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evading even our surveillance, which was troubling considering he supposedly didn’t know he was being watched.
    That meant his “brain” was really smart, because everything we knew about Simmons told us he was dumber than a box of rocks.
    “Never heard of a shy brain before,” Reed said as we followed Fairbine down the stairs toward the vaults. He walked with a hitch in his stride, and I wondered where the man had got it; he didn’t look like he’d hold up well in combat, so I discounted the military. “Shy kidneys, but not a shy brain.”
    “You’d think that’d make it more difficult to produce thoughts while being watched,” Welch said, his attempt at a joke. Welch wasn’t funny, but he tried.
    We worked our way down the stairwell. The building was old, but had been refurbished a lot. Tons of surveillance cameras everywhere. I hadn’t been to the ladies’ room, but there was probably one in every stall. I suspected the vault was laden with more than its fair share of them as well, which had me wondering what our criminals were planning to do to bring that particular obstacle down. I voiced this thought to Fairbine.
    He shook as he answered. “If they’re able to create earthquakes all around the island of Manhattan, I don’t imagine it’d be terribly difficult to shake our cameras off the wall.” Good point, Nelly.
    Fairbine opened the first vault door to us with a key card, exposing a half dozen NYPD uniforms in the waiting area outside the main vault. Welch and his boys had called us in on this gig after they’d tracked a string of bank robberies that were just a little too good for an ordinary criminal to have pulled off. His analysis, not mine. I don’t deal with normal criminals. The common thread had been seismic events, teeth-rattling earthquakes at the site of each robbery, vibrations that opened vaults and broke through walls like a rock star cracked through the brittle reserve of an excitable groupie.
    Which is where my brother and I came into the picture. Man-made earthquakes that were actually made by a man? Sounded like a metahuman at work. Two days on the scene with Rocha and the rest of our crew and we’d narrowed our search to lower Manhattan. Another day and we’d found Eric Simmons and his basement hideaway. A little digging on our part (not literal) and we’d figured out their plan. After all, a group of bank-robbing criminals probably don’t rent out the basement suite across from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York because they’re genuinely interested in locating their mail-order business there. I mean, we ordered some of the sticky-tack from their website just in case, but I wasn’t holding my breath on that order being fulfilled, since J.J. back at headquarters had gotten us access to satellite imaging which had shown us their tunnel pretty clearly.
    Fairbine opened the second vault to us, passing through biometrics that scanned his retina and all five fingers. He’d walked us through the security measures when we’d approached him, and I realized pretty quickly that Simmons’s approach to the vault was unique, if not ingenious. He’d been setting off seismic sensors around Manhattan for months, forcing even the most hardened, logical of seismologists to question whether there might have been something they’d missed below the bedrock of the island. They all swore up and down that if there was going to be an earthquake on Manhattan, it’d have to be a lot broader based than the small quakes that had been rattling the hell out of the island.
    Ergo, someone was messing with them. Someone who could create earthquakes.
    The second vault door opened up, and I looked upon a sight of beautiful gold, filling cages as far as I could see. Okay, it wasn’t sprawlingly huge, like a warehouse, exactly, but it was pretty big. The gold bars gleamed in the light, too, in a way that they never really did on TV or in the movies. These were actual shiny metals (oooh, shiny!)