I couldn't sleep that night. I just couldn't.
The envelope Zack gave me just sat there on the desk, like it was watching me.
I paced around my room, already second-guessing my choices. But ten thousand dollars… that didn't feel real. But it was. Real money. And it was mine.
I got up, opened my laptop, and started digging into the jewelry store. Because if you're going to do something, you have to do it right. I applied everything I've learned in school, plus my experience with people, and started researching.
The more I dug, the deeper the rabbit hole got. This wasn't the easy job Zack made it sound like. Whoever set this up wasn't playing around. They actually knew what they were doing.
I ran a few tests—nothing serious, just small probes to see what worked and what didn't. But nothing. I started in the morning, and now it was late at night… still nothing. No mistakes. No openings. Nothing.
But who am I kidding? Anyone willing to open a jewelry store worth that much would take their security seriously.
My phone buzzed. It was Zack. I stared at it for a second, torn between answering or ignoring it. But in the end, I picked it up.
"Yeah?"
"You figure it out yet?"
"I'm working on it. I just need time."
"Yeah, about that… schedules moved up."
I sat up straight.
"What do you mean?"
"Something came up. We have to act earlier than expected."
"What does that mean?"
"It means you've got two days to come up with an answer. Don't mess this up."
Then he hung up.
I sat there, just staring at my phone, trying to figure out where to even start. Then I saw it on the news—there'd been a robbery across town at a jewelry store.
And it clicked.
That's why Zack was in a rush. Maybe the cops were onto them. But that meant I was in this now. If Zack gets caught… I'm involved too. Robbery or not.
Now I was staring at my system again, and then I thought of something. Zack sounded too confident when he pitched the job. That meant they'd done this before. This wasn't new territory for them.
And if there's one thing I know about criminals… it's that if something works, they rarely change it.
I picked up my laptop and started digging into robberies from the last six months—same time Zack first approached me. And yeah… there it was. Almost twenty cases. Same pattern. All jewelry stores.
But I couldn't be sure they were all Zack and his crew, so I narrowed it down—places closer to us. At least an hour away by car. Easy to get to, easy to escape, easy to lose the cops in back alleys and winding roads.
And then I saw it.
Six cases.
Six.
And all of them had one thing in common—they all used the same security company.
So that meant Zack's guy… probably worked there.
Now that I knew the company, I had work to do. Companies like that always leave patterns—tags, little habits in the way they build things. So I started digging into their old systems.
That's when I found it. Their older software used to run internally, meaning access could be shut down from the company itself.
But this one… this one was different. It ran directly on the store's own server.
Which meant… I didn't need to break the system. I just needed to shut down the server.
And the crazy part? Small private servers like this aren't managed well. Careless. A simple virus could shut it down completely and make it look like a system failure.
I sat up.
"I got it."
All I needed was a virus. Something to shut down the server remotely.
I called Zack.
"Yeah?"
"The store… do they have open Wi-Fi?"
"Yeah… I think so. Why?"
"Don't worry."
That made my job easier.
I got to work, spent the rest of the day—and most of the night—building the virus. When I was done, I exported it onto an old phone we had lying around. The kind nobody uses… but nobody throws away either.
The next day, I met Zack at the café.
"Hey."
"Hey."
I slid the phone across the table.
"What's this?" he asked.
"Your answer."
He raised an eyebrow.
I sighed. "All you have to do is connect to the store's Wi-Fi and open the app named 'Z'."
He looked at me, then back at the phone.
"That's it?"
"Yes. That's it."
"Alright. I'll get back to you after the job is done."
He picked up the phone and left.
I just sat there, staring at the empty space in front of me.
Wondering if this choice… was going to come back and bite me in the ass