I have to admit that I don't know if a building of 58 levels has a cleaning gondola. I just assumed.

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Yoongi focus

"Blue suit jacket and black dress pants, 90s hair," Yoongi mumbled from behind the newspaper he was reading in the lobby of the tower.

"Understood," Taehyung's voice replied through the earpiece and Yoongi watched the man walking outside.

They had to test their method of deleting the card, and Jimin had told them that Choi always stowed his purse in the inner chest pocket of his suits, so Yoongi had waited for a resident who also had their purse at the same place for Taehyung to train. His best friend would pickpocket their victim's wallet and run a neodymium magnet (the strongest type of permanent magnet existing) all over it to hopefully delete the keycard. Credit cards and other important magnetic chips should not be affected because they were high coercivity cards, but for the low coercivity apartment cards it should work perfectly fine.

Should. That's why they were testing it. Once Taehyung was done, Namjoon would get the wallet and pretend to have found it, so that the owner gets it back. And for the rest of the day and the following days, their ex-cop would observe what would happen and how fast, given that he obviously had the most experience in observation.

They had played the idea through with a keycard cloner, but that would have required a cloner and Yoongi had not been sure if the device would have made it through the airport control next to a diamond polishing set (or even alone). And they still would have been left with the problem of finding a keycard writer, not to speak of the time such a scan could take. Giving someone back their wallet after more than some seconds simply was suspicious. So, they had settled for a slightly more extravagant plan, with which they did not need to worry about technical tools.

"Job's done," he heard his crimson friend and put down the paper. "You should have seen his panicked face when he checked if anything was missing." The other chuckled lowly.

"I bet it was beautiful," Yoongi said bored, "Now move your ass inside."

"Boring," Taehyung mumbled, but Yoongi knew he would come anyway.

They would check Choi's room today with the cleaning gondola because Jimin, brilliant and talented Jimin (yes, Yoongi had had to reevaluate his opinion on the little idiot), had found out the apartment and phone number of their target, after he had so cleverly introduced Jin and gained Choi's trust by verifying himself as part of the criminal circle. And Namjoon had been able to tell them where in the building the apartments with the last number 5 where by being so foresighted to take a picture of the ground plan.

Working with a team that was like a body of which every limb knew what it was doing felt great. Yoongi really could get used to it. Only Hope was missing, but the dance teacher was busy. Last time Tae and he checked, he was enlarging his dance studio and stuck in the middle of renovation. Taehyung had drawn his logo on the wall outside while Yoongi had remastered the intern database system for their friend.

"Ready?" Taehyung asked him when they met in the broom cabinet Yoongi had just picked the door lock of. With a wide boxy grin, the younger gave him the bag with the uniforms that looked like the technical staff's. They had not had time to get an exact copy, but blue overalls should be good enough. After all, people just saw what they wanted to see.

"I was born ready," he replied with a grin and leaned in for a brief kiss that made his stomach flip. They had not done more than this, because Tae apparently could sense his anxiety regarding anything that went further than kissing, and he knew he was an idiot for being scared because his best friend was one of the most considerate and gentle people in the world, but even just thinking about it caused his brain to short-circuit. He was not sure if he could handle this much input at once. Not that this kept him from fantasizing.

But that was nothing he should be concerned about right now because a boner would not help him getting the information he needed. If anything, it would make him look suspicious. Thus, determined he opened the door, pulled the white basecap into his face and marched off towards the elevators. Namjoon had found out that they would have to take the last level by stairs which could be entered through a door next to the sky view sports area. Having a fitness studio at the level with the most terrific view seemed slightly stupid to Yoongi, but he would not complain because it was easier to get past that than a pool area or a restaurant for the mere reason that many people were thinking like him and the place was most likely empty at this time.

And like promised, there was a door at the end of the hallway, that looked like it was not meant for normal people.

"Do you want to open this one, or should I?" Taehyung asked with a hint of competitiveness in his voice while they walked closer. The words were almost too quiet for Yoongi's pressure-clogged ears, so he tried to yawn it away.

"I'll do it. I won our last quick pick contest," he answered then and grinned at his friend mockingly.

Taehyung frowned. "By 0.3 seconds. That's within the fault tolerance of human reaction time."

Yoongi chuckled but subtly held out his hand for Tae to give him the lock pick set from the bag. "I still want to do it. You get to crack the safe, so leave some crumbs for me."

"Fair point," his friend admitted and slipped the tools he would need into his hand. "Show me what you've got."

The lock was a joke. It didn't even take Yoongi two seconds to crack it, and with a satisfying click it opened into a dark staircase that led upstairs. The second door that opened onto the roof was picked within another three seconds and they finally breathed in the thin smoggy air of Hongkong.

"Here we go," Taehyung cheered and ran off towards the gondola system. Sometimes it was like watching over a giant baby, but it was funny how easily his best friend could be entertained.

By the time Yoongi reached the system, the younger had already found out how it worked and was waiting impatiently. "Grandpa needs a little longer," Yoongi joked and reached out for the bag around his friend's shoulder to get out the laser distance measurer.

Given by the total building length they had measured yesterday, the apartment 48.5 should start at 12 meters and end at 24, so Yoongi crouched down to measure the distance to the far-off wall. Step by step he adjusted his position until the laser measur showed him a 12.6m.

