Chapter 9
The Present… Third Floor Of A Building, New York City, USA
I was still a little ahead of schedule as I drilled the last hole I hoped to need. A solid plug of concrete was freed from the ceiling by the series of holes I’d drilled around its perimeter. I’d cut through all the rebar except one. It was bent down from the weight of the plug of concrete it kept suspended. Climbing the scaffold I added my weight to that of the concrete and bent the rebar more. Gauging the size of the hole, I figured there was a 50/50 chance I could wiggle my fat ass through without further drilling.
Going up and down the scaffold to get my tools inside the vault caused my head to swim and black spots to dance in my eyes. I needed another energy bar break before I passed out and fell off the scaffold. Using the sink in the janitor’s closet I washed concrete dust from my eyes and face. Two more energy bars and a gallon of water later I felt much better. It was still hard to summon the energy to get my feet moving. All my body wanted to do was to continue to lie on the cool and amazingly comfortable concrete floor. If my life force had a gauge like a car’s fuel tank it would be hovering just above EMPTY with a big, rapidly flashing red light. I was running on energy I was borrowing from tomorrow and I knew I’d have to pay for it somehow.
I told Rambo I was going to try. In time to a soft chant in my earpiece of Do it! Do it! Do it! I squirmed, shimmied, and wormed my way through the hole with only minimal scrapping damage to my leotard and ass. Sitting on the edge, I unwound the repeater’s wire antenna through the hole so Rambo and I were still able to communicate.
I had two battery-powered lanterns. Turning them on I saw that there was a table running most of the length of the vault. One lantern on each end and, yep… This was a table with lights under a white, glazed top. I found the switch to turn the lights on and I had plenty of illumination to take my first good look at what I’d been striving to reach for months.
A long room stretching from the vault door to iron bars in the back. Along both walls facing the center table were small doors of varying sizes holding safety deposit boxes. Place the most religious people you know in every cathedral ever built… What they might feel was what I felt at that moment. “Oh, my God, Rambo. It’s so beautiful!” I whispered.
I don’t know why I whispered. All the sensors were on the other side of that foot-thick steel door. I had my out-of-body moment and then a rasping voice in my earpiece pulled me back to the present. “Beauty don’t feed the bulldog, Sugar Tits! Get to work and bring home the bacon!”
Deciding Rambo was correct this time, I got to work. I strapped on another ‘bra’. This one had a wide Velcro strip between my boobs and wasn’t built to support a hundred pounds of drill. Next was a wide-mouth silk bag with a Velcro strip that attached to my bra. Next were two sets of keys…
Wanna know a secret? All the safety deposit boxes in all the vaults built by this company can be opened by just twenty keys! Ten Master Keys and ten Customer Keys. The bank will get one Master Key. Any customer who wants a box gets one of ten keys matching his or her box. But that one key will open 10% of ALL the boxes in the vault. Because the customer doesn’t know this and because the customer doesn’t have the bank’s Master Key, the other boxes are still secure.
Think about it. You build hundreds of safes and vaults a year. Thousands of safety deposit boxes. Are you going to keep track of tens of thousands of keys for when a duplicate needs to be made? No, of course not! You send the bank in Des Moines Master Key One and you send to the bank in San Fransisco Master Key Two. The bank doesn’t know what other banks that master key will work at. Just as the customer won’t know what other boxes his key will open. Ignorance keeps everything secure.
How do I know this? Another story for another day. How did I get my keys? Again, another story for another day. I got work to do!
I started at the end beside the vault’s door. The fourth key I tried turned out to be the Master Key to everything in this vault. The other nine got tossed into the silk pouch stuck to my chest. Third Customer Key turned the lock and I pulled the box out and set it on the lit table. It wasn’t very large and when I lifted the top… Ten shiny rows, ten files… I had to clear my throat before I could speak, “Rambo. One hundred. Two carats. Round cut.”
We’d agreed that I’d try to give Rambo a running count of what I stole. Rambo could keep a rough approximation of what we had. This math was easy since I knew approximately what diamonds cost by size and cut. Even allowing for a .25 cent on the dollar the fence would give us, I tilted the box and poured about 700,000 dollars into the silk bag between my boobs. 350,000 dollars of that was mine!
And this was only the first box! There was way, way over a hundred to go!
My legs got weak and I grabbed the side of the table for support. I think I had an orgasm!
