Money Run by Jack Heath Read Free Book Online Page A

wouldn’t arrive for three days. After that there was one word – “ Interested? ” – with a link to a secure server.
    They had panicked. No way were they clicking the link – the police were obviously on to them, and were trying to lure them into a trap. What should they do? How could they save themselves?
    But four days later, they saw a story on the news about federal agents finding $700,000 in a storage unit. Apparently the drug lord who rented it had died of a heart attack months ago, leaving his lease to expire.
    The storage unit was the location in the Source’s email.
    The Source sent them a few more emails. Each had a location, a date and a link. At first, Ash and Benjamin were still suspicious – even if it wasn’t the police, someone was playing games with them. Who, and why? So they started clicking the links, in order to investigate. Behind each one, they found a description of something valuable. Something that would be in a specific place, at a specific time, briefly exposed. Vulnerable. And there was always a bank account number, to deposit 15 per cent of the profits after the job – the informer’s cut.
    They didn’t know how the Source had found them. But they knew he or she was offering them a fortune. And it wasn’t long before they received an email about Hammond Buckland.
    The place? HBS. The prize? Two hundred million dollars .
    The link led them to a document that detailed Buckland’s financial history, including all his exploits, corporations, profits and expenses. The information was mostly on the public record, but there were a few things, like account balances from Buckland’s bank statements, that must have been stolen. And the Source had highlighted one spot where the numbers didn’t add up. At exactly the time Buckland purchased what was now the HBS building and started refurbishing it, $200 million mysteriously disappeared. There were no other expenditures. No acquisitions. No other infrastructure. There was only one place the money could be.
    Benjamin and Ash were excited. There was a fortune hidden somewhere in the HBS building, and only they knew it was there. So they started planning.
    Benjamin went into HBS one day, with a cover story about an economics project. It didn’t get him beyond the lobby, but he was able to take a few snapshots of the vacuum bots – the squat, circular robots that rolled quietly around each floor, sucking dust out of the carpet and polishing the floor tiles. Having established the make and model, he ordered one on eBay. When it arrived, he took it to pieces and planted a tiny camera next to the motion sensor and a transmitter behind the wheels. Then he repackaged it, went back into HBS, and poured a cup of coffee into the motion sensor of one of theirs. Without a working sensor, the bot started bumping into walls and people. Benjamin went back home, and waited.
    It took three days for HBS to notice the fault. It took two days for them to establish it couldn’t be fixed and order a new one. It took one day for the company that made the robots to send a delivery driver with a replacement. And it took twenty-two seconds for Ash to steal the robot out of the truck, leaving Benjamin’s modified version in its place.
    Ash hadn’t asked why they didn’t just switch one of the robots at HBS for theirs. Benjamin told her anyway.
    â€œFirstly because the robots map out each floor as they move so they can clean with the most efficient route,” he said. “Our one wouldn’t know the floor plan, because it was new. This would cause the engineers at HBS to believe it was faulty and open it up, then they might spot our camera and transmitter. And secondly, because HBS puts chips in everything they own, so it sets off the alarms any time someone tries to take it outside the building. It had to be a new one.”
    â€œWe could have thrown the old robot in the garbage inside the