Vopros and Banshee started to case the rooms, flashlight in hand, mimicking the movements seen in policemen through tv-series and, in Banshee's case, in real life as well.

Even with the Bratva's blueprint, they actually didn't know where the music box was kept. The Museum was an old building, full of nooks and crannies, and only a person quite privy to it would have imagined the position of the right storage room, of which there were lots, under the building.

But one thing Banshee knew: if you want a man to reveal his weak point, bluff. His eyes will betray him. She had based her plan exactly on that. The black-out, the diverted phone calls, they were all the biggest bluff of them all.

And judging from the three guards in front of an inconspicuous little brown door with a "no entry" sign on the side of an anonymous room filled with stuffed animals, the bluff worked like a charm.

«I go with plan B?» asked Vopros with a whisper.

«No, let's stick to plan A.» she hissed back. She was trying to concentrate to erase their images from the camera's feed without interrupting it. It was quite an exercise in Destroy, so she couldn't think about deviations from the original plan right now. «Are you ready?»

«Plan B more simple.» protested Vopros, while they approached the group of guards in front of the door.

They were but a couple of steps from them, and this time it was Vopros's time to act.

Suddenly, in the silent room, echoed a gunshot.

Banshee curled on herself with a scream, blood spatting on the left side of her uniform.

The guards sprung to action in perfect synchronous, extracting their weapons.

«What was that?» screamed one, while Vopros coldly tugged Banshee on a perfect cover, behind a tall display case.

«It came from the Prehistoric Hall!» she screamed, dramatically panting. «Go! Go! We'll cover you!»

«You're hit!» said a second guard. Some tall, blonde hunky gym enthusiasts.

«It's a scratch! Go!» she urged him, taking out her own gun. The three guards run towards the side room while Banshee faked a radio call for reinforcements. The fake wound on her side, the good old blood bag, was already empty.

The door was theirs.

She and Vopros exchanged glances and rushed inside.

There was a small metal staircase leading down towards a dimly lit corridor full of doors with numbers and letter codes on them.

«Fuck.» she muttered through her teeth. «This'll take ages!»

«Who's there?» called a voice. A fat, black man in guard uniform, positioned right in the middle of the corridor, shone his flashlight right in their faces. Banshee had just enough time to bend over, going back to her fake-wound performance.

«Plan B?» suggested Vopros with a whisper. She glared at him. The Russian moaned.

«Police! Is music box safe?» he called out, trying to dry his accent. The fat man reached them and started fretting as soon as he saw blood.

«Oh my God, what happened?»

«Didn't you hear the shots? Someone's in the museum! Is the music box safe?» asked Banshee with a fake suffering strain in her voice.

«You're wounded!»

«Can ye answer a simple question, man?» she growled.

«The... of course, of course, it is. Nobody passed through here, and I was in front of the door until now basically. Nobody could have entered!» he said, as if with hurt pride, pointing straight at the door they needed.

Bingo.

«Perfect. We take it from here, you go help your colleagues until reinforcements arrive.» ordered Vopros in his best rank-pulling voice. The guard had a moment of hesitation.

«But I'm not supposed to leave my place...»

«You know museum better than us, and your colleagues need your help to corner the bastard. We call if anything happens. Go! If anyone say anything blame sergeant Wakowski!» Vopros's voice was the voice of a military more used to obedience than discussion, and this seeped through the museum guard quite well. He was old, but the uniform showed the dry physique of someone who cared for his form and himself, and his posture betrayed his army past apparently enough to convince the black man to face a mysterious museum shooter. The man half-ran up to the stairs, leaving them behind.

They darted towards the door the man indicated, while Banshee took over the feed modification again. There were cameras everywhere. She had to focus all of her attention on them.

With just a movement of his hand, the Russian eliminated the necessity of the magnetic key to open the door.

They entered a dark room, and Vopros started to dart the flashlight around.

