Spring Break Story Stub 5
I love heist movies. Always have. I'd like to write a heist novel. Hopefully it'll be better than this.
In various locations around the city, six watches beeped in absolute precision as a pocketwatch in the hand of a man standing on the balcony of a house on the hill overlooking the city chimed 7pm. If a woman could be in multiple places at once, she would have seen a tableau of seve little smiles on the faces of those holding the watches.
There is a unique smile to those in the midst of observing a perfect moment. It is not the quiet smile of pride at a job well done, nor is it the head-tossed-back laugh of exhilaration. It is akin to, but not quite, the smile shared between lovers in a moment of intimacy. Capturing the essence of the perfect moment smile requires a bit of all three, for the creation of such a moment requires work well done, an intimacy only known to few, and the desire with every fiber of your being to live each day as your last.
A spontaneous perfect moment does not exist in this world. Hard work is required to achieve perfection, and harder work to achieve it with the effortlessness afforded to spontaneity. Surely for the seven, basking in the glow of what the ringing of the hour stood for, perfection was the result of weeks, months, and, in one case, years of struggle. There had been lifetimes of training and dedication before the seven had come together, and months of drills and practice before this time on this day. Perfection had been expensive as well. There had been spaces to rent, equipment to buy, palms to grease and identities to create. All of these took prodigious funding, and all the money needed had been provided by the man with the pocketwatch on the hill.
There is always a man of this type associated with these ventures. He is the Man with the Plan. The other six expected this kind of man, and he did not disappoint in stature or action. He appeared to all the world like someone's wealthy grandfather; gray in his har belied his years while his tailored suits seemed to contain a physique strengthened by a lifetime of training. He never met with the six all at the same time, always preferring twos or threes, but this was also expected. It was he who set the watches to ring at 7pm. It was at 7pm that the first explosion shook the city.
The six were not themselves bad men. Most of them had done something that could qualify as less than upstanding, but none of them had ever deliberately caused harm on a personal level. Harm against organizations as a matter of course, but they were for the most against harm against the individual. They all considered themselves some variation on a rogue; they were not evil, just outside societal norms. They had been gathered by the man with the pocketwatch to steal the most valuable item in the world.
At 710pm precisely the lid of the pocketwatch was snapped shut and the man walked back into the house on the hill. The six went their separate ways and never saw nor heard from each other again. The aftermath, in the days that followed their theft, would haunt the six for the rest of their lives.
Comments, please!