Chapter 6 - The Setup
Los Angeles was a city of glittering illusions, and Silas Vance’s estate in the Hollywood Hills was the grandest of them all. It sat on a cliffside, surrounded by reinforced concrete walls, heavily armed patrols, and a state-of-the-art biometric security grid.
Marcus and Elena set up a staging ground in a rented warehouse in downtown LA.
"The gala starts at 8:00 PM," Elena said, projecting a blueprint of the estate onto the wall. "The server room where Vance is finalizing the defense contract is in the sub-basement. The vault door requires dual biometric scans—Vance’s fingerprint and his retinal scan."
"I can bypass the fingerprint with a silicone mold if we pull his prints off a glass," Marcus analyzed. "But the retinal scanner is military-grade. We can't fake it."
"We don't need to fake it," Elena pulled out a sleek, matte-black EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) disruptor from the Indian's cache. "If I trigger this on the main floor, it will cause a micro-surge in the grid. The vault’s fail-safe will initiate a manual override sequence for exactly thirty seconds. That’s your window to crack the physical tumblers."
"Thirty seconds to crack a bespoke titanium vault," Marcus smirked. "It's tight."
"You used to do it in twenty," Elena reminded him.
"I'm out of practice," he joked, though his pulse was already pounding with the familiar, intoxicating rush of the heist.
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They geared up. Beneath custom-tailored formal wear, they wore lightweight Kevlar vests. The suppressed weapons were hidden in the false bottom of a catering cart they had intercepted and cloned earlier that day.
It was time to crash the party.
