Mission Moon [AHS book 3]

11th lock

Taehyung focus

"We have a problem," Taehyung spoke into his phone while staring at the red safe in front of him. Since Yamamoto was in Japan, he simply had broken into the lawyer's secret apartment in Seoul the moment they had spied out the surroundings. It had been much easier than expected because the only security measure had been the five-bolt door lock on the apartment door. Taehyung had almost been sure that they would not find anything here when there was made so little effort to keep people like him out. But then he had seen the red man-sized safe in what must be the study (the apartment was unpleasantly empty and void of personal stuff, so it was hard to tell). "A big problem," he emphasized.

A quick shuffle could be heard on the other end of the line before Namjoon's warm baritone joined their conversation. "What's the matter?"

"His safe is a Waldis Premium 1500 with an electronic lock," Taehyung explained. This safe was uncrackable.

"Fuck," he heard Yoongi cursing.

"Didn't you say that you're the best?" the KFC agent asked with a mix of confusion and anger in his voice.

Taehyung snorted. "This safe is not only a Swiss M-series, but an M-series by Waldis," he emphasized before he realized that Namjoon might not know what that meant.

"So what?" the ex-cop asked.

Yoongi helped out with the explanation. "Waldis invented a new material mix for their safe walls, Relastan®. That's a random pattern of segments made of ceramic, which is resistant against welding, steel, which is resistant to brute force of a sledge hammer, rubber, which is the death of our tungsten carbide drill because it melts into it, and plastic, which is a pain in the ass if you burn it because it smokes like a bitch."

"Swiss, hm?" Namjoon mumbled. "What about hacking the electronic lock?" he wanted to know then.

"You sound like that's a walk in the park," Yoongi said, voice flat from disappointment.

"Is it not?" the agent asked. "How can a lock compare to an airport?"

Oh, so Namjoon remembered Hongkong. Taehyung chuckled. The agent was about to get lectured.

"Because," Yoongi began in a tone that signaled he was pissed by the ex-cop's ignorance, "the airport is a database with connections to a network that's used by many careless and stupid people. It's a giant distributed system with many entrances which has to have weak spots. But a lock is so primitive that it's almost impossible to hack." Yoongi was growling by now.

Namjoon made some undefinable sound that showed that he did not understand what the problem was, so Taehyung decided to explain it differently. "The human component makes a system weak and the more a system relies on human intelligence in maintaining and handling, the weaker it becomes. But since an electronic lock is even more primitive than a computer and needs no maintenance and much less intelligent handling once it's set up, it has no weak spots. You have the code, or you don't. That's it."

"Oh," Namjoon seemed to finally understand. "Then what are we going to do?"

"We already did something," Taehyung answered and grinned when he realized that his black scorpion idea was benefitting their current situation. "We added the human component," he explained to the agent.

"The scorpion," Namjoon understood. "You made him nervous."

"Yes," Taehyung chuckled. "Now we just need him to act upon his nerves."

"How?" Namjoon asked, sounding like he knew that they already had a solution.

"Play pretend," Taehyung said. The easiest way to lure someone who feared to lose something was to make them think they already lost it. "We pretend like we already stole the documents."