“Again!” Danny yelled out, his figure towering over Baek Kyoung’s sweaty body as he managed to break into the mock safe for the second time in a row. “But faster this time!” Baek Kyoung let out a low groan in protest but got up to his feet anyway knowing that in the end all this practice was going to pay off, largely.

The abandoned motel had proved to be the perfect place to build their mock vault, as its isolation from society entitled the four friends to do anything they pleased without having to worry about garnering any unneeded attention. Baek Kyoung, who impersonated as a graduate student writing a paper on old buildings situated in the heart of the city, easily acquired the blueprints of the actual bank itself from public city records. While the mock vault had been appropriately built to par, with each minute detail having been extrapolated from notes made by Jinhwan after each of the three visits he paid to the bank. The vault itself was like a beautiful woman. Elegant and stunning yet riddled with trust issues that made it painstakingly hard, and at often times, not even worth the attempt to penetrate.

The first of these “trust issues” was a combination wheel that had the numbers 0 to 99 on it, requiring a 4-number code. The seismic alarm imbedded in the doorframe, came next, and made using power-tools useless, as even the slightest vibration from a drill was enough to alter the metal plates underneath setting the alarm off. These plates not only served to detect the smallest change in vibration on the door but also created a magnetic field between the two adjacent sides of the doorframe. The vault door itself served as a conductor of the current and allowed for a constant flow of elementary particles to be sent from one plate to the other in either direction. If the vault door was to be opened and the flow of particles broken, the alarm would be triggered. The only way to bypass the triggering of the alarm when the vault door would be opened was if a code was pressed into the keypad on the adjacent wall disarming the force field. But that wasn’t it. After the code was punched in, a foot-long key had to be pushed through the tiny opening into the lock to finally turn off the field, enabling whomever it was that wanted to open the vault now able to.

The first few levels of security could be easily bypassed, all courtesy of Jinhwan. On his second visit to the bank, he managed to plant a small microscopic camera at the top of the light fixture that gave him the best view of the 4-number code that would be needed for the combination wheel under the ruse that he was trying to kill a moth he saw flying near the light bulb. His camera not only managed to capture the code for the wheel but also the code needed to be punched in the keypad to disarm the magnetic field.

But that was just the vault door. The vault itself had its own barriers that needed to be penetrated, one of them being the triple sensor that sensed light, temperature and motion alterations within the vault. A thin layer of hairspray sprayed over temperature and motion sensor a day before the actual robbery by Jinhwan on his third and final visit to the bank would prove sufficient enough to ward off its effects temporarily, giving Baek Kyoung hopefully enough time to enter the vault in the dark and properly disable them. The rest would be easy pickings. Armed with a customized drill bit, they could easily open each private box in the vault and take whatever it was they desired, which for them was box number 113.

The entire escapade, from the moment they stepped into the foyer of the bank to the moment they walked out, would take a total of two hours if everything went as planned. But practice didn’t always mean perfect, as Baek Kyoung failed again to break through the last layer of external protection and they were already entering their third hour into the robbery. The mock vault they had built back at the motel was an exact replica, which only further frustrated the men, as Baek Kyoung still couldn’t manage to infiltrate it despite having done it countless times in the past three months successfully.

“Let’s just go man,” Jinhwan advised, looking over to Teddy and Baek Kyoung while they stood in the vault antechamber. “Its been almost three hours. Look, no one even knows we broke in. People just think the bank is closed today. Let’s just get out while we still can without any problems.”

“Are you ing kidding me?” Teddy yelled out. “After all this you want to give up? Do you even realize what’s at stake here?”  Shaking his head in disappointment, he turned to look over at the youngest. “Try again. This time focus.”

Baek Kyoung meekly nodded and turned to face the three-ton steel vault door, closing off the larger of the two vaults that were in the basement. The other vault, the one they could care less about, was kept open during business hours and contained close to two million dollars in cash. But that wasn’t what they were there for. What they wanted was in the vault on the opposite side of the room; the vault whose door alone had over five layers of security. However, the man was already bogged down by one of the easiest of the layers – the code for the keypad. The four men had watched the video footage enough times to have the four-digit code literally stamped on their hippocampus yet still it didn’t work. Which only meant one thing – the code had been changed. It was something the four men had both not expected and not accounted for during their preparations.

