TRIGGER WARNING THIS CHAPTER for voluntary vomiting

"You don't have to trust me," Aaron said. "I get that you won't. We're all thieves and there is no honour amongst thieves, but there can be trust in a crew and I need you all to trust that we can each do our own parts to get out of here."

"Good speech, man," Blake said. "I'm in."

"Me too," Kath sighed. "Against my better judgement."

"Fine, I guess I'll help."

Aaron grinned, "Okay, then Symona, phone please?"

Symona screwed her face up in a very upset-looking face. "Oh, this is going to suck." She stuck two fingers down her throat and bent over in pain as she retched.

"Oh hell no!" Blake cried.

~

"Nausea could mean a concussion," A doctor said, checking Symona's temperature while Sym lay on the hospital bed compliantly. "If you feel any more effects or blurred vision, tell the policeman right away."

Symona nodded like a child, agreeing quickly so that they would leave her the hell alone.

The Officer, who was posted outside their door, checked on Symona and Blake's handcuffs before nodding and leaving the room, back to her post guarding the door.

After the doctor left, Symona popped up, a smartphone in her hand. From the other bed, Blake held up a flip phone, they both looked at their phones and then the others and then tossed their phone to the other. Blake could do more with a smartphone than Symona could.

Symona holds up the keys she stole and tossed them to Blake who fumbled them for a moment before catching them properly to unlock herself.

Obviously, Symona had picked the locks on her handcuffs in almost a second and she stood on the nightstand between her bed and Blake's to shove the flip phone through the grates of the vent. "Aaron, phone," She said, bluntly.

"Yeah, I got it," Aaron said, receiving the flip phone from the vent. "So the trick is to give them what they want. They're expecting a phone call, right?" He tosses the phone to Kath who grins as she opens the phone.

A nurse approaches a police officer in a long hospital hallway, "There's an outside call for you. Line 2."

The police officer stands up and follows the nurse towards the foyer.

Blake holds up the smartphone in front of her face and makes a professional expression. "Okay." She presses a few more buttons before she smiles excitedly.

"Uh, this is Deputy Burns," the officer said, as he picked up the phone.

Kath's sharp and gruff voice spoke through the phone. "This is Detective Lieutenant Carden with the Illinois State Police. We got those prints that you sent us." Kath's voice dripped with authority. "The problem I have is that they're sending up red flags all over the place and I've got somebody on the phone for you from the FBI down there in Washington. Can you hold, son?"

Deputy Burns snapped up to attention, "Yes, sir."

Back in the hospital room, Blake was fiddling with the phone again while Symona looked over her shoulder.

"Watcha doing?" Symona asked with a deadpan expression.

Blake sighed as she typed out a few more things, "Just gonna send a fax and..." Blake grinned up at Symona with an ecstatic face. "There you go."

In the other room, Kath tossed the phone to Aaron who grinned and put on a southern accent. "Yeah, Deputy Burns, this is Deputy Director McCumber, FBI. Yes, is our woman all right?"

Deputy Burns, out in the hallway snapped right back up, his back ramrod straight. "Uh, I'm sorry, I don't follow..."

"Deputy, listen to me the woman that you have inside there is ours actually. She's been in deep cover for three years."

"Really?" Burns asked, astonished.

"That's correct." Aaron's voice rang through the speaker. His voice sounded gruffer as the southern accent was dwindling. "In fact, you should be receiving a fax any moment now confirming what I'm telling you."

Another officer lightly jogged down the hall with a piece of paper in his hand, still warm from the fax machine. He handed the paper to Deputy Burns who looked shocked at the large red 'CLASSIFIED' stamped on the top of the page. Under the red lettering was a professional picture of Blake.

Aaron spoke up again, "Most of what I've told you is classified. I need to know I can trust you. Can I?"

Deputy Burns nodded, "Yes, sir."

~

Blake, with a smile on her face, piled Symona, Aaron, and Kath into a spare police cruiser. As she went to push Kath into the cruiser she accidentally hit his head on the frame. Kath growled at Blake as he shook his head out.

