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A few of the tellers immediately pulled out their cell phones.
"I don't have a signal either! It must be from that massive lightning strike. God, the city's infrastructure is a joke!"
The conversation quickly derailed into everyone complaining about the federal government's incompetence. Hearing the griping, the Head of Security let his guard down, assuming it was just a localized blackout.
In reality, the dead zone was caused by the military-grade ECM jammers Lawson had planted and activated the second the C4 blew.
If anyone had just walked out the front doors of the bank, they would have found perfect cell reception. But with a tropical storm raging outside, no one was stepping a foot past the lobby.
Down in the storm drains, the thick cloud of concrete dust quickly washed away in the rushing water.
A massive, jagged crater now existed where the ten-foot reinforced wall used to be.
The five men stepped up to the breach and peered inside. Staring back at them was the blinding, glittering shine of solid gold.
"We're in."
To guarantee the breach, Lawson had over-indexed on the explosives.
He had wildly underestimated the sheer cutting power of military C4. The hole wasn't just big enough to crawl through; you could have driven a forklift through it.
Just as Lawson suspected, the "earthquake-damaged" wall had been hollowed out and lined with hundreds of flush-mounted safe deposit boxes.
The blast had completely obliterated the front-facing panels. The floor of the vault was covered in debris—jewelry, legal documents, and random luxury items scattered everywhere.
Lawson quickly scanned the wreckage. Nothing caught his eye.
The boxes on this wall were small, roughly the size of standard apartment mailboxes. You couldn't fit a massive corporate ledger in them.
If Francis Ricci was hiding the master books, they were locked in the heavy-duty safes on the far wall.
Donnie shook off the shock of the explosion, grabbed his heavy-duty rotary saw, and moved toward the intact boxes.
But the three guys from the Toretto crew were completely frozen, mesmerized by the sheer volume of gold in front of them.
Lawson had to snap them out of it.
"Move! We only have fifteen minutes!"
The three ECM jammers Lawson had deployed ran on a strict five-minute battery life each. Fired in sequence, they bought the crew exactly fifteen minutes of total electronic blackout.
The second the clock ran out, the cameras would reboot and the LAPD would be swarming the block.
Donnie was on lock-picking duty. That left four guys to manually move five tons of gold in under a quarter of an hour. The pressure was crushing.
But Lawson had underestimated the psychological effect that much wealth had on the human brain. The Toretto crew looked like they had just taken a shot of pure adrenaline straight to the heart.
They started hauling hundred-pound gold bricks like they were carrying groceries.
It made sense for Dom—the guy was built like a heavyweight boxer. But seeing the scrawny, hyperactive Jesse sprinting back and forth with a hundred pounds of gold in his arms made Lawson realize just how intoxicating greed really was.
They hauled the bricks through the breach and loaded them directly onto a custom-built speedboat idling in the flooded storm drain.
The boat, heavily modified by Lawson and Jesse, was engineered to easily handle a six-ton payload.
Lawson had specifically chosen to strike during a tropical storm for two reasons: the thunder masked the C4, and the torrential rain flooded the massive LA aqueducts, giving the heavy speedboat enough clearance to navigate the tunnels.
The water level was rising fast, making the footing treacherous, but the crew was running on pure adrenaline.
At fifty kilos a trip, it should have taken them roughly fifty minutes of continuous labor to move all five tons. Divided by four men, they needed at least twelve minutes to clear the room.
Powered by sheer, greedy desperation, they actually beat the clock.
By the time the last brick hit the deck of the speedboat, Jesse and Vince were physically destroyed, gasping for air and clutching their backs.
"Fuck! Jack, the gold is loaded!" Dom yelled. "We've got a minute left! We need to bounce!"
Lawson glanced at Donnie. He was sweating bullets, aggressively cutting through locks, but he still hadn't found the ledgers.
"Hold on! Give him another minute!"
Vince, catching his breath, suddenly pointed at the steel table in the center of the vault.
"If we got a minute, I'm grabbing the paper!"
