Chapter 11: THE SAFECRACKER'S AUDITION
[Tribeca, Manhattan — Five Days Later, 11:42 PM]
Jimmy Chen smoked clove cigarettes and worked with the patient silence of a man who'd made his living by touch for thirty years.
We'd met in a parking garage on Chambers Street — two men and a toolbag climbing into a panel van that Jimmy had prepped with magnetic signs for a locksmith company that didn't exist. The drive to the target was eight blocks. Jimmy talked during three of them.
"The mark is Gerald Haas. Art collector, hedge fund second-tier. Wife's at the opera benefit in Lincoln Center, he's in Southampton for the weekend. Housekeeper leaves at nine." Jimmy's voice was flat, nasal, Brooklyn-born. He drove with one hand and smoked with the other. "Home safe is a Sargent & Greenleaf 6120 — electronic lock with manual override. Wife keeps the good jewelry inside plus a cash reserve. I handle the safe. You handle entry, lookout, and the car."
"Split?"
"Sixty-forty. My job, my intel, my risk assessment. You're here because Alex says you're steady and I'm tired of working with people who fidget."
Fair. I didn't argue. The money wasn't the primary objective anyway — not tonight. Tonight was about watching Jimmy Chen's hands.
The brownstone sat on a tree-lined block where the streetlights were intentionally dim and the security systems were intentionally obvious. Three cameras on the exterior, a monitored alarm panel by the front entrance, and a secondary system on the ground-floor windows that I'd identified during the drive-by Alex had arranged two days ago.
Jimmy parked the van around the corner. We approached through the service alley. The rear entrance had a simpler alarm — a magnetic contact on the door, bypass-capable if you knew where the junction box was.
I knew where it was. The hacking skills I'd copied from DeShawn extended to security system architecture — not deep expertise, but enough to identify a residential setup and locate its vulnerable points. The junction box was behind a utility panel to the left of the door. I opened it, found the correct wire pair, and bridged the contact with an alligator clip. The magnetic sensor registered the door as permanently closed.
"Nice." Jimmy tossed his cigarette. "Alex said you had hands. Let's go."
Inside, the brownstone was dark, quiet, and decorated with the restrained excess of serious money — hardwood floors under Persian rugs, art on the walls that was either very good or very expensive or both. We moved through it without speaking, penlight beams sweeping ahead, footsteps careful on the old wood.
The safe was in the master bedroom closet. Hidden behind a false panel that Jimmy located by running his palm along the wall until he found the temperature differential where the metal housing leaked cold.
"Here." He pulled the panel free, revealing the Sargent & Greenleaf — matte grey face, electronic keypad, manual dial beneath it. Jimmy set down his toolbag, crouched, and went to work.
I stood three feet behind him. Close enough to watch every movement. Far enough to not crowd a man who needed silence the way a surgeon needed light.
The Talent Copy stirred.
The heightened perception narrowed my focus to Jimmy's hands. His fingers on the dial — not gripping, barely touching, the contact so light it was more suggestion than pressure. He turned the dial clockwise, listening with his entire body. His breathing slowed. His head tilted at an angle that placed his ear parallel to the safe face. He wasn't hearing the tumblers fall — he was feeling them, the vibrations traveling through the metal into his fingertips and translating into information that his conscious mind processed as instinct.
Three clicks. A pause. Counter-clockwise. Two more. His ring finger twitched — a micro-adjustment, compensating for the dial's natural play. The electronic keypad above the dial blinked once: manual override accepted.
He tried the handle. The safe opened.
Fourteen minutes. A lifetime of practice compressed into quarter-hour of focused work.
"Bag," he said.
I handed him the lined duffel. Jimmy emptied the safe with efficient hands — cash banded in thousand-dollar stacks (I counted eight), a jewelry box containing a necklace, two bracelets, and a pair of earrings, and a manila envelope that he didn't open.
My mind was full. The copying architecture had been absorbing Jimmy's technique throughout the process — not just the physical movements but the sensory framework, the way he translated touch into information, the decision tree for each tumbler position. The integration was slower than DeShawn's had been. More physical, less cognitive. The patterns were settling into my fingers rather than my mind, which made sense — safecracking was muscle memory at its core, fingers teaching themselves to read metal.
The headache arrived on schedule. Duller than DeShawn's had been — the integration fatigue learning my tolerance, or maybe my nervous system adapting to the process. A low throb behind both temples that I could function through.
We were out in twenty-two minutes. Van, alley, side streets. Jimmy drove without hurry. The alarm never triggered. No cars followed. A clean operation, professional, the kind of job that left no evidence except an empty safe and a wealthy man's insurance claim.
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[Panel Van — Chambers Street Parking Garage, 12:31 AM]
Jimmy split the cash on the van's floor. My forty percent: thirty-two thousand dollars and a diamond bracelet from the jewelry box that he estimated at twenty thousand retail, probably twelve to fifteen through a fence.
"Alex vouched good." He shook my hand. Callused palm, careful grip — a safecracker's handshake, conscious of his tools. "You're steady. No fidgeting, no questions during the work, clean with the alarm bypass. You need a second job, you call me."
"I will."
He offered a flask. Bourbon — good quality, rough finish. I took a pull. The warmth hit my stomach and spread, easing the tension that had been coiled in my chest since we'd entered the brownstone. The satisfaction was physical — not just the money, though the money mattered, but the competence. The operation had worked. My skills had contributed. The Talent Copy was building something real.
Jimmy dropped me at a subway entrance and disappeared into the Tribeca grid. I stood on the sidewalk with thirty-two thousand dollars and a diamond bracelet in my jacket and a new skill settling into my fingertips like muscle memory for a language I'd never spoken aloud.
I walked back to the new apartment — a real lease now, studio in Hell's Kitchen, paid three months upfront from the prepaid cards that had been slowly yielding their Degas proceeds. Not luxury. Not even comfortable, exactly. But mine, with a lock on the door and a window that faced west and a radiator that worked.
The Queen of Hearts sat on the nightstand where I'd placed it the day I'd moved in. I set the cash beside it and counted. Thirty-two thousand from tonight. Plus the bracelet. Plus what remained from the safe deposit and the slowly draining cards.
Roughly a hundred and twenty thousand in accessible assets. Against two hundred eighty-five thousand owed. A hundred and seventy short, with the clock running.
The police scanner I'd bought three days ago sat on the kitchen counter — a Uniden, picked up from a pawn shop on Tenth Avenue, tuned to NYPD and federal frequencies. Background noise while I worked, tracking the city's criminal pulse.
It crackled as I reached to turn it off.
"— surveillance units, Caffrey residence — subject may have information on prison escape timeline. Maintain position. OPR authorization confirmed."
My hand stopped.
Caffrey. Kate's building. Fowler's people, already positioning for Neal's escape. OPR authorization — the Office of Professional Responsibility, Fowler's domain, deployed against its own agents' colleagues to protect a billionaire's treasure hunt.
The timeline was tightening.
I turned the scanner's volume up and sat on the bed in the dark, listening to the machinery of Neal Caffrey's future grinding into position.
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