THURSDAY, JAN 9, 2026
By the second week of January his virtual currency balance had cleared a hundred and sixty thousand dollars. The real-world cash account was approaching two hundred thousand, split across the safety deposit box, the warehouse strongbox, and the operational float he kept at the 113th Street room.
The numbers had started to feel abstract, which was something he'd read about in the psychological literature on criminal enterprises: the moment money stopped feeling like a finite resource and became a flow, a context, a backdrop, was the moment people started making expensive decisions about it. He had read about this and was watching for the moment in himself and was not entirely certain he'd recognize it when it arrived, which was a limitation he couldn't fully solve for.
He bought the armored vehicle in January. Not the military-adjacent SUV — he wasn't there yet — but a heavy sedan with factory-installed ballistic glass and a reinforced chassis, sourced through the same channel as everything else he owned and delivered to his Red Hook vehicle bay in the form of its closest real-world equivalent: a modified Executive-Series vehicle with glass rated to stop rifle rounds and door panels that added three hundred pounds to the car's total weight, which he felt in the steering the first time he took it out at four in the morning on the empty streets near the warehouse. It drove like a normal car with strong opinions about corners.
He drove it for two weeks before the Fisk Tower job. Not to any of his operational areas, he drove it in the outer boroughs, in Queens and Staten Island and the less-monitored sections of the Bronx, learning the weight distribution, the braking characteristics, the turning radius, the way it responded at speed compared to the lighter vehicle he'd been using.
He had his Driving stat at sixty-two, which the Panel's internal feedback suggested was the equivalent of someone with significant road experience and above-average technical skill. He drove the heavy car until it stopped feeling heavy and started feeling like the appropriate instrument for what he was doing.
Marco met the car on a Thursday and walked around it with his hands in his pockets and said nothing for thirty seconds.
"Ballistic glass," he said finally.
"Yes."
"You're expecting trouble on the Fisk job."
"I'm expecting a Fisk-adjacent job to be a different category of risk than previous operations, and I'm equipping accordingly." He paused. "I'm also expecting that as we grow, the category of risk will continue to increase, and I'd rather have the equipment already and not need it than need it and not have it."
Marco walked to the passenger side and opened the door and looked at the interior — the reinforced panels, the communication array Dan had added himself, the dedicated scanner that monitored police frequencies and several others he monitored more quietly. "You've been spending," Marco said.
"Investing," Dan said. "The distinction matters."
"Does it?"
"An operation that fails because it was underequipped is more expensive than the cost of the equipment." He'd run the calculation for all of his major purchases and the logic always came out the same way. You did not go cheap on the things that determined whether you came home.
Marco got in. He sat in the passenger seat and looked through the ballistic glass at the warehouse bay. After a while he said: "I've been in cars like this before."
"I know," Dan said. He didn't know the specifics, but the recognition in Marco's body language when he'd looked at the car was not the recognition of someone encountering something new.
"Different context," Marco said.
"Better context, I'd imagine."
Marco allowed a short sound that was technically a laugh. "Marginally." He put his hand flat on the door panel, feeling the weight of it. "I'm going to need a better extraction kit for the Fisk job. The relay bypass I was planning to use is standard-issue security architecture. If their subsidiary runs Fisk's own protocol — which it probably does — the relay system is proprietary. I need the specs."
"I have them," Dan said. He'd sourced the Fisk subsidiary's security contract through a document broker two weeks ago. "Come upstairs."
They spent three hours in the warehouse office. Dan made actual coffee, because the space heater and the document work and the length of the session warranted it, and Marco spread his own notes alongside Dan's schematics and they built the approach from two directions simultaneously, which was a different kind of planning than either of them had done alone — more complicated in the moment, more complete in the result.
At the end, Marco gathered his notes and rolled them and put them in his jacket pocket in the gesture of someone who was finished with something rather than pausing. "Two weeks," he said.
"Two weeks," Dan agreed. "I want to do one more site visit first."
"Alone?"
"Alone. The Fisk subsidiary has a public-facing client service office on the second floor. I want to go in as a client."
Marco looked at him. "A client."
"A prospective client. I have a credible pretext through the Columbia identity — a research grant inquiry, something that would logically come through a financial management firm. I want to see the floor layout from the inside."
"That's reckless," Marco said, mildly.
"It's calculated." He'd run the risk profile three times. The visit would be brief, routine, indistinguishable from dozens of similar consultations the firm fielded weekly. His Columbia identity was clean and verifiable. He would not go near anything sensitive. He would sit in a waiting room and observe for forty-five minutes and come away with information worth an hour of external observation. "The calculation comes out on the side of going in."
Another of Marco's assessing pauses. "You're going to do it regardless of what I say."
"I'm going to make my own decision," Dan said. "That's different from disregarding your input."
"Is it?"
"Yes." He met Marco's eyes. "If you have a specific operational objection, make it. I'll consider it seriously. If it's a general concern about the risk profile, I've already considered it and I've made the call."
Marco looked at him for a moment. "Don't be charming at the client meeting," he said. "Charming is memorable."
Dan almost smiled. "I'll be adequately forgettable," he said, which was a skill he had been practicing nearly as long as the other ones and which had, so far, served him reasonably well.