The Past… Wisconsin, USA
Getting a job at the company was simplicity itself. I found out the person hiring was male. A button-down blouse with a couple of buttons too many undone combined with a pushup bra… I knew I was hired before the typing test. I was just one more in the secretarial pool. I typed, filed, ran messages, and did what needed to be done on any given day. One thing that needed to be done every day was the VP who’d hired me. At least in his opinion. I pled having a boyfriend when he kept asking me out after work for drinks. I played the part of a wide-eyed, Mid-Western Good Girl who just couldn’t cheat on her boyfriend until he got tired of hearing no.
I had a good finger on the pulse of this company in the first week. Though this company did business on an international scale, this was where the company had started and this very large, very modern building was still the administrative central hub. There was a town nearby but you didn’t apply to work here if you wanted the amenities offered by a large city. If you wanted a great home-cooked meal there was Rusty’s Restaurant where it wasn’t unusual to find foreign billionaires having a power lunch while wolfing down Southern Fried Steak with mashed potatoes and gravy.
Across a manicured grass park where people congregated on nice weather days to smoke and eat their lunch were two very large buildings where safes and vaults were assembled. A third building beyond them served as Shipping and Receiving with a railroad spur that ended at its dock.
There were two break rooms. One in the admin building for office workers and one in the assembly building where safes were made. I ate my lunches in the assembly building. Dear God! Even now I laugh when I remember how simple it was to learn everything I needed to know.
I played the Wide-Eyed, Mid-Western Good Girl role to perfection. Maaaybe my skirts were a little too short? Maaaybe my blouses had one button too many undone? Maaaybe my V-Neck sweaters were a little tight with the V dipping a little low? The men sensed I didn’t mind them looking but they got used to being turned down when they asked me out. I was a Good Girl with a boyfriend, after all.
Pretty soon I was accepted in the break room as a nice looking piece of ass, but an empty-headed piece of ass. I giggled a lot. I also listened a lot.
See, these guys worked hard to do a good paying job well. They worked hard at a BORRRING job that no one wanted to hear about. Not friends and not family. How exciting can you make a story about attaching a safe’s door? I became an excellent listener. I was a decent looking female and I actually seemed interested in what they did. Pretty soon I was being taken on tours of the assembly areas.
It turned out that everything I wanted to know about breaking into safes, these guys had already figured out. It’s just human nature. You spend your days building something, you think of ways to dismantle the same thing. All I had to do was show an interest, ask questions and giggle.
Wow. That’s a thick door. I bet no one could open that! <giggle>
“Nah. This type is a piece of junk. Because of the locking mechanism the door riiight here? It’s barely a quarter-inch thick. Drill right there, snake a hooked wire in to trip the locking pin and you’re in.”
But how can you open this if you forget the combination? I always forgot my lock combination in high school. <giggle>
“We don’t get many calls like that. I guess someone like me would have be sent but I could open this safe in about an hour even without the combination. Drill about two inches above the dial and you can trip the lock. The owner will have to buy another door but we got plenty of those.”
But, I heard someone say that this is special, really strong steel. You can drill into that? <giggle>
“Sure. You just need a tempered drill bit. We order Brand Z bits from Company G.”
I think you get the gist of how I got my Doctorate Degree in Safe Cracking. All I had to do was strike up conversations in the break room, act interested, ask questions and giggle. I also learned about bank vaults. I learned that I’d never be able to get through a vault door! In the movies where in no time at all the bad guy has drilled a hole? Where a stick of dynamite or some nitroglycerine can go BOOM! and the vault’s door just pops open? Bullshit made up in Hollywood crap films!
I did learn how vaults were transported in sections and assembled on-site. I also learned about safety deposit boxes. Getting a complete set of keys took no time. These guys assembled the boxes so they needed keys at their work sites. I’d just stick one in my bra when no one was looking. Took me about a month to collect the whole set. I didn’t know when I might need the keys, but it’s always best to have stuff than not to have.
I did slip up one time in the break room. The guys were talking about this other guy who’d killed his wife and dumped her body in the ocean. He then reported her missing and spun a tale that she’d probably run off with a lover. A week later her body washed up on shore. The killer/husband was now on trial. It wasn’t expected to be a long trial. A bullet from the gun registered to the husband had still been rattling around in her skull. There’s never a hungry shark around when you need one.
I was digging at the bottom of a yogurt cup trying to get the last spoon full and spoke before thinking, “Stupid shithead. Three or four cinder blocks and some rope and he wouldn’t be on trial. Anyone that stupid deserves to fry.”
