The third man shook his head slowly. “Ricky, it’s not done yet. Nothing is done until we are lying on a beach somewhere faraway, with more money than we know what to do with.”

At sixty-three, Sebastian Ramos was the oldest of the three and by far the most cautious. He’d spent two long spells inside the notorious Caseros Prison, in the south district of the city, for robbery and firearms offences and that meant this job was his last roll of the dice.

Pedro picked up the power drill and started to walk back down the tunnel. “It’s 6 a.m. The world above us is waking up. Right now, we rest and at midnight we start the final drilling and then we have the whole weekend to enjoy those boxes.”

Pedro was a patient man. He’d been planning the job for over ten years. The financial crisis that hit Argentina in 2001 had been brutal. It had wiped out his meagre life savings, just as it had for millions of his fellow countrymen. The trigger for the economic meltdown had been a catastrophic run on the banks as people perceived they weren’t holding enough cash to cover their deposits. The public lost confidence in the banking system and chose to keep their cash and valuables at home or open safe-deposit boxes. Ten years after the crash, there were over five hundred thousand boxes being rented from banks. One for every eighty residents: a staggering ratio.

Pedro was one of them, but his box, located in the vault of the Banco Estero, was different from the rest. It was permanently empty.

He’d opened it in January 2009 and had made regular visits to the bank on the first Monday of every month. Over time, he’d memorised the internal layout of the vault and had mapped the exact positions of the twelve hundred boxes. The living room walls inside his tiny one-bed flat were covered with large hand-drawn designs. They displayed the layout of the boxes inside the vault and were colour-coded, depending on their size. Pedro knew that, even with a clear run of forty-eight hours over a quiet weekend, there wouldn’t be enough time to drill open all the boxes. He calculated that three men, working as a team, could manage roughly ten per cent, so that meant targeting the biggest ones, of which there were one hundred and twenty.

Pedro was a former soldier who’d left school at eighteen and served for seven years in the First Tank Calvary Regiment as a mechanic. Once he left the army, he’d landed a job as a heating and air-conditioning engineer and those skills proved to be invaluable when it came to constructing the ventilation system required for a hundred-foot tunnel.