[Illium, Nos Olmos] Withdrawal

There was something to be said for the availability of floor plans. Illium architects were notoriously mercenary, and a few credits in the right direction could get you a remarkable amount of advance intel, and so it was that Shirin sat at the head of the war room's table, staring at a blueprint of the Citizen's Financial Institute in Nos Olmos.

She really needed a smoke. If the hookah hadn't gone missing several days ago, she'd probably be in a better mood.

"The haul is a guaranteed sell if we can get it out of there and back to the client," she said, taking a second to grind her molars together in a vain attempt to relieve the frustration of the previous week. "Which, considering the security, should go fairly smoothly."

The odd urge to punch Cerastes filled Shirin's mind, for no readily-apparent reason. Hopefully this was just a reaction to recent events, and wouldn't become a consistent thing in the future.

"...Okay, I give up. Has anybody seen my hookah?"

"Nope."

Somewhere out there in the galaxy, Cerastes suddenly felt very threatened.

He made another pot of coffee to comfort himself.

There was a nearly interminable silence.

"...Right."

She was still young, and impetuosity took over from time to time, but you didn't get through the Red Room without cultivating a considerable amount of patience. Shirin breathed in deep, compartmentalized her frustration, and returned to the heist-planning.

"They've got a reasonably small detachment of Eclipse rent-a-cops working security - we could probably take them if we had to, but we won't have to because we're not starting anything." The overhead view zoomed out, highlighting a spot across the street from their intended target. "With that said, in the event that the plan doesn't survive contact with the enemy, there's a Grand Tiala across the street. I've taken the liberty of renting a room on the fourth floor for Aliquam. Hopefully it'll be a suitable position - I chose that side because the bank has the most windows facing its direction."

"The room is excellent," the turian said, "The angle affords me deep penetration, I can shoot almost cover one third of the building..."

He tapped his chin, "I think I saw you hookah with the rest of the supplies. Together with rifles... speaking of which, I'll be using a M-98 non-arm ripping variant on this job... should things go bad I'll switch to a Krysae, don't stand too close to targets once I do that. It'll get gory fast..."

Left unsaid; "That's why people call me Demon Thunder"

"I'll warn you in advance... when I get made I'll go up shoot a few more from the roof and exit using the waiting car. Where's the post-operation rendezvous point?"

He could of course be called 'suitcase' as he was had more than one of them, sniper rifles where tools, you needed the right one for the job and he made sure he had all the tools he could ever need.

“Here, lemme show ya, Sug,” said Ana, winking as she passed an OSD off to Quam. “Got a pair of reservations over at the Callis in the Sackhoff District. Real swanky place, got this loooovely crystal fountain in the Reception. I almost decided to call a friend about getting a discount for the Penthouse suite, but you know—” she waved a hand at the turian – “windows and such. Floor number’s 53, Room 67? Yeahhh, that sounds about right.”

Considering her usual state on the ship, Ana was…unusually perky today – even going so far as to use big words again. The reason for this was the same reason that there was approximately 56 credits’ worth of Amber Gliss tucked in a locker in the Armory – she’d simply not gotten around to smoking it yet. Actually, no, that was a lie; it was more that she hadn’t smoked it at her usual time, just before passing out for the night. As a result, the Blue Lady was filled with restless energy that she needed to burn – and today’s operation was the best chance for her to do so.

She scratched at an itch on her abdomen, grinning.

“Oh, and if things go tits-up and we need to crash someplace else, there’s this great place on Bamber I got as a contingency. Place is called Widdows – kind of a dump, to be honest, but real private and serves the best Tupo Sunrises on Illium.”

Ana had successfully done two or three things on command now - that made her substantially more reliable than Shirin had expected. It was a relief to find that Jil'Korah's endorsement wasn't suddenly becoming worthless, and she was beginning to feel more comfortable trusting the asari.

The eventual discovery of her hookah would probably do some damage to that trust.

"We're not actually after the money, particularly since we don't have a reliable means of laundering it at the moment." The diagram of a lower floor glowed, highlighting a large room. "Our goal's in the sub-basement - one of the safe deposit boxes has a property title in it that our buyer's interested in acquiring. Now, normally, the safe deposit boxes are kept locked down, and you have to be escorted down there to get through the security door. However, the door's powered by a basic two-track system - we knock off the primary power externally, then it's down for about five seconds until the secondary kicks in."

Steepling her fingers, the drell leaned back in her chair. "So depending on how you want to do this...I could get in position and then have the door open in those five seconds. Alternately, Kirok could probably knock out the secondary track. It'll be on-site - the primary draws from Nos Olmos municipal - so we'd have to physically take out the generator."

Speaking of Jil'Korah, the quarian finally spoke up, having listened carefully to everything said so far while he figured out how to carry out his part.

"Man. Hacking a power system like that is easy - all kinds of fun. I wish I could help out, but Ensemble and I will be pretty busy keeping the alarms from going off. Any kind of power outage is going to put law enforcement on notice, especially if it's not accompanied by an outage in the rest of the city, and this kind of place is constantly monitored. The big banks have VIs in place whose only purpose is to watch for this kind of stuff."

Rising from his chair, the quarian paced around for a while, speaking out loud but to nobody in particular.

"We're going to have to isolate the bank from local networks without triggering the alarms, which is going to be hard enough in and of itself - setting up some kind of feedback loop should do it, but it's nowhere near as easy as it is in the vids and unless we get it right the whole building will lock down as soon as we try. We'll have to do the same thing to the monitoring network at the exact same time or it will trigger other alarms; even just maintenance alerts would be bad news for us here because inevitably someone will turn up to investigate."