Oops. Every guy there turned to look at me.
“Well, that’s what Oprah said!” <giggle>
If Oprah said it then it was gospel. I kept my opinions to myself after that.
Winter came and then Spring and Summer. I had binders filled with notes on how to crack open safes. How older safes no longer sold were similar to this or that safe still sold. I drove to other states on Saturdays to special order boxes of drill bits from hardware stores. I bought a large drill I found at a flea market. But I knew I couldn’t just lean into the drill to apply enough pressure for the bit to dig in. A guy gave me the solution he’d thought of while daydreaming about doing what I planned to do in reality.
He actually had a drawing of a framework built around a drill that by turning a wheel pulled the drill bit into the steel door. Attach many ‘arms’ to the framework and then attach those arms to the safe’s door. What to use to attach the arms to the door? Superglue! I managed to get a piece of steel from a trash bin at the plant one night and took it home. I wasn’t convinced my guy knew what he was talking about. Turned out the guy was a fucking genius! Experimenting I found that I needed ten arms attached to the drill’s framework. Ten arms superglued to the piece of steel I wanted to drill into. I could turn the wheel slowly and watch the drill bite and start dropping steel shavings onto my floor. More experimenting and I could average a quarter-of-an-inch every five minutes without applying so much pressure the superglue came unstuck. It also didn’t overheat the steel and bind up the bit.
Fall came and I had everything I thought I’d need. Except for one thing… This company made a crap ton of safes every year. I needed to know where those safes were! What was the use of knowing how to break into a safe if you didn’t know where the damned safe was! Only one person I could think of would have that information. The VP in charge of sales. I needed what was in his computer files. Only trouble was, I knew nothing about computers.
I stayed a little late a few days. The building cleared out fast after 5 pm. One Friday I was able to pick the lock on the VP’s door and slip inside. I searched but couldn’t find anything that might be his computer password written down anywhere. I was going to have to do this the hard way.
I found reasons to take files to the VP. He’d asked me out a couple of times when I’d first started working here, but he’d taken my refusals because of a boyfriend well. The Thursday after I’d broken into his office I snorted some pepper to get my mucus flowing. Looking sad and sniffling I took some papers to the VP. I looked and sounded like I’d been crying all morning.
He asked me what was wrong, of course, and I spun a woeful tale that my boyfriend had broken up with me last night. He’d been seeing someone else all this time. He was getting married… yada, yada, yada… The VP saw his chance for a rebound catch and asked me out for drinks, just drinks between friends, and I could cry it all out. That night we had drinks and I acted much drunker than what I was. I obviously couldn’t drive so he volunteered to drive me home. Helped me to my door and then seduced me on my couch.
We had a torrid, month long sex fest. We fucked everywhere and any time we could arrange to meet if just for a quicky. The Tuesday before Thanksgiving he’d just come inside me when I offered to make his holiday jolly if he’d meet me early in his office in the morning. He was more than willing to come to work early. No one was in the office yet when we locked his office door behind us. Blow jobs, titty fucking, cowboy, reverse cowboy, more blow jobs… It was getting close to the time others would start arriving for work before I finished wearing that guy out and let him finally come. Egging him on to fuck me harder in a stand-up doggy fuck while I was bent over his desk.
He was breathing hard and sweating when he collapsed in his chair. I used tissue to quickly clean between my thighs. Finished, I wrapped my arms around him and whispered in his ear, “Would you print out a file I need now so I don’t have to come back. And it will give me an excuse to have been in here if someone sees me in the hallway.”
Poor guy didn’t have the energy left to think about hiding his password. Standing behind him and looking over his shoulder I saw every letter he hit. Son-of-a-bitch! His password is his wife’s name!
Over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, getting past the only guard on duty was child’s play. Especially since he left the admin building to check the other buildings every hour or so. A few hours later I slipped out of the building with everything I wanted downloaded onto two thumb drives. Years ago when the company moved into this new building, they’d digitized all their old paperwork. I had decades of information on safes and vaults. Who bought them. Where were they installed. What type. Did the customer ask for any security system to be installed. I had everything a thief like me would pay a fortune for!
I continued our affair for several more weeks before a new ‘boyfriend’ was in my life and I said I just couldn’t cheat on him. He took the news of our ‘breakup’ okay. I think he was boinking the new receptionist as well by then. What a lying, cheating SOB!