The C4 shockwave had blown millions of dollars in pristine, hundred-dollar bills all over the floor, but there were still massive, banded stacks sitting on the table.
"Take it!" Lawson yelled over the noise of the saw. "Whatever you can carry is yours. I don't want a cut of the cash!"
Instantly re-energized, Vince and Jesse scrambled over to the table and started violently stuffing banded stacks of cash into their duffel bags.
The fifteen-minute mark hit.
The final ECM jammer died. Inside the bank's security room, the monitors flickered back to life, immediately displaying the massive hole in the vault.
A split second later, the bank's catastrophic alarm system shrieked to life.
"Fuck! We're made!"
Dom raised his shotgun and blew the ceiling camera to pieces, then spun toward Lawson.
Lawson didn't even flinch. His eyes were glued to Donnie's saw. He could walk away from the bearer bonds, but leaving the ledger wasn't an option.
"Jack!" Dom roared.
"Dom, take the boat and get the gold out of here! Stick to the escape route! We'll rendezvous at the drop point!"
"What about you two?!"
Dom was a loyal guy. He wasn't about to abandon his crew, unlike Vince and Jesse, who had already dove into the speedboat.
Lawson had planned for contingencies. Two high-speed jet skis were tied off next to the boat, specifically reserved for a hot extraction.
"Leave us a jet ski! Get out of here!"
Dom hesitated for a fraction of a second, then slapped Lawson hard on the shoulder.
"Watch your back! Vince, Jesse, you two are a couple of ungrateful little shits!"
Dom sprinted through the breach. Seconds later, the deep, guttural roar of the customized boat engine echoed through the storm drains as they sped off.
"Mr. Brasco, give me the saw! I'll cut, you pick the tumblers!"
"Got it!"
Lawson grabbed the heavy rotary saw. With two sets of hands attacking the safes, their efficiency doubled instantly.
"Jack! I found the crest!"
At the eighteen-minute mark, Donnie popped open a medium-sized safe and pulled out a heavy, sealed envelope bearing the Bonanno family insignia.
"Open it!"
Donnie ripped the seal. Inside were stacks of high-denomination bearer bonds.
"Bag it. Keep going!" Lawson ordered.
Donnie stared at him like he was insane.
"Keep going?! The cops are already on the way!"
"Give me two more minutes!"
Donnie gritted his teeth and jammed his lockpicks into the next safe.
Because of the severe flooding on the streets, the LAPD's response time was heavily delayed. And since Lopez had already left the building, the Head of Security couldn't open the vault door even if he wanted to.
The twenty-inch steel door was actually protecting Lawson and Donnie from the bank guards.
"Jack, what exactly are we looking for?!" Donnie yelled as Lawson burned through another circular saw blade.
"The ledger! Francis Ricci's master ledger!"
"The Bonanno books?! You're kidding me!" Donnie's eyes went wide. He suddenly realized the sheer magnitude of what they were trying to steal.
Lawson snapped a fresh blade into the saw, but the motor whined and jammed. Fifteen minutes of non-stop cutting had fried the engine.
"Jack, who told you the ledger was in the vault?!"
"Lawson! Francis Ricci confessed it before he died!"
Technically, the intel came from the Payday App, but blaming the dead guy was easier.
"Is it possible it's not in the vault? What if he hid it somewhere else in the bank?"
Lawson froze.
His mind raced back to the exact wording on the Payday App objective.
Retrieve the ledger hidden inside St. Martin's Bank.
It never specifically said "inside the vault."
If it wasn't in the vault, where the hell was it?
Then it clicked.
The private safe in the General Manager's office.
Through Mia's intel, Lawson knew Lopez was promoted to GM immediately after Francis secretly acquired the bank. Lopez was Francis's puppet.
If Francis needed to stash a highly sensitive, personal ledger, handing it to his puppet manager to lock in his private office safe made perfect sense.
"Mr. Brasco. I know exactly where it is. I have to go topside! Take the jet ski and get to the extraction point!"
