Quarantine Heist

An increasingly pervasive hum, which felt like it was borrowing deep into her temples, gradually pulled Cassandra out of her sleep and into disorienting consciousness. Her eyes were dry and sensitive to the artificial glow of light that was around her, so she kept them shut. Her entire body suddenly began to tremor along with everything else around her, rattling in place but sounding ready to break out. She gradually opened her eyes to be faced directly with a masked woman wearing a clear visor. She was gesturing and waving at her frantically. The words of the masked woman were muffled by the deep thrumming hum, but Cassandra could just about make them out.

‘We have started our descent into Brisbane. Could you please move your chair into the upright position?’

‘Of course,’ Cassandra replied and after some fumbling, she brought the chair up and pulled up the window visor, flooding her row with the light of the Golden Coast. She sighed with relief. Somewhere down there was her boyfriend. Her planned gap year of volunteering in Bolivia and backpacking across Latin America was cancelled by the pandemic. It became a protracted process of purgatory as she had waited months for repatriation back to Australia, with its strict travel limits and quarantine rules.

As she stood up to disembark the plane, she checked her front seat pocket where she had stored her headphones and pulled out a small, discreet black leather notebook, which was held shut tightly by an elastic band. When leaving the plane she tried to turn it in to one of the flight attendants. She was taken aback and said almost sternly, ‘Please hand it over at the lost luggage desk at Arrivals; they should also be equipped with additional disinfecting wipes. We’re all out I’m afraid.’

Cassandra put on a smile and turned to step out into crisp coastal air. Her flight had been split with connections in Chile and Sydney, totalling almost thirty-six hours so far. But this was really only the start of her journey as she faced two weeks in isolation in a hotel. She wanted nothing else but to lie down and pass out somewhere.

After collecting her luggage, she was swiftly ushered through the terminal by the airport staff. Cassandra briefly paused in the steady stream of socially distanced passengers, progressing towards the exit and said to an airport staff member, ‘I would like to turn in this notebook that was left behind.’

‘Please keep moving and get in touch with Airport Lost and Found once you have completed quarantine. The desk isn’t open,’ he said, already focused on gesturing and herding the next passengers down the Arrivals terminal hallway.

It looked like she would have to hold onto it for a while longer.

The first thing Cassandra when she got to her hotel room was fling her tote bag onto her bed, letting some of its contents spill out. She got into the shower to rinse off the smells and grime of plane seats, airport terminals and buses. She then threw herself onto her bed and sunk her face into the fresh linen-covered pillow. As she lay there, she felt a small pressure below her body, pressing into her ribs. She felt for the source and found the notebook. It was small but had a heft to it. She flicked the elastic band over the corners of the notebook and it almost burst open. She leafed through the early pages slowly and furrowed her brow. She scanned through the following pages more quickly. Every single page was completely filled with a scrawling handwriting. Entire pages were just continuous lists of letter and numbers, written so small that she had to strain her eyes to even decipher the characters.

She lifted her fingers and let the pages freely flicker until they all fell flat, revealing the notebook’s inner cover. It was a Moleskin notebook and it had an envelope flap on the inner cover that could barely be shut because it was stuffed so full. On the flap a small note read, ‘If lost, please contact for return. Large reward will be given.’

A telephone number was written below it.

Cassandra opened the envelope flap, gasped and immediately slammed it shut. She gently pried it open, as if exposing it to the light could harm it. Inside was a stack of crisp, American one-hundred dollar bills. She counted them out: $20,000 exactly.

***

Over the next few days, Cassandra become intimately familiar with every nook and cranny of her hotel room. The days bled into one another as she would pace around her room. She would sit at the foot of her bed and focus her gaze for meditation, trying to clear the stressful thoughts like a deep cleanse of detritus from her mind. But every time she tried, her gaze would gradually drift down, down following what seemed to be a heavy weight: the notebook nestled upon some towels in the room’s corner. It felt magnetic or gravitational. When she closed her eyes, it seemed like the notebook’s weight had made it sink lower, pulling the carpeted floor down into the rooms below. And she was just circling around it like coin in a basin, inexorably ever closer.

Her boyfriend had been very excited by the images of the notebook pages that she had sent to him, more so than the money inside and called her regularly. This felt unusual, he wasn’t one to initiate. She formally broke her meditation to retrieve the notebook and put in the drawer of her bedside table. Out of sight and out of mind.

***

On night number six she woke up in a sweat. She threw her sheets back and, pulled the drawer open and called the number on the inner flap.

Immediately she heard a woman’s voice. It crackled, ‘You do not have credit to call this number abroad. Please log-in online and top up enough credit to get an international add-on package.’

