made a crew pay attention. "The Garrick Tower," she said, and clicked the little remote, and the photo went up on the wall — forty-one storeys of dark glass standing over the river like it was charging the water rent. "Built nineteen years ago. Refurbished twice. The top thirty floors are offices nobody can afford and the bottom ten are a bank nobody's heard of, because banks you've heard of want you to walk in. This one would rather you didn't." "And the eleventh thing," said Bram, from the back, because Bram could never wait. "What's eleven floors down." "The vault." She clicked again. A schematic now, all clean lines, the kind of drawing that cost money to be wrong about. "Sub-basement. Eleven floors below the lobby. It has never been opened by anybody who wasn't supposed to open it. Not because it can't be done. Because the people who could do it looked at the job, did the sum, and went home." "And we're not going home," said Pilar. She had her boots up on the table and a paper cup of the showroom's terrible coffee balanced on her knee, and she was the best driver Nadia had ever worked with, which was the only reason the boots were tolerated. "We're not going home, because the sum is different now." Nadia let that sit. She was good at letting things sit; it was ninety per cent of the job, the other ten being the part where everything went wrong at speed. "Six weeks ago the Garrick changed its security contractor. New firm, cheaper firm, and for eleven days — eleven, the number keeps turning up, I've decided to take it personally — for eleven days during the handover, the old system and the new system are both running, and neither one fully trusts the other. That's the window. That's the whole job. Eleven days, and we are now on day three." Marek, who had not spoken, who never spoke until he had decided the thing was real, leaned forward. He did locks and he did doors and he had hands like a surgeon's and a face like a man waiting for bad news he was sure was coming. "Eleven moving parts," he said. "You said eleven parts. On the phone." "I did." "Walk them." So she walked them. She stood in the function room above the carpet showroom and she laid out the eleven parts of the cleanest job of her career, one through eleven, and the crew watched the wall and did the sum along with her, and she watched their faces do the thing she needed faces to do, which was stop calculating and start wanting. She got to eleven. She clicked the remote one last time and the wall went dark. "Questions," she said. Pilar took her boots off the table. "Just the one. The empty chair. Who's the sixth?" "The sixth is our inside man. He works the sub-basement four nights a week and he has agreed, for a number that made him stop arguing, to be in the wrong place at the right time." Nadia almost smiled. "He's not here tonight because the first rule of an inside man is that he is never in the same room as the crew. You'll meet him exactly once, and only one of you, and that's how it stays." "What's his name," said Bram. "His name," said Nadia, "is part four. We'll get there." What she did not know — what none of them in the room above the carpet showroom knew, on day three of eleven — was that part four was already finished. Part four had finished at six-forty that evening, in a car park she had never seen, and the inside man was not going to be in the wrong place at the right time, because the inside man was not going to be anywhere at all.