Lawson tossed the dead saw aside and strapped the duffel bag of bearer bonds tight across his chest.
"What?! You're going up there?!"
"I have a job to do! Don't wait for me!"
It was 3:25 PM. Twenty-five minutes since the initial blast. Five minutes since the alarms tripped.
Lawson climbed out of a manhole in an alley a block away from the bank.
The LAPD still wasn't on the scene. Visibility was near zero in the driving rain, and the squad cars couldn't speed on the flooded asphalt.
He still had a tiny window.
Without hesitating, Lawson pulled out his heavy-duty grappling hook, aimed it at the roof edge of St. Martin's Bank, and pulled the trigger.
The steel claws bit hard into the concrete parapet.
The high-torque motorized winch violently ripped Lawson off the ground, hauling him up the side of the building.
If a normal man tried that, the G-force would have ripped his arm completely out of its socket. But with the physical enhancements of the Iron Man Trump Card, Lawson barely felt the strain.
The hurricane-force winds whipped across the side of the building, nearly blowing him off the wall, but the reinforced cable held tight, dragging him safely over the ledge.
Standing on the roof, Lawson sprinted to the large glass skylight positioned directly over the General Manager's office.
He materialized the Remington 870 shotgun from the Payday App, loaded with a solid lead breaching slug.
BOOM!
The roar of the shotgun and the sound of shattering glass echoed over the storm. It sounded completely different from thunder, instantly alerting the guards below.
"Someone's on the roof!"
Ignoring the shouting, Lawson peered through the shattered skylight, aimed his grappling hook at the small steel safe sitting on the bookshelf below, and fired.
He didn't have time to crack it. He was taking the whole box.
By sheer luck, the safe wasn't bolted to the wall. The motorized winch screamed as it hauled the heavy steel box up through the broken skylight.
Lawson grabbed the safe, tucked it under his arm, and prepared to move.
Suddenly, a chorus of sirens cut through the rain. The LAPD had finally arrived.
A dozen black-and-white cruisers swarmed the streets around the bank, completely cutting off his ground escape.
Lawson quickly scanned the skyline. There were a few adjacent mid-rise apartment buildings he could grapple to, but the winds were getting lethal. One bad gust, and he'd end up as a stain on the pavement.
He tapped his earpiece.
"Brasco, the cops are here. I can't get down to the street. Take the jet ski and go!"
"Jack, what about you?!"
"I've got an alternate route! See you at the rendezvous!"
Cutting the comms, Lawson aimed his grapple at the exterior stairwell of a six-story apartment building across the alley and fired.
Down on the street, the bank guards were frantically pointing at the roof. Just as a squad of LAPD officers looked up, they saw a shadow swing gracefully through the torrential rain, disappearing onto the adjacent rooftop.
"Suspect on the roof! He's moving!"
The cops instantly split into two teams—one breaching the basement to check the vault, the other rushing the apartment building.
This was the third massive advantage of hitting the bank during a tropical storm: the LAPD couldn't scramble their helicopters.
Flying a "ghetto bird" in a hurricane was a guaranteed death sentence.
Without eyes in the sky tracking his movements with a spotlight, Lawson became a ghost. He grappled from rooftop to rooftop, vanishing completely into the blinding rain, leaving the LAPD hopelessly lost in his wake.
A few minutes later, his earpiece crackled. It was Dom.
"Jack. We hit the drop point. We're loading the cargo now."
"Any heat on your tail?"
"Nothing! The cops are running in circles. They never saw this coming!"
Dom sounded incredibly smug. The flawless execution of the heist had clearly gone straight to his head.
"Don't get cocky," Lawson warned sharply. "Don't trip right before you cross the finish line."
The cold warning snapped Dom back to reality.
"You're right. I'm going dark. See you soon."
Miles away, standing ankle-deep in the concrete channel of the LA River, Dom watched as Jesse operated a stolen forklift, hoisting the massive pallets of gold out of the speedboat and dropping them into the back of a waiting industrial garbage truck.
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