Alchemy

            by Gabe Wolf

 

“How’d you do it?” He asked me.

“You have no way of knowing I did it,” I said sitting straight up in the interrogation room chair, looking him straight in the eye.

“You don’t even know if anything’s missing yet.  Why would somebody break in and not steal anything?”  He was probably just thrown on this case because they knew nobody would solve it.  They have to act like they care.  He looked at me with a strange expression on his face.  He was too new at this to put together what happened, even though it was right under his nose.

“Unfortunately you’re right,” he said looking up.  “At least for now.”

 

 

It was a warm morning, and I don’t mean warm as in it was going to be a warm day.  It was a warm morning as in I was getting hot, and the sun had just come up.  Too warm for hot coffee.  I was sitting shotgun next to Franklin.  He drove mad, but not like a madman; I’m not sure why.  The rest of the crew was in back of the truck, except for Allen.   Allen was in a car behind us, but he wasn’t going all the way up to the lab.  We were on the freeway at that point, heading north.  We were making good time.  You see, we had to be there at a specific time.  That’s when the delivery was due, and if we were late, they might get suspicious.  I looked back in the bed of the truck, making sure the bag of lab coats were still there.  I’m not sure where they would have gone, it was just a nervous kind of check.  It’s not that I was nervous; there was just nervous energy in the air.  Something about the dry morning heat. 

We exited the freeway and got on south lake street, heading west.  That’s what the plan was.  The plan was flawless, skillfully planned, and was to be carried out masterfully.   It was a quick job.  Relatively quick anyways.  And if all went according to plan, which I had no reason to think otherwise, it was going to be all of our last plans.  This wasn’t a jewelry heist, those were too easy.  I could rob four jewelry stores and be out of the state before lunch time.  There was no fun in those.  This was going to be on the front page of the paper.  All over the network news.  The talk of other labs all over the country.  There was going to be a huge investigation, but the cops would know they couldn’t pin it on anyone.  And the armed guards don’t investigate this type of thing, they just try and stop it, not that their guns were going be of use.

We had been heading west on south lake street for a while, and we started climbing.  I’m not quite sure why they put a national laboratory up in the hills, but it’s pretty far up there.  The truck was going fairly slowly by now, as the incline was increasing.   At the turnout, we pulled over and one of the guys in the back hopped out and got into Allen’s car.  His car was stayed at the turnout.  We pulled back onto the road and made a right.  We passed by the gardens that the university has, and continued up the winding road.

It was Mike working gate security this morning.  Franklin pulled right up to him, greeted him with a grunt, and handed him our order request, on a clipboard, just like we talked about. He handed us a sign in sheet, which we proceeded to sign.  He raised the gate and we drove forward.  The lab complex was huge, and the receiving bay was in the back.  The lab wasn’t quite open for business yet, so it was still fairly quiet.   We pulled around the back, and up an incline to the receiving bay which overlooked the whole lab.  It actually overlooked the whole area for that matter.  I could see clear to the ocean.  There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.  Franklin made a three-point turn and backed into bay number four.

There were about four thirteen minutes until we were to make our move.  Twelve minutes until Allen was to make his.  Bay number three was now open, and the lab workers were starting to unload the truck. I got up and walked into the back of the van.  I dug into the bag of lab coats.

“Put these on,” I said to the others.

I received replies in the form of action.  Tom went up and sat shotgun, taking my place.  Once we started to move, we would only have about a minute.  We sat there, in the back of the truck in silence.  Boy, was it hot. 

We heard the bang.  It was more of a crash followed by some scraping than a bang.  But it was loud, either way.  We opened the back of the truck, and stepped onto the warehouse floor.  Franklin sat with Tom in the truck with no intention of moving. 

These labs have a lot of loot in them.  They’re pretty well protected.  We weren’t after anything nuclear.  I don’t want to hurt anyone, and I’m not a terrorist.  This was the one point in plan that involved an assumption.  And we were right.  All of the guards went straight to the plutonium.  They took an oath to protect that plutonium.  That’s not what we were after. 

The ancient Muslims practiced alchemy during the Golden Age of Islam.  The one thing that alchemy failed to produce in the golden age was, well, gold.  Fast forward a thousand years, and someone figured it out.  It’s still a government secret.  You see, if the public finds out how to make gold out of anything, then gold is no longer precious.  That’s where we come in. 

It’s simple.  We walk in, get the plans for the machine and walk out.  You see, these labs are protected very well from the outside.   It took a lot of planning to be able to get in.  But nobody ever thought about trying to keep someone inside.  Why would they do that?  This is the genius of the plan.  Once we got to that part we were home free.

 

 

They called me in for questioning a day later, on Monday.  I didn’t care, they had nothing on me.  And besides, the damage was done.  Yesterday, Sunday, there was a press release containing the plans for the alchemy machine.  It was no simple machine to build, but people were more than willing.  Today, Monday, the gold markets will open, and promptly crash.

I walked into the police station and was directed to the interrogation room.  I sat down and was kept waiting for a while, probably on purpose.  A young detective walked in, I’d never seen him before.  I had been in that room many times, but this time was different.  This time, I had no fear of getting caught.

“How’d you do it?” He asked me.

“You have no way of knowing I did it,” I said sitting straight up in the interrogation room chair, looking him straight in the eye.

“You don’t even know if anything’s missing yet.  Why would somebody break in and not steal anything?”  He was probably just thrown on this case because they knew nobody would solve it.  They have to act like they care.  He looked at me with a strange expression on his face.  He was too new at this to put together what happened, even though it was right under his nose.

“Unfortunately you’re right,” he said looking up.  “At least for now.”

I walked out of the room and down the front steps of the police station, as I put on my jacket.  I got into my car as a cloud shadowed the sun.  It looked like it was going to rain.