Cassandra groaned. She picked up the hotel phone by the bedside and followed the instruction to make an external call. It rang in a gurgle of distorted static for an eternity before it went silent. Then came a small click.

‘Sorry—Hello? I’m calling about returning a notebook I found,’ she tried.

There were no more sounds on the other end. She tried her best to sleep.

A series of shrill digital beeps woke her into a state of disarray. It was coming from the hotel telephone. The little LED display read 4AM. She picked it up.

A man spoke with an accent that was hard to place. ‘Thank you very much for contacting me. Please download Signal and message this number with the first five characters on the seventh page of the notebook.’

Cassandra scrambled to write down the instructions on the notepad next to the phone. She followed the steps and immediately a notification whooshed to indicate the man’s response, ‘Thank you again for finding the notebook. It holds a lot of value to me and my work. You should have found the money in the back pocket unless someone got to it before you. I can double that, if you could send it as soon as possible, to cover the inconvenience.’

Cassandra paused. She thought about what her boyfriend had said could be in the notebook.

‘So?’ he followed up almost instantly.

She responded, ‘Extra 60,000 and we have a deal.’

‘Certainly’ the response came in without hesitation. ‘I can get the money over to you as quickly as possible. Please request a next day courier to deliver to the following postal address. Where are you?’

Cassandra evaded saying anywhere specific but explained that she would not be able post it out for another eight days because of her quarantine. The man asked her if she could request a direct pickup from the hotel. She told him there was no chance.

After a moment’s pause, she received a response, ‘Please be extremely careful, I would suggest you leave the hotel as soon as possible.’

There were supposed to be hotel staff patrolling to enforce the rules. Cassandra panicked, closed the app and called her boyfriend.

‘You should have told me before calling him!’ he exclaimed. ‘I think I know what’s in those pages.’

‘Well?’

‘I mean—I know—they are paper wallets for Bitcoins and maybe other currencies. You can write the key on paper to store them so no one can hack them online. But if you have the paper you can take the assets. I tried moving some and it worked. Those first couple of pages you sent to me were worth half a million dollars alone, imagine what else is in there.’

‘Will he know you have moved them?’

‘…Yes. But he doesn’t know where you are,’ he said, still confidently. ‘Cassandra?’

‘Marcus, I called him from the hotel phone. You need to send them back. Please tell me you can do that?’

His silence was nauseating. ‘I think we are going to need an exit plan. You’re a four-hour drive away.’

***

After the call Cassandra tried and failed to get some sleep. She couldn’t even lay still. Soon the earliest rays of light started to seep in through the window blinds. She was starting to doze off from exhaustion when she heard a knock on the door.

It was forceful and insistent.

She went over and looked through her door’s peephole: there were two figures dressed in what looked like hazmat suits. Before she had time to decide what to do, the lock slowly rolled anticlockwise and they burst into the room.

‘Please move over into the holding room down the hall, my colleague will escort you. This is a routine test and cleaning procedure,’ one said, muffled by their equipment. It was completely unmarked, with no affiliation on the lapel.

‘I thought I wasn’t supposed to leave my room. Let me speak to someone from the hotel.’

‘This is protocol.’

‘Okay, let me get some things first.’

‘No. This will take a moment. Everything must be left here for contamination purposes. Please wear a mask and follow my colleague.’

She was taken to a room that looked like a storage for cleaning equipment, and the door was closed firmly behind her. Half an hour must have passed and she couldn’t hear a sound from outside. She carefully opened the door into the hallway. The people in the hazmat suits were gone and there wasn’t a member of hotel staff in sight.

As soon as she got back to her room she rushed over to her bedside drawer. She yanked it open, almost pulling the drawer out of the bracket. Sure enough, the notebook was gone. In its place lay a neat stack of the dollar bills. Who were those people and who sent them? Had they found her through the hotel phone? Either way, she couldn’t stick around for any more visitors. All her other belongings were where she left them.

Cassandra sat on the end of her bed for a moment. She couldn’t believe she was about to do it. But there was no time now to contemplate it or second guess herself. On her phone she had pictures of every single page of the notebook. The moment she got out of the hotel her boyfriend would transfer all of the rest of the assets into his account. Her travel case was ready and her boyfriend messaged to say he was in place by the hotel fire exit.

She was officially midway through her quarantine, but the decision had been made for her: she was going to escape—and make it a heist at that. As she was leaving her room, she instinctively looked at herself in the full-body mirror and realised she had forgotten something essential. She pulled out a black mask, pulled it over her face and walked out through the door.