He paused in his circuit, looking up and then directly at Shirin.

"We can handle it, but it's going to keep us busy. You guys will have to deal with the internal stuff."

"All right. Good to know."

Keeping the system under control meant they'd lose access to Jil and Ensemble for most of the job, but if all went well, that wouldn't be longer than ten or twenty minutes, and Shirin could handle any internal tech-related issues herself. Of course, things rarely went well.

"Let's skip the generator; it'll just get us more attention. Kirok, you're coming in through the basement with me. If it doesn't go as planned and we start getting maintenance or security investigations, or if someone comes down to do something with the safe deposit boxes, I need you to deal with them quietly while I finish extracting the haul."

The trick was predicting where things wouldn't go well, or indeed where they would completely blow up and fly off the rails, and taking measures to build up your contingencies in those areas. Occasionally something totally unexpected would happen in the second-least-likely way (Shirin always prepared for the least-likely to happen, just in case), and these were the times that tried men's souls. Thankfully, you didn't get through the Red Room without learning a lot about grabbing the unexpected and running with it. Improvisation - not just on Shirin's part, but the entire group's - had pulled them through several heists that probably should've ended badly, and it likely would again.

With that said, the idea was to make sure it didn't get to that point. Statistically speaking, you can only be reduced to improvising so many times before your ability to think on the fly fails you. This combined poorly with the generally high stakes of stealing expensive things from heavily-armed people. As such, Shirin tended to ask herself "But what if x?", where x was some deeply unlikely scenario, during the planning process.

"Ana, any preference for your assignment on this one? I was thinking I'd just put you with Kirok to deal with anybody showing up in the sub-basement unexpectedly, but if you have any suggestions for a distraction up top I'm willing to go with it."

Another part of heist preparation was, of course, soliciting input and playing to the strengths of your resources.

Kirok cleared his throat and leaned back in his chair, the ancient plastics creaking dangerously.

"I kin handle ennythin on m'own, Shirin. Put the 'sari up top. Don't need newbies gettin' in m'way."

“Well, o’course you can, dear!” replied Ana, giving the krogan wink. “I wouldn’t dream of gettin' in the way’a what you do best…though one of these days ya’ll have to give a girl her due credit…’cause I was thinkin’a simply being the tech crew. Y’know, in case we did trip somethin’ down there.”

Kirok just glared, mentally commanding the asari's head to explode into gory bits, or catch on fire, or something. Luckily for the asair, Kirok had not become telekinetic in the past hour, so Ana was safe. The krogan satisfied himself with sneering at her, and then promising himself he'd slip some varrenshit into her room somehow.

"I like it." Shirin studied the diagram, cracking the knuckles on one hand. She nearly added that it would work perfectly as long as Kirok didn't mistake Ana for an actual maintenance crew and waylay her the second she appeared, but that went without saying. No reason to potentially insult anybody.

"So, if anything gets by Jil, you're our backup plan - otherwise, just keep an eye out for anything suspicious happening up top."

"You think we have time to stop at the Matriarch whatever Plaza? They have this bakery that sells some of the best pastries ever so light they almost float... I'll get you guys some levo ones, my treat." Ali thought out loud, "last thing you want is to be on edge because you're hungry."

"Try to stay on target here, people. There's not going to be time for pastries - we're on a strict timetable here. That's an order."

=== one hour later ===

The lemon-cream donut was actually quite delicious, Shirin decided.

"Approaching the target. Kirok and I will break off in one minute." As begrudgingly as one can munch a pastry, she chewed down the last bites and brushed off her hands - not on the coat covering her hardsuit, thankfully. With Kirok on one side and Ana on another, she meandered over the sidewalk.

They were approximately a block from the CFI. Hopefully the rest of the team was in position by now...

"Aliquam, have you got eyes on the bank yet? Give me a quick summary."

She was about to get a very unpleasant surprise.

"Boss, I'm in position but you won't like what I'm going to tell you..." Ali said, he looked through his scope once again, to make sure he was seeing correctly.

"The bank, it's being robbed." He waited a beat to let it sink in before he continued, "There's a crew working, all masked, I have positively identified one as doing crowd control, I'm sure there are more than three in there. I think they shot one or two guys... just a sec..."

He shifted his gaze to the roofs, of the buildings around the bank, "okay don't know if the alarm is disabled or not but there is no visible police presence... but that can change quickly. They don't seem to be ignoring the entrance to the safety deposit boxes. Maybe they're only after the money."

There was a long sigh over the comm.

"...You know, I actually have a backup plan specifically for this."

"That's some mad planning skills you got there boss... I'll keep you informed if the situation changes."

"Marry me." Shirin reached under her coat and checked the heatsink on her Locust one last time. "All right, things just got a little more complicated, but the basic plan is going to stay the same. Jil, get in the system; I need you and Aliquam keeping an eye on the bank."

Having circled around to the back of the bank, the drell glanced around: it was, for the moment, deserted - external surveillance in this particular spot was nearly nonexistent, and most of the CFI's cameras were inside.

"Once Jil brings the cameras down, we're moving in. Kirok, mine the back door."

Ana grinned as she readjusted the wristpads on her old Eclipse uniform and pushed a thumb against her teeth, making sure the bright white enamel mouthguards were neatly snapped in place. Grinning widely at Kirok, she grabbed a grubby-looking shotgun and popped the safety off it, shaking it as the various pieces popped into place.

“Ready to kick some ass, big boy?”