Baek Kyoung sighed, burying his masked-face into his hands. He had already used the two homemade slabs of aluminum, sticking them to the outside of the doorframe altering the direction of current flowing from each plate without breaking the individual stream. Therefore, the current the plate emitted would bounce off the aluminum slab and get sent back to it, manipulating the plate into thinking it was the other plate sending it a current back. So that when the vault door would eventually be opened, the plates would never sense a break in the magnetic field. This small maneuver would sidestep the confirmation call the bank manager would get from Alliance Securities verifying that it was indeed them that wanted to open the vault and not someone else. All of this had been done effortlessly, but Baek Kyoung still couldn’t open the door. It was all perfect – the plan they had mapped out, the plan they had expected to execute without fault was essentially flawless yet there he was standing in front of the three-ton obstacle beside himself.

A simple four-numbered code, a total of 10,000 possible combinations, was all they needed and Baek Kyoung had already tried 1,000 in the last two hours with no positive outcome to report. Although he was grateful that there seemed to be no maximum number of inputs into the keypad, he wasn’t about to sit there and punch out the remaining nine thousand combinations as time wasn’t on their side. The young male looked up, his eyes pleading for help from Jinhwan.

“Um. Here.” Jinhwan started off, pulling the pen out of his jacket pocket and scribbling on the backside of the paper Baek Kyoung had used to write down all the combinations he had gone through unsuccessfully. Jinhwan was the resident genius, a nerd if you will, great with numbers and computers yet horrible with the opposite . “Use this algorithm. If we take into consideration the thousand combos you have already tried, and take out the really obvious combinations that leaves us with eight thousand or so. Now if we think about the fact that the combo was probably created by a super computer, it probably used an algorithm similar to the one we are using.” Jinhwan continued to scribble gibberish onto the paper while the other two men looked on hoping that this would solve their problem.

Danny, oblivious to the growing sense of urgency down in the basement, paced around the lobby toting his M16 assault rifle in his arms gradually becoming bored and annoyed with how he got stuck with babysitting when it was initially Jinhwan’s job. His mind drifted off into another world when the television screen overhead began to display highlights of the recent soccer match diverting Danny’s attention away from guarding the group of hostages.

Alex’s body stiffened once more when she felt the security guard’s fingers touch her forearm for the second time, trying to get her attention as she hesitantly turned her head toward him. Without saying a word, his eyes darted down to his back pocket then back to Alex as if telling her there was something there. Alex’s eyes followed suit and she nearly choked on her own spit when she saw the outline of a long rectangular object. Scooting over closer to the guard, Alex angled her arms letting her fingers sink into his back pocket and whimpered at the feel of the cold metal against her fingertips. While keeping an eye on Danny, who was still distracted by the game, Alex slowly pulled the object out.

All the other hostages peered over their shoulders and watched with anticipation while Alex pulled the black switchblade out of the security guard’s back pocket. How had the burglars missed that? Easy. Danny and Jinhwan assumed that all of the security guard’s weapons were in his utility belt that they removed and failed to give him a proper pat down to check for other devices that could be used as a weapon. It was as though a curtain of hopelessness that had once been shrouded over the group of hostages was pulled away – they potentially had a way out. Alex’s hands shook uncontrollably, as she opened the switchblade, aiming the knife against the plastic tie and slowly began sawing away at it, trying desperately to break the security guard free. Her hands shook so much that the switchblade fumbled out of her hand and hit the marble floor with a loud clang.

Danny instantly spun around, his eyes wild as he searched for the source of the sound. Haeri, the middle aged mother, instantly pinched her child’s side, forcing the young girl to let out a deafening shrill that progressed to incessant crying.

“Shut her up!” Danny yelled while Haeri cooed the crying child in her arms, her eyes darting toward Alex who sent her a small smile of thanks in her direction. When Danny had diverted his attention back to the television, Alex’s fingers grasped onto the switchblade again. She couldn’t give up now, not when everyone was counting on her.

“Um, this would be a whole lot easier if I just ran upstairs real quick and grabbed my laptop.” Jinhwan said, looking over to Teddy as if asking for permission.

“Stop wasting time. Just do it quick. You have like what, 300 combos left?” Teddy questioned, peering over Baek Kyoung’s shoulder to glance at the math formula that looked like it was written in a foreign language.

Accepting defeat in the matter, Jinhwan looked back at the sheet of paper and continued with his algorithm. “Well, if we apply-”

The sound of gunshots being fired ripped through Jinhwan’s train of thought as chaos erupted upstairs in the main lobby. The three men looked at each other, fear and concern drowned their eyes as the screaming from up above never ceased. Taking two steps at a time, the three men ran up to the main floor and skidded to a halt.  Blood tainted the white marble floors – blood that wasn’t supposed to be shed – blood that would mark the first of a series of mistakes the four men were never supposed to make.

word count: 2029

thanks for reading!

hopefully it wasn't too boring for you...lol

a/n: if I lost any of you while explaining the security layers of the actual vault please don't hesitate to ask me!!