Excerpt
THE HEIST
BREACH
The bank stands alone at the city's heart. Circular and tall, its face to the world is of unbroken, smooth steel, a façade that hides and protects its heart. Whatever windows there may be are hidden.
Along its vertical wall a shadow moves. Where no living creature could go it crawls, a piece of darkness and moonlight almost indistinguishable from its surroundings.
It moves along. Its body is encased in a darkness that is more than clothes; its hands cling to the wall by uncertain means. It climbs the tower like a spider, scuttling in a silence that is more than the absence of noise.
The tower's immune system has not so far detected the intruder. If it had, hidden machines would open fire, for every five lead bullets two of silver, for every four bullets one tipped with gold. If it had, if the motion sensors and the heat sensors, the dust sensors and the X-ray censors, radar and cameras and other, more arcane means, have not temporarily failed, the intruder would be captured and brought inside to the intimate womb of the tower, from which it would never return.
The intruder moves, uninterrupted, until it reaches the upper levels of the tower. Here there are hidden windows, a loose array of armoured, one way mirrors.
The intruder feels along the sides of one, running its hands along the perimeter of the small window. Any impact with the glass, any cut made to the layers of glass and wiring, will cause an immediate reaction. It jerks away its hand in seeming pain: there are tiny crucifixes cut into the glass, every five centimetres. The intruder scuttles up and down the side of the wall until it finds a window that it is apparently satisfied with. Feeling along the bottom of the windows, it detects the tiniest motion of air. There is a gap in the tower, a breach on a micronic scale.
In seconds, the intruder is gone. A cloud of vapour hangs in the air for a short while yet, the ghost of the dark mist that edges its way into the tower.
Inside, the cloud quickly reassembles. It reveals its shape first, then solidifies further, now that it is in the building. The intruder's clothes are matt black, sealing the body inside it.
The intruder removes its headgear, revealing the face of a woman. She glides along the walls and down a corridor, looking around her cautiously. Her movements are precise.
There are no sounds. Her steps become more confident as she walks further into the heart of the tower.
Then, without warning, dark shapes slide out of the ceiling.
They look like bulbous plants at first, little metal balls that noiselessly grow a circle of tiny pipes around themselves, like the offshoots of a flower.
They sprinkle out water in a fine mist that gently descends to the floor. The intruder does not even notice until the water is nearly on her naked face.
Then she screams.
In the dim light of the corridor her face is a mask of writhing shadows. Where the water touches it, the skin blisters and frays.
Only the eyes remain for a while longer as the face around them is rapidly consumed, staring with an unnatural fear at the floating mist. Then they, too, are consumed in a bright flare and her whole head explodes, spraying the walls with brain and blood that are dry, and that form little mounds of mud on the floor. The intruder's body slowly topples over.
In time it, too, is consumed by the mist.
