It was a black night, the lone source of light came from two neon green lights seemingly floating across the field. The lights weren't floating though, they were walking mounted to the head of if not the world's most famous "archeologist" certainly it's most lusted after. She normally didn't care much in the way of equipment, a pair of pistols and enough ammunition to declare war on a small country was usually enough, and when it wasn't it was her wits, not her gizmos that managed to get her out of a pharaoh's tomb or away from animals that had long since gone extinct everywhere else on the planet.
Tonight was a different case all together. She wasn't recovering the lost treasure of Imotep from his sunken palace. She was recovering a priceless, and stolen, piece of history from an undeserving piece of human refuse. The busty brunette felt a little like Batman, or Batgirl rather, with all the equipment she had strapped to sash. Aerosol sprays to detect laser grids, night vision, infrared and UV lights built into her custom made goggles, several different grapples and climbing tools. A PDA with the entire lay out of Wonderland.
Wonderland was the private estate of the most popular rapper perhaps of all time if judged purely on income. The Mad Hatter though he preferred the insane, MaDD hAtTA, spelling, or wherever the capitals managed to fall this time around. It was just one more infuriating thing for Lara that he seemed intentionally mangled the English language.
Rappers. She thought angrily watching as she passed by an opulent statue of the man himself wearing an absurd top hat to soft to keep its shape entirely it was cocked slightly to the side. Gaudy. She thought continuing to move on.
The mansion was came into view over a hill spilling enough light for Lara to turn off her night vision and instead let her lovely brown eyes take in her environment. So far the security had been lax, almost embarrassingly so, a few guards lazily roaming the grounds. It she'd been wearing her signature blue top and khaki shorts she might have been spotted. Probably not the guards were driving along in their golf carts, as long as she wasn't in the way she would probably have been overlooked. She wasn't wearing her standard outfit though.
Lara had traded in her khaki shorts for black spandex that clung to her legendary curves like a lover. Her top was a made of dull black cotton again outlining her curves and squeezing her breasts tightly together. The only parts of her normal outfit she was currently wearing were twin pistols hanging from her hips and her nearly waist length braid which was currently wrapped around her shoulder to keep it out of her way. In that outfit they could have stared right at her they would probably never notice her. She was like a ghost hovering through the grounds.
The other security measures were a little harder to get around and for an average thief probably enough of a deterrent to go hit an easier softer target. Lara had spent nearly near entire adult life learning to avoid security measures that had been in place for thousands of years without a single person getting past them. Places so old that they were forgotten to most and while her body had the scars to remind her that she didn't get everything right the first time that was when she was making it up as she went along. Given the choice between raptors and security cameras it was a no brainer what Lara would prefer to be attempting to avoid.
There was a moment before the next camera gap so Lara had time to stop and stare at the opulent manor again still feeling that disgust she'd felt before. It was just money for money's sake. There was no class to lining a driveway with statues of yourself or to a golden fountain with nude women carved around it. The only thing that she found even slightly attractive about the house were the doors, sixteen foot tall double doors in a black lacquer. They reminded her of some of the gothic castles she'd excavated but everything else just turned her stomach.
Five. Four. Lara felt the familiar tension coil in her belly. It was always there when she was about to be in danger. The danger was part of why she did this, the incredible rush she got. She'd made enough money by the time she was twenty one to have lived modestly for the rest of her life and by the time she was twenty five she could have lived well for the rest of her life. Now at just the far side of thirty she couldn't conceivably spend all of her money before she died. It wasn't greed that motivated her at this point. Even though she planned on donating the piece she was on the trail of tonight it wasn't some philanthropic urge in her either. She loved facing danger.
Three. Two. That last second she had to wait, possibly the last second in her life that she wasn't in danger she spent checking her equipment one last time. The grapple was still in place and secured, her PDA was locked in place, every pouch was secured as were her pistols. Nothing was going to fall off or rattle to give her position away. Everything metal was covered, there was nothing to catch the light and alert the guards.
One. She exhaled all the air in her body then dragged in one last breath. Go! She thought and sprinted across the football field sized clearing where the majority of the cameras were. It would have looked to the casual observer like she was practicing football maneuvers as she sprinted up, cut left, fell back and darted diagonally but it wasn't practice. The practice had come in the weeks before when she'd identified the best way to cross the clearing without alerting the cameras to her presence.
The fact that the tomb raiding beauty could easily have been an Olympic level gymnast was obvious as she approached the front of the house and easily somersaulted over the railing then kick flipped off a wall to grab the banister of the second story. From there she quickly shimmied up a column reached around to grab the roof and flipped onto the rooftop.
