Week 9.5 – Ripped Off

Previously: Digger and Twain were sneaking into a deserted mansion when Twain revealed he hadn’t actually disabled the alarms. And now…

“I wasn’t able to recon this place as thoroughly as I’d like,” Twain said. “He may not even have an alarm on the house. I just don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” Digger repeated in disbelief. “What the hell kind of villain are you?”

“Hey, I’m just as good a villain as you are a hero,” Twain retorted.

“That’s not helpful.”

Twain halted them before a set of double doors and started to dig through his bag. “Look, the best I could do was finding one photo in an old magazine article along with tracking down invoices from when the place was built. Video cameras, motion sensors, pressure plates. But not enough to cover the entire house and grounds. Enough to monitor a narrow band around the perimeter, or one or two rooms very thoroughly.”

He pulled an electronic probe from the bag and attached it to his smart phone. He waved the probe around as high as he could reach, and a moment later, a staticky picture wavered to life on the phone. “Yeah, see? He’s got a camera mounted up in the corner of the room. Second signal piggybacking on the first; probably a motion sensor. Which is where you come in.”

“I don’t get it,” Digger said.

“The room is a basic rectangle,” Twain said. “I’m guessing there are four sensor/camera suites, one in each corner, oriented toward the opposite corner. That gives them redundant coverage of the entire room. That plus pressure sensitive plates in the floor makes it pretty impossible to sneak into. But in the photo I saw, I noticed that the decorator had installed ceiling fans. Which means the motion sensor fields are probably calibrated to ignore anything above the fans’ level.”

He dug into his bag and drew out a metal box which contained six small cylinders. He showed Digger how the cylinders could open to clamp around a cable. “You’re going to climb on the ceiling and clamp one of these to each camera cable to disable the devices. Then you just grab what we need. Easy.”

“It’s never that easy,” Digger said as Twain handed him the cylinders and a flashlight he could strap around his head. But things actually went pretty smoothly. Twain set off a smoke grenade to conceal Digger’s entrance through the top of the doorway. Then Digger crept to all four corners and clamped the cylinders to the cables. “Okay, now what?”

“Now go to that cabinet on the far left,” Twain said.

As Digger turned his head to search for the cabinet, the light fell on a glass display case. Inside the case was a familiar sight: a stout miner’s pick with a hammer head on the back end. “Hey, that’s Angar’s. What’s this guy doing with Angar’s hammer?”

Digger scanned the wall, and his light fell across a portrait. “Whose house did you say this was?”

“I didn’t. Some rich lawyer named Derek Arthur,” Twain answered.

“Jesus Christ!” Digger shouted. “We’re robbing Caveat Maledictor’s house?”

Is this as bad an idea as it sounds? Find out next week in our next exciting chapter!

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