Work Text:
George shifted the box to his other arm, shoulders aching from carrying all his junk all the way from his office on the fifteenth floor. He brought books to work, but that wasn’t why he was fired. He was fired for asking too many questions about the new program they were rolling out for the City of London Police to help them with everything from social media web crawling to pursuit route planning. George had doubts about the legality of the AI training models, and he was almost certain Penelope Fittes had a backdoor into the neural net. He couldn’t prove it yet, but the rip of their master branch burning a thumbdrive-sized hole in his pocket would probably go pretty far to proving that.
Now he just had to figure out how to get home.
He squinted into the afternoon light, trying to distinguish where one car began and another ended. He leaned back, trying to take more of the box’s weight on his chest, and plastic grinded in his front flannel pocket.
The real problem was he mouthed off to Paul Poriskova on his way out, and Paul was always a fucking hothead. George’s cheek still smarted from the weak, software-developer punch that had flung his glasses onto the floor. He probably wouldn’t even have a bruise, but he was blind as a bat, and getting new glasses was always a bitch. He had a spare at home, but getting home was the trouble now.
There was a black sedan idling half a block from Fittes headquarters, and it was just boxy enough that George was ninety percent sure it was a taxi. Well, eighty percent sure at first, but he waited a minute just in case, and that bumped him up to nearly certain. He hobbled his way over, box starting to slip out of his grasp—seriously, he was a code monkey, not a mailman—and he braced the box on the window to grope for the handle.
“14 Farnsworth, Hammersmith, please,” George said, shoving the box into the middle seat and crowding in next to it.
The blurry head in the driver’s seat didn’t move. Outside, some building’s fire alarms started going off. The Rotwell Bank across the street was always testing out their alarms; George saw those sad sacks out on the street probably once a month, twiddling their thumbs.
“This is a cab, right?” George asked. The interior was dark, and he couldn’t find where to pay.
A cough, and then a woman’s voice saying, “No, sir, it’s—”
The other side of the backseat opened. Two bulbous duffels sailed in, one of them crushing George’s baby jade plant, and then a slender man in a suit followed.
“At your leisure, Lu—” The stranger turned a pale, blurry face to George. “My dear, when did we pick up a passenger?”
“Right now,” the woman answered.
The locks clicked shut.
The car shifted into gear.
“Okay, sir, I’m sorry to tell you this, but you’re having a bad day,” the man said as the car pulled into the street.
“No kidding,” George replied. “I just got sacked.”
The man barked out a laugh, and the fire alarm faded into the distance, the car pulling smoothly to a stoplight at the end of the street. He unzipped one of the bags, and a familiar scent filled the backseat.
Not a fire alarm, then.
George fumbled for his crushed glasses, hooking his finger in the hole where the right lens used to be. Fresh money smelled like ink and heat and a sharpness that tickled George’s nose, and when he held what was left of his glasses to his face, the fractured kaleidoscope of his left lens gave him just enough clarity to understand one thing.
This bank robber was attractive.
“Exiting camera blackout,” the woman said, turning left when the light turned green.
“Did you know London has one surveillance camera for every fourteen people?” The man said, shedding his coat and tie and moving the duffel off of George’s things.
“It’s in the top ten most surveilled cities in the world,” George replied because he did already know that. The thief paused, flashing George a grin like the gunshot that had George’s pulse off to the races. Speaking of, George’s gaze slid to the shiny silver butt of a pistol that had been deposited into the pocket of the car door.
The man got back to his task, fingers flying over the buttons of his dress shirt. George tried to avert his gaze, but the smooth column of the man’s throat, the peek and shift of his ribs—George officially came out of the closet that opened both ways just three weeks ago to his sisters and the one friend he kept up with from uni. He was still getting used to the electric dance in his gut, and it was far too addictive to tear his gaze away from a handsome man stripping down on the other side of the backseat.
“What’s your name, friend?” The man asked.
“George.”
“A very solid name, George. Now, can I ask—?”
“Hold on,” George said because that was the bakery that Kipps always got the office donuts from which meant—“Are you going south on Pierce?”
“I don’t need directions,” the woman snapped, glaring at him through the rearview mirror, and if the closet door opened both ways, he was yanking the thing off its hinges, stumbling out like a drunkard.
“It’s just that if you’re going south on Pierce, that crosses with Wyndham, and they relocated a squad car onto Wyndham, so they’ll be using Pierce to get to the bank,” George explained. They had performance issues with running the response time simulator for every possible crime location in London, and George spent three weeks fine tuning the queries until each scenario ran in under 400 milliseconds. It was quite the job; he was going to put that one on his resume.
“We scouted the cop’s locations,” the woman said.
“In the past week? They just implemented a new Fittes system, and it rearranged their patrols.” George dug in his carton to produce his Fittes ID badge, now deactivated. He offered it to the man who had just finished pulling a cream colored polo over his head.
“Lovely, why don’t you turn onto Crawford?” The man suggested, and even in a poor profile, George could see the irritation pull at her face.
“Why don’t you shut it, pumpkin, and remember the last time you planned a route?” She said.
“The protest was not my fault.”
“It wasn’t a protest! It was a parade which was registered with the city.”
“I’m going to duck,” George said because he wasn’t a seasoned bank robber, but he knew the more people in the car, the more suspicious they would look.
He really didn’t want to get caught.
There was the fact that bank robbing was nearly a victimless crime, and now he’d watched the thieves bicker, and if they went to jail, George would always remember them sniping at each other like a married couple, and it would haunt him. There was also the fact that no matter how much Paul Poriskova’s knuckles alibi’d him out for being a co-conspirator, the cops wouldn’t know that until later. They would probably search him which would not go well with a couple million dollars worth of stolen code in his pocket.
Just as he expected, a pair of cop cars pulled out onto Pierce and made for them. The woman’s fingers turned white gripping the wheel, and the man likewise hunkered down, still squirming because he was changing out his trousers now. She kept the car flowing smoothly forward, under the speed limit and well within the lines. The cops screamed passed, their sirens hitting an offensively shrill Doppler effect, and the woman’s shoulders only relaxed when the cops turned and disappeared from the rearview.
She hit her blinker.
“I—”
“Don’t say it,” the woman snapped, and George’s jaw clicked shut.
The man slipped on a jaunty fedora. He dumped one of the duffels out onto the floor, hundreds of thousands of pounds collected around his feet like he was having a spa day. The duffel was bright pink on the inside with zippered pockets and handles on the sides.
“Could you grab those for me?” The man asked, pointing to George’s floorboards. George swivelled his cracked monocle to assess the situation. Everything was black, but some metal bars glinted in the passing afternoon sun. He got his hand around them and awkwardly lifted, passing them over.
They were the pull handles for a suitcase, George realized as soon as the thief started attaching them to the reversed duffel. Suddenly, instead of a black duffel, he had a Elle Woods’ roller bag. He shoved his other outfit into the bottom of the bag and then started refilling it with the money bundles.
So they weren’t totally stupid.
“Where are we going?” George asked.
“Not to Hammersmith,” the woman replied.
“It’s bad form, you see, to divulge plans to civilians,” the man said, converting the other duffel into a discreet navy blue roller bag. “It’s like magicians.”
“Yeah, now watch all this money disappear,” the woman muttered.
“They’ll set up a perimeter. Twenty five blocks or so, depending on the R-quotient, and they’ll start analyzing footage for cars leaving the scene,” George said.
“We’ll be well out of that, won’t we, my love?”
“I dunno. Now that I’m not taking Pierce, we might—”
“Light of my life.”
“Alright, yes, we’ll be fine,” the woman huffed. “And the windows are tinted. CCTV shouldn’t be able to pick us up.”
“It’s not like it is in the movies, you know,” the man said conversationally. “There’s no burning rubber or Tokyo drifting. L—my lovely getaway driver doesn’t even run yellow lights.”
“Stop flirting with the random guy,” she said, and George’s palms immediately started to sweat. It was one thing to look, and it was another thing entirely for the observed party to get called out by their bank robbing girlfriend for looking back.
“His name is George,” the man responded primly. He had somehow donned a fake mustache while George wasn’t looking.
“Stop flirting with George,” she replied. “I don’t care how cute he is without his glasses.”
“But think about how cute he would be with his glasses,” the man argued. “And how cute it is that he knows so much about police patterns.”
The woman went quiet up front, and George swallowed, the thick sound of it momentarily drowning out the frantic horse race of his pulse. Her tongue clicked in her mouth, and she hit her blinker to turn right. Her eyes cut up to the rearview mirror. George knew because he was watching for it.
“So how do you know so much?” She asked.
George felt the thumbdrive in his pocket like it was weighed down by the half a dozen felonies he’d committed this morning.
“We’re very good at keeping secrets,” the man said with an unfairly boyish grin.
George wasn’t a people person. In fact, he’d gotten punched in the face not fifteen minutes ago because he lacked some innate charisma. Also Paul was being and always had been a dick. The fact remained: George Karim didn’t form connections.
Even so, a tether, thin and juddering, appeared in the space between the three of them. George felt it hooked between his third and fourth ribs, and when he leaned back, it tugged him forward again.
George told them.
…
After walking in a different direction from both of them for a solid half hour, George paid for a cab with bank-fresh bills. He didn’t know how they did it, but by the time he got home, there was a card waiting for him. Scrawled across pristine textured cardstock:
Anthony and Lucy Lockwood
35 Portland Row
Bring donuts