Taehyung guided the gondola towards the right position, and Yoongi got inside. Now it meant going down 10 levels to peek into Mr. Choi's apartment. The man was out for business, given by the position of his phone, so there should be no unexpected interruption of their little stunt. In case their target would come back earlier than expected, Yoongi's laptop would send a message to his phone.

"Soundcheck," Taehyung said and looked after him when he vanished below the roof's rim.

"I can hear you," Yoongi answered when he heard his friend through the earpiece.

"Should I sing a song while you have to wait?" the sound of Taehyung's voice asked him through the system.

"Make it a good one," Yoongi said and smiled to himself. The gondola was going down extremely slow, so why not listen to some music?

Without delay, Taehyung began to sing Andrea Bocelli's Time to Say Goodbye in his most hilarious operatic voice and Yoongi sat on the floor of the swaying vehicle to sit it out while chuckling at his best friend's demeanor and trying to ignore the meaning of the lyrics.

Two minutes later, he gave the signal to stop (what did not stop Taehyung from singing) and got out the polarized sunglasses that enabled him to look through the extremely reflecting glass into the apartment. What he saw made his smile freeze.

Hastily, he grabbed his smartphone from his pocket and dialed Jin's number. This was the second time, and if what he just saw was real, they had big trust issues in the team and he would blow off the job immediately.

"Kim Seokjin," the rather bored voice of the personal shopper came through the speaker.

"Tae, shut up for a sec!" Yoongi barked at his friend and the song died down. "Jin, please explain to me why I'm looking at An Azalea on Choi's living room wall," he said flatly. Taehyung gasped.

"What?" Jin shouted through the phone over the rattling sounds in the background. Apparently, the brunette was at a street restaurant or something similar.

"An Azalea, Jin. I'm looking at the fucking piece we stole last time and I wonder again if Choi is one of your customers," he tried to phrase it nicely, but the accusation was there, implicit or explicit, it did not matter.

"I told you I don't know Choi," the personal shopper defended himself loudly, "No, I said it's not hard. See? Not. Hard."

"What?" Yoongi asked confused.

"Give me a second, Suga," the man at the other end said. Then, "This egg is raw inside. Sh­ēng. But I want it gù."

Was the beauty just explaining the cook how he wanted his fucking eggs? Now? After being accused of lying for the second time within three days?

"Jin, what the fuck? I'm in a gondola at what feels about a hundred meters above the ground and checking out our target's living room, and you're fighting with a damn chef over your eggs?" he growled into the microphone. He was about to shout at the other, but he would not allow himself such rudeness. It was bad enough that Jimin and Namjoon could make his blood boil in a manner that caused him to become loud, he would not make it a habit.

The little Taehyung in his ear chuckled. Of course, his silly idiot would find this funny, but Yoongi was the one in a shitty situation, and he needed answers.

"Yes, do it again," Jin said, "Now where were we?"

"An Azalea," Yoongi hissed once more. "Why does Choi have An Azalea?"

"I don't know. My customer was Dong Youngbae, not Choi Seunghyun. Maybe business partners?" the personal shopper answered. "I swear to you, I don't know him. No, I'm not talking to you, I'm talking to the phone. Watch the eggs!"

Yoongi sighed. Okay, so apparently their latest job had made it out of the country. And now that he thought about it, Choi could have simply heard of the personal shopper while receiving this painting, so maybe this was the connection; maybe this was why their target knew of drag-and-drop-art. Hopefully, Jin had not spilled any information about how he got the piece.

"Jin?" he asked for the other man's attention.

"I told you I don't know Choi."

"Yeah, I got that. What did you tell Dong about us?" he asked concerned.

"Nothing. I never talk about my sources to customers," the other answered, and Yoongi felt the weight lifting from his chest.

"Good. And by the way: hard-boiled is zhǔ yìng. You can thank me later," he replied and hung up to turn back to the apartment, back to what he originally wanted.

The safe was easy to spot. It was worked into the wall behind a wide simplistic office desk. "The safe looks like a 7-X-2000 with a number disk," he told Tae. It was almost comically that it was not hidden behind a painting or a wall carpet, so Choi must be very confident about his security system, which by the way was nowhere to be seen. No control panel shimmered along the walls of the wide living room, only two cameras in the upper corners. Most likely, the control unit was directly next to the entrance and therefore hidden behind the wall that parted the small foyer from the rest of the apartment.

"Can you move me to the side?" he asked his best friend and received a hum.

Centimeter by centimeter he moved along the window and the small foyer came into sight bit by bit, but nothing that looked like an alarm system or control unit with a number pad. Maybe it was behind the stupid potted palm tree.

"I can't find a hint at the security system," he reported. This job was damn frustrating, and he began to doubt their success.

"Then come up again and we'll think of something else," Taehyung said. "It's not like we're not busy. I have to buy my things for the forgery and you'll have to modify a phone for me because we don't have the cracking set here." Not bringing the safe cracking set had been a monetary decision. They could have easily brought it here with the diplomat's luggage, but they had decided not to make an effort again in bringing everything back, so the expensive tools had had to stay at home.

Was this really it? All the fuzz to find out they were up against a standard safe? Well, at least they would not have to worry about that anymore. "Okay, let's go shopping," he sighed and shook his head. This job was not paid well enough for what they had to do.

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The original Time to Say Goodbye:

The new Time to Say Goodbye: