“Damn,” Chapel said. He glanced into the living room and saw Angel watching him from her chair. She needed him. He was going to save her, but that meant getting her into a bank. “If I had any better ideas…”
As if to underscore his predicament, the noise from the living room rose to a sustained pitch just then. Ralph must have been taking on a Nazi pillbox with a machine gun, judging by the sound.
Chapel tried to think of what to say next, what to do next, but the noise of the game just seemed to rattle around inside his head. He was surprised when Angel jumped up out of her chair and ran toward the television. Was she going to ask Ralph to mute the sound? That might be helpful, or—
He heard her talking to Ralph in the other room. He couldn’t hear the reply, but she was asking him about his video-game console, about what generation it was and whether he had a certain accessory for it. Chapel had never had any interest in such things and wasn’t sure what she was talking about.
When she poked her head back into the kitchen, though, her eyes were bright. “Um, excuse me,” she said. “Can I say something?”
“Of course,” Chapel told her. “What is it?”
“I think I just had one of those better ideas.”
They drove past the big box store three times, just to make sure it was as deserted as it appeared. It sat well back from the road, at the far end of a well-lit but empty parking lot, surrounded on three sides by thick stands of trees. The big sign out front that read CIRCUIT BARN was lit up, but metal security gates had been pulled down across the plateglass windows that fronted the store and it looked like there were no lights on inside. Chapel had kept an eye out for police cars or any sign that someone was watching the store, but he’d seen nothing.
“You really think this’ll work?” Julia asked.
Chapel shrugged. “I think we can get inside without setting off any alarms, yeah. I figure in a neighborhood like this they probably don’t worry too much about robberies, so they’re not likely to have a lot of security cameras. I think we’re good.”
“I was actually asking Angel, about her side of this,” Julia said.
Chapel turned around to look at Angel in the backseat. She nodded.
“Good enough,” he said.
He parked Top’s car outside a Chinese restaurant a block away. The three of them headed around behind the restaurant and then made their way through the trees that screened the Circuit Barn lot. There was a chain-link fence back there, about six feet high, installed so long ago that tree branches had woven through the gaps between the chain. There was no barbed wire on top of the fence, so it was easy enough to climb up and over.
On the far side, still inside the cover of the trees, he gestured for the two women to wait a minute. He studied the back side of the Circuit Barn and saw about what he’d expected to find, a place for Dumpsters and a loading dock where trucks could bring in the store’s merchandise. The loading dock had a big rolling door, but he knew that would be hooked up to the store’s alarms. Another, smaller door opened into a patch of weeds strewn with old cigarette butts and decaying coffee cups. He guessed that was where the store’s employees took their breaks. That was their way in.
He took one last glance around for security cameras, just in case, but he didn’t see any. Then he waved Julia and Angel forward, and the three of them gathered around the employee door.
“There’s almost certainly an alarm on this door,” Chapel said, “so we’ll need to be careful, but—”
Angel squatted down next to the door lock and pointed a little flashlight into the crack between the door and its frame. “Anybody have a stick of gum?” she asked.
“I do,” Julia said, looking surprised. She rummaged in her purse, then handed the gum to Angel.
The younger woman unwrapped the gum. She handed the stick back to Julia but kept the foil wrapper. “Give me that screwdriver,” she said, and Chapel handed her the flathead driver he’d brought.
For a minute Angel worked at the door, carefully folding the foil wrapper into just the right shape and then wedging it into the doorframe with the blade of the screwdriver. “The way the alarm works is there’s a wire in the door and a wire in the frame, and when they meet, an electric current flows between them. If you open the door, you break that current and the system knows the door is open, so it sounds the alarm. Then there’s another pair of wires for the lock. Same basic principle, but in reverse — if the current is flowing, the door stays locked, but if the current is broken, it unlocks automatically. The foil in there now will send current from the alarm wire to the lock wire so both systems think they’re intact when in fact,” she said, and pulled the door open, “neither of them are.”
Chapel peered into the darkness behind the open door. “Where did you learn how to do this?” he asked.
Angel laughed. “Sugar, I spend all day, every day on the Internet. You get bored, you start looking at random pages. You pick up a few things.”
Julia shot a look at Chapel and mouthed the word sugar. He shrugged in response. Angel had called him that a million times before when he was on a mission. Just never face-to-face before.
“Okay,” he said. “We’re in. Let me go first.” He ducked inside, into a stockroom, where only a single bulb burned in the ceiling high overhead. He took in the rows of shelves holding boxed electronics, but just then he had other things to worry about. Moving quickly but silently he worked his way through an employee break room, the management offices, and then out onto the sales floor, where hundreds of television sets stared blankly back at him. There was no sign anywhere of a night watchman, no sign that anybody had been inside the store since it closed for the day.
When he was sure of it, he let himself breathe again. Then he headed back to where the women were still standing outside. “We’re good,” he told them. He took a prepaid cell phone out of his pocket and handed it to Julia. He showed her how to switch on its walkie-talkie mode, then turned on a second one for himself. “You’re standing guard,” he said.
Julia nodded. “Anything I’m looking for in particular?”
“Just let us know if you see anything at all. If anybody pulls into the lot, if somebody starts looking at our car, if you hear anything — just let me know. Angel, you’re with me.”
The two of them crept inside. Angel headed down the rows of shelving units in the stockroom, running her finger along the rows of boxes. Chapel winced, thinking of all the fingerprints she was leaving behind. He knew that was the least of their problems, though — breaking and entering was a much less serious crime than treason.
It didn’t take her long to find what she needed. “Over here,” she said.
Chapel came to stand next to her. He saw immediately what she’d found. One entire shelving unit was stuffed full of identical merchandise, big colorful cardboard boxes advertising the latest, hottest video-game system money could buy. There must have been three dozen of them sitting there, waiting to be put out on the sales floor.
“Jackpot,” Angel said.
Chapel found a couple of box cutters in the stockroom and the two of them got to work, furiously slashing open the boxes and pulling out the video-game consoles. “Don’t even worry about the peripherals,” Angel said. “All we need are the actual consoles and their power supplies.” As Chapel laid out the devices in neat rows, Angel headed down another aisle and came back with dozens of Ethernet cables cradled in her arms.