Luckily, their search wasn't long. If the artefacts flux interference field was a bitch to recover them, it was a dead-giveaway to trace them in a room full of crates and boxes. They could clearly see the distortion of the fluxes around one, particular box. The small filaments were curling and bending all over it, like what happens if you cause water to ripple around a stick.

«Come on, come on, they're coming back!» Banshee urged him, keeping track of the guards while inside the video feed.

The music box wasn't big, at all. It could fit in Vopros's hand quite easily, and that only made more exquisite the wonderful artwork of the engravings.

They made it out of the door just in time. The sound of running steps and muffled sirens had started to be heard.

They ran out the stairwell, in the room they left before, hiding behind a display cabinet, while around them the first screams of "Find them!" started. They had finally discovered that no patrol has been sent to check the museum.

«If police find us, we fucked.» hissed Vopros. «Plan B?»

«We just have to get to one o' the windows, we can jump out. We're on the ground floor!» whispered Banshee back.

Vopros cussed in his mother tongue, quite heavily. As smooth as the plan has gone until that moment, he hated the fact that his most prominent contribution had to be passed over so completely. But apparently, the times calculated by Banshee were perfect.

Without losing her control over the cameras, they slid through the darkened hall full of stuffed animals, right while the policemen started to move towards the room to get to the music box room.

They fretted and reached one of the well-closed windows. Banshee used her last drops of focus for a last, desperate spell. Vopros, with an artefact under his hat, couldn't use magic, literally, to save his life. A red flash glimmered, and the window's lock busted, albeit quite silently. Then, Vopros helped her reach the windowsill, she pulled him up, and they vanished just as the first gunshots started to reach the walls around them.

«Jesus wept! We are the best!» shouted Banshee, launching herself into the Simca 1000, where Chico was half asleep, waiting for them.

«You did it?» he asked, waking up with a jolt and looking at them as if they were just popped out of thin air. They had thrown the police uniforms in a trash can and incinerated them with a fast Destroy spell.

As an answer, Vopros took off his busby. Tucked away inside it, with the utmost cure and care, there was the small music box. They took a moment to bask in marvel in front of the undeniable result of their efforts. From the open car window, a grey pigeon cooed, as he entered and perched on Banshee's left shoulder, with a satisfied expression in the little black eyes. The woman smiled, tickling the head of her familiar, whose observation from the sky had made possible her precise calculations of police response times.

They did it.

They truly did it.

And they got away with it with such flawless precision and elegance.

An explosion blasted the silent Boston night.

Chico and Banshee turned to look in dismay, as the north-west corner of the museum's first floor burst into flames, projecting debris in a fifty feet area around it. The museum and near buildings' windows were shattered in a thousand shards and screams of pain filled the night.

They sat, paralyzed, as the first screams started to echo in the night, and the distant sound of sirens increased, while the fire brigade added its nightly alarms to the police and ambulances. The darkness became a bright show of light and flame, as groups of nosy pedestrians and residents started leaving their homes, clad in pajamas and nightgowns, to understand what happened. Someone was already shouting "Terrorist attack!".

«Vopros, what the fucking hell!» shouted Banshee, her face turning to a degree of disquieting bright pink that, on her near-white flesh, was an indication of an extreme surge of blood to the face. «We were already safe!»

Vopros shrugged.

«Now we sure we get away with no problem.» he said, his expression never varying from his unreadable normal one. Chico was still staring at the flames.

«Madre de Diòs... que follòn...» a disaster, there was no other word. «What if there are victims?»

«That side is guard room. All guards were out searching museum. I think no one dead.» Vopros shrugged again. «Now, you drive or I come and drive away?» he urged.

Chico left the scene from a back road, turning over to their home, with Banshee still screaming.

«Why? We didn't need Plan B at all! It was just to create a diversion if an emergency ensued!»

«It was pity.» explained Vopros, as peaceful as ever.

«A pity?»

«I already put explosive. If no use it, pity.»

Banshee hid her face behind her hand, breathing deeply.

«The Chief will kill us all.» she muttered, while the Simca 1000 darted away in the night.