The fire stairs were wide enough for Bria and me to creep down side by side. I stopped at every floor, but the doors were all locked, and I didn’t hear any movements on the other sides, much less see anyone through the narrow strips of glass in the doors. No one was working up here in the offices, and Santos hadn’t bothered to station any guards on the higher floors. Excellent.
Bria and I quietly went down the stairs to the second floor. Once we were on the landing there, I leaned over the side of the railing and peered down. Sure enough, a guard was stationed in the stairwell on the first floor, leaning against the open door, thumbing through screens on his phone, totally bored by his assignment.
I motioned to Bria to draw back, then made two Ice picks and unlocked the door on the second-floor landing. I winced at the snick of the door opening, and Bria and I scooted through to the other side and eased the door shut behind us. We flattened ourselves against the wall, out of sight of the strip of glass in the door, and waited, but the guard didn’t come to investigate.
“We’re stuck,” Bria said. “We can’t get past that guard without letting everyone in the lobby know that we’re here.”
“Yes, we can. We just have to be a little more creative. This way.”
The second floor was mostly offices and cubicles, reserved for some of the investment bankers and their assistants or rented out to real-estate and other companies that had extensive dealings with the bank. I stopped a moment, orienting myself, then went over to the opposite side of the building, pushed through a wooden door, and stopped. Bria slipped in behind me and looked around at the urinals, stalls, and sinks.
“Um, Gin?”
“Yeah?”
“What are we doing in the men’s bathroom?”
“Making our own elevator shaft.”
Bria gave me a strange look, but she followed me to the back corner of the bathroom.
“I spent a lot of time studying the bank’s blueprints when I was trying to figure out how to mock-kill Finn here. All the bathrooms are located on this side of the building, stacked right on top of each other, which means that we’re directly above the men’s bathroom on the first floor,” I said. “Someplace that Santos isn’t likely to be, since he’s down in the basement vault. So we get through the floor here, and we can get down to the lobby. After that, we’ll see what’s what and go from there.”
Bria nodded. “Let’s do it.”
We both knelt down. The floor was the same beautiful gray marble as in the lobby, but it wasn’t nearly as thick and had been cordoned off into three-foot squares fitted together. I reached for my Stone magic, and a cold silver light flared to life on the tip of my right index finger, burning as brightly and steadily as a blow torch. I leaned forward and traced my finger along the marble seams, using my power to crack the stone.
Bria came along right behind me, her finger glowing an intense blue with her own magic, driving her elemental Ice down into the cracks that I’d created and widening them.
We repeated the process over and over, cracking the marble with our combined magic until we were able to hook our fingers down into the broken stone and start lifting out chunks of the floor. We worked quickly and quietly, careful not to crack too much of the marble at once. The last thing we needed was for a piece of stone to fall down, hit the floor below, and make enough noise for someone to come check on things.
It took us the better part of fifteen minutes to make a jagged hole that was big enough for us to drop through. I went first, with Bria behind me. We landed on the bathroom floor below, raised our weapons, and waited, wondering if anyone had heard or sensed our magical jackhammers, but a minute passed, then two, then three, and no one came to investigate.
I had taken a step toward the bathroom door when a smear of red on the floor caught my eye. I stopped and pointed to the stain, which was in front of the largest stall door. Bria nodded and raised her gun. I tiptoed forward and opened the stall door.
A giant was inside, his knees tucked up under his body and his arm flung over the toilet as though he were about to puke. The pose was so natural that for a second, I thought he was actually alive. Then I noticed his empty, sightless gaze and the black hole in his forehead still oozing blood. Given his gray uniform, he must have been one of the real guards, killed when Santos and his crew had taken over the bank.
Bria tiptoed forward and eased open the next stall door, then the one after that and the one after that. Bodies filled all of them, stacked on top of one another like rolls of toilet paper. There were six in total, all dressed in guard uniforms.
Santos must have eliminated the real guards first thing, so none of them would make any trouble or trip a silent alarm while the heist went down. Then he’d replaced them with his own crew, dressed in the uniforms that Dimitri had gotten them, so the folks from the armored-truck company wouldn’t know the difference as they handed over all the exhibit jewelry. Smart. And brutal.