Up until that moment Lara had managed to keep herself from audibly criticizing the audacity of Wonderland but this was simply too much. It didn't even serve a purpose aside from sheer vanity. The roof itself was painted into a combination of rap artists wearing various Alice in Wonderland style outfits. Lara herself was standing on Lil' Kim in an indecent recreation of the blue dress white frock Alice and they were posed like the Sistine Chapel with God handing down a bowler cap with the price tag 10/9 on it to Mad Hatta. That drew a disgusted groan from the treasure hunter.
Lara, thankfully, couldn't hear the lyrics to the song playing in side. She couldn't even hear the music yet but she could feel the vibrations through the ceiling and that was enough to remind her why she was on this particular job when normally she would have taken a pass ancient Egyptian artifact or not. There was something about rap music that just boiled the blood in her veins. She jogged across the roof to its center where a skylight served as her planned entry point. It was designed to be shatter proof and cut resistant but acid was apparently not in the specs certainly not for the screws that held the massive piece of glass in place. Lara had to wait patiently for the acid to do its work, she needed to use the exact right amount and not a drop more because one drop too many would leak into the house and she risked setting off an alarm if that happened. It didn't. Five minutes after she'd cracked the glass vials she was carefully lifting and moving the hefty glass cover out of her way.
It took her only a few second to secure her harness to the ceiling and drop down into the room. Just like the outside of the mansion the inside reeked of wasted money just the most ridiculous things that money could buy. She could smell the chlorine from the in door pool in the next room. The room she was in was lined with posters an platinum and gold records yet another thing for Lara to be upset by. Mad Hatta was a very successful. . .entertainer. Lara refused to use the term artist for him but what he did sold well enough over the last decade and a half to fund this palace.
As soon as she was on the floor she checked her PDA again. She didn't want to spend a single moment longer in this place than she had to. Lara trotted quickly down the halls, most of the hard work was done at this point, somewhere in the mansion Mad Hatta was asleep, or possibly passed out, there was the slight hint of marijuana in the air, which grew stronger as she made her wait to his vault.
Idiot. It wasn't that Lara had any problem with smoking marijuana. She didn't and found the American laws to be idiotic in the extreme when it came to marijuana. It was the fact that someone who had as much as Mad Hatta had would be willing to risk it all for a high. A high he could legally purchase as absinth.
She could hear the lyrics as well at this point. The song was titled, or at least the most commonly repeated lyrics in it, Smackin' Hos. It wasn't the lyrics that offended Lara, they were offensive but it was just music. It was something intangible about the garbled grouping of words that upset her.
Lara had been prepared to break into the safe, amongst other things she'd researched before coming here were the most likely combinations to his safe. His birthday, childhood address, first single, she had them all programmed into her PDA for quick reference but that wasn't going to be the answer to her problem. Instead she got lucky and Hatta had left the door to the safe open and she was able to walk right in.
The safe wasn't at all what she was expecting. The walk in vault bore more than a slight resemblance to the Batcave of comic lore. There was a dinosaur, an authentic raptor from the movie Jurassic Park, and a red headed doll I overalls with a scared face. A jersey worn by Michal Jordan in the Olympics and signed by the entire Dream Team and the football used in the kick off of AFC vs. NFC. Lara wasn't a fan of American Football, very few Europeans are so she didn't know that was what they called the Super Bowl before calling it the Super Bowl. She did know that it would be difficult to put a price some of the paintings he had lining the walls and that the tapestry hanging near the center of the room dated to the Ming Dynasty and if not a one of a kind, certainly one of few surviving copies.
It only took a few moments for it to become obvious that the lay out wasn't entirely aesthetic. The more valuable pieces were towards the back and center. So searching for her artifact, a golden jewel encrusted ankh believed to have been used by Ramses II & III. If the rumors it could be used grant a man immortality. Mad Hatta had bought it at an auction because quote. "This shit was bling for the king nigga of all time. I reckon it belongs to me now." Considering the amount of money he'd paid for it, just shy of a billion dollars, easily the total value of everything else in the vault Lara expected it to be at the room's center where a bright spot light shone. Her guess was wrong. The thing held beneath the spotlight was a diploma naming Dayshaun Crow a doctor of psychology. The ankh was next to it.
It had taken her spreading a little money around but she had managed to learn the exact design of the security system he was using to protect the Ankh. It was a combination pressure plate and temperature gauge. Very difficult to trick. Not only did she have to pull off the sleight of hand trick to get the trinket and replace it with the dummy of roughly equal weight, but she had to get them to the same temperature. Fortunately she'd known this heading in and had her own ankh, and two special tools that looked like guns to the casual observer. The first was microwave emitter, it would basically heat the metal to her chosen temperature, she could probably melt it if she had enough time but she didn't want to melt it she wanted to steal it. The second was a laser thermometer, allowing her to know with in one hundredth of a degree the temperature of both the Ankh and her replacement.