"Oh, walk it off. Walk..." Blake glared, as Deputy Burns looked over her shoulder, intrigued. "Get inside. Get inside."

Kath gets into the car.

Blake turned towards the officers as she closed the door. "Men, you know, it fills my heart with tears of joy, what you guys do. It really does."

She grins as she gets into the cruiser and starts it up, driving away with her crew.

A Nurse approaches Deputy Burns outside the hospital building. "There's a call for you, State Police?"

~

The four walk into a large loft. The walls are covered in sports posters, presumably the owner's favourite players.

"Four first-class tickets to anywhere but here, coming up," Blake said, sitting down at the large computer bank in the corner of the room.

Symona snuck up behind her, looking over Blake's shoulder as she typed. "Who's place is this?"

"Mine," Blake said. "Help yourself to the fridge, but don't touch my ice cream."

Kath was pacing through the living room, narrowly avoiding the side tables and couches. He muttered thickly under their breath, "I'm gonna beat Dubenich so bad that even the people who look like him are gonna bleed."

"You won't get within 100 yards." Symona turned away from Blake to focus on Kath. "He knows your face. He knows all our faces."

"He tried to kill us," Kath growled, his hands reaching up to lightly tug on their hair.

"And, more importantly," Sym said, upset. "He didn't pay us!"

Kath stopped tugging at their hair and just stared at Symona for a moment. "How is that more important?"

"I take that personally."

"There's something wrong with you," Kath said, a slight bit calmer after that banter.

"Heads up, heads up, look," Blake called. Everyone moved to join her, crowded around the bank of computer screens. "Dubenich's story is about 90 per cent true. He is the head of Bering Aerospace big rival to Pierson, but, check out what my little web crawlers coughed up."

A video of a news report began to play. A tall, older, white man began to speak on the steps of a large building. The captions labelled him as the Head of Pierson Aviation. "We've lost research that we've been working on for over five years. Our servers have been sabotaged and now we're going to pursue these perpetrators to the full extent of the law and with all the resources we have at our disposal."

"Could be a cover story," Aaron said, picking at the nails on his right hand with his left hand.

"Look, here's a log of last night's rip. Internal timestamps on the project–" Blake took a quick look at the computer monitor. "2003, 2004, they're way, way down in the code. There's no reason to fake those."

"So we didn't steal the plans back?" Kath asked, confused.

Sym shook her head, "No, we were just stealing them."

"But it doesn't make sense," Blake said, swivelling around in her chair to face the circle they had unwittingly made. "Why would Dubenich lie to us?"

Aaron sighed, "'Cause we're thieves. If he hired us for a straight-up crime, we'd know he was a bad guy like us, we'd be suspicious. This way we just saw another citizen in over his head and that's why we didn't see the double-cross coming."

"Okay, look," Blake said, standing and grabbing a few papers from her printer. "I bought tickets to London, Rome, Paris and Sao Paulo all matching the IDs that you gave me."

Aaron walked over to the monitor, staring at the photo of Dubenich that Blake had put up. "You're running."

"Yeah," Kath said, taking one of the tickets from Blake. "You got a better idea?"

"No, no," Aaron spoke to the Dubenich on the screen. "You're running. Now that was a high-risk play. You got your balls tied to the stock price like a cinder block, a shareholder meeting coming up. We can't let this guy have any time to cool down."

Kath raised an eyebrow, "You wanna run a play on this guy?"

"Yeah, I mean, this guy he's greedy, he thinks he's smart, he's the best kind of mark," Aaron said, almost excitedly.

"Well," Symona began. "He does think he got rid of us."

"Element of surprise," Blake said."

Kath sighed, "What's in it for me?"

Aaron grinned, "Payback, and if it goes right a lot of money."

"What's in it for me?" Symona asked, not interested in Aaron's previous answer.

"A lot of money, and if it goes right, payback."

Symona grinned.

Blake shrugged, "I was just gonna send a thousand porno magazines to his office, but, hell yeah, let's fuck him up."

Aaron grinned almost manically, "All right then, let's go get Eden."

He turned to walk out of the room, Sym and Blake following as Kath glared, "What the hell's an Eden?"