The Heist

had the opportunity to see a most remarkable sight. Sadly for the two guards in the front office who were halfheartedly watching the surveillance camera feeds, the sight was not made available to them.
    Earlier in the day, a leather armchair and a matching couch had been placed in the hallway outside the salon where the Crimson Teardrop was on display. There were cameras in the hallway aimed at the chair and couch, but one side of each piece of furniture was not visible to the cameras, and it was on those sides that the upholstery began to peel away and reveal two men. One of the men had been folded in a sitting position in the chair. The second man had been lying inside the couch. Both men were completely clad, from head to toe, in skintight green bodysuits.
    If Spider-Man was entirely green, couldn’t shoot webs from his wrists, wasn’t ripped, and was self-conscious about the contours of his privates being so out there, these guys were what he’d look like.
    Chair Man stood up and removed a folded green bedsheet and a small green gym bag from within the chair. Couch Man slid out and removed two thin boards wrapped in green fabric from within his couch. The lightweight boards were roughly the same size as his body and had handles on their backs, which allowed him to hold them like shields.
    At that same moment, one of the two security guards looked atthe monitor showing the camera feed from the hallway and saw nothing unusual. Chair Man and Couch Man and the contours of their privates and the things they carried were absolutely invisible on the camera feed.
    Chair Man opened his bag, crouched in front of the archway, and took out a green aerosol can, which he sprayed in front of the archway walls, where he knew the heat and motion sensors were hidden. He and Couch Man waited for the mist to clear, then Couch Man handed one of the shields to Chair Man. The two green men, standing behind their boards, entered on either side of the archway. They each stopped in front of the archway frame, unfolded legs from the backs of the boards, and left them in place.
    The half-ton steel door hidden above their heads didn’t come crashing down, so they continued into the salon devoted to the Crimson Teardrop display. There was no corner of the room that was obscured from the view of the many hidden cameras, and yet none of them picked up the two men or what they carried.
    Chair Man set the green gym bag and the green sheet on the floor in front of the pedestal holding the Teardrop. He picked up one edge of the sheet, Couch Man picked up the other, and they slowly lifted it up in unison and draped the fabric gently over the entire display. Chair Man slipped under the sheet with a glass-cutting tool and began to cut into the Teardrop’s protective glass box. The cut was barely a scratch, hardly visible to the naked eye, but the instant the glass was breached, an alarm sounded and the steel door came crashing down in the archway, rocking the building like an earthquake and trapping the two green men inside the room.

Nick Fox, in his guise as Inspector Norman Peterson, arrived within twenty minutes of the alarm call, carrying two cups of coffee from Starbucks, one of which he handed to Clarissa Hart, who stood anxiously outside the steel door with the two security guards who’d been watching the monitors.
    “One Cinnamon Dolce Latte, as promised, though I didn’t expect I’d ever have to come through on it.” Nick tipped his head toward the lanky young man in the corduroy jacket who’d arrived with him. “This is my partner, Inspector Ed Brown.”
    Brown nodded. It wasn’t his real name, of course. Not even Nick knew what that was. Every time he’d worked with “Brown,” the man had a different name and a different look.
    “What set off the alarm?” Nick asked, taking a sip of his coffee, seeming to be in no hurry at all to apprehend the thieves trapped on the other side of the steel door.
    “There’s a sensor that monitors the air pressure inside the glass box that contains the Crimson Teardrop. It’s tripped the instant the glass is breached. But here’s what makes no sense, Inspector,” she said, holding up her iPhone. “This is the feed from one of the security cameras. As you can see, there’s nobody inside the room, but there’s no way out and the image is definitely live. You can see the steel door in the archway.”
    “But you can’t see pieces of this,” Nick said, gesturing to the chunks of