Part Two

She found out on day four, at a petrol station, from the radio. That was the part that stayed with her afterward — not the news itself but the cheapness of how it arrived, in between a traffic report and an advert for a sofa sale, a man's voice saying that a body had been found in a multi-storey car park off Calder Street and that police were not yet releasing the name. Nadia stood at the pump with the nozzle in her hand and a number in her head, and the number was the inside man's number, the one she had dialled four times that morning and let ring out four times, and a cold understanding came up through her like water finding the bottom of a boat. She did not panic. Panic was for people who hadn't planned. But she did the next-best thing to panicking, which was she finished fuelling the car with great care, and paid in cash, and drove three streets away to a road she had no reason to be on, and parked, and sat with her hands on the wheel and made herself say it out loud, because saying things out loud was how she stopped them from being true in only the bad way. "Part four is dead," she said, to the windscreen. "And I didn't do it. So somebody did." There were, she made herself work through it, three kinds of somebody. The first kind was the world. People died in car parks for reasons that had nothing to do with anybody's vault — a robbery, a debt, a bad marriage, plain ugly luck. If it was the world, the job was wounded but not finished. You could replace an inside man. It would cost time she did not have, eleven days now down to seven, but it was a wound, not a death. The second kind was the Garrick. If the new security firm, or the old one, or the bank itself had got a thread of this and pulled it, then the inside man had been a leak and someone had stopped the leak the permanent way, and that meant they knew, and if they knew then the eleven-day window wasn't a window at all, it was a trap with the glass already in it, and the only correct move was to drive to the airport and become a different person. The third kind was the worst kind, and she sat with it longest, because it was the kind a planner least wants to look at. The third kind of somebody was in her crew. Five people had been in the room above the carpet showroom. She had chosen all five herself, which felt like it should be reassuring and was the opposite, because it meant any betrayal was a betrayal she had personally invited and signed for. Bram, who couldn't wait. Pilar, who could drive away from anything, including this. Marek, who watched a job until he was sure it was real and never once said what he'd do if he decided it wasn't. And two more she hadn't even named yet to the others — the climber, and the woman who did money — both of whom had known the shape of the thing before tonight. One of them had asked the inside man's name. Bram had asked it. She had said: we'll get there. And someone, somewhere between that answer and this petrol station, had got there first. Nadia started the car. She had a rule, an old one, the rule that had kept her out of every room with bars on it for nineteen years, and the rule was: when a plan loses a part, you do not add a part to fix it, you build a shorter plan. Eleven parts was the cleanest job of her career. Eleven parts was also, as of the seven o'clock news, a dead document. She needed a shorter list. She needed it before the crew heard the radio. And she needed, before anything, before the vault, before the money, to find out which of the people she trusted had stopped being one of them — because you cannot rob a building eleven floors down with someone behind you who has already shown you, quietly, in a car park off Calder Street, exactly what they are willing to do.