“Talk to me, Travis,” Jackie screamed into her headset and hoped this time Travis would respond. It had been more than five minutes since she had lost contact with him. Just before that, Jackie heard what sounded like gun shots blaring in the background. She put on her night vision goggles, dimmed the lights on her stolen Hummer and continued to search for him. “Come on, Travis, talk to me.”

Now, Jackie began to realize why Nick Simmons old partner, Monika Wynn, passed on this job and recommended that she and Travis do the same. After working with Travis on the surveillance of Martin Marshall, Monika thought that she could make use of Travis’s computer skills. He had been a programmer by trade before the system dealt him a bad hand and he, in turn, became a high-tech robber.

Back in those days, Travis was known as Mr. Blue, Jackie was Mr. White, and their friend, Ronnie Grier, went by the name Mr. Green. They were all college graduates and all were victims of corporate layoffs and downsizing. They’d rob banks, grocery stores, and jewelry stores. In this new career, which he seemed to have mastered so well, his programmer’s attention to detail proved useful in planning the jobs they ran.

That combination of skills was just what Monika, who was ex-army special operations, was looking for, since she desperately needed a new partner. So, when one of her contacts, Jack Faulkner, approached her with this job, she brought Travis along to hear what he had to say. They met at Nita Nita on Wythe Aveune in Brooklyn. Over cocktails, Jack began to explain the job.

“Quad-core processors,” Jack said to Monika when she asked what the job was.

“What?” Monika asked, not having the slightest idea of the words Jack had just thrown at her.

“Quad-core processors, Monika,” Travis answered for Jack, seemingly excited at just the mention of the words. “It’s a computer processor made for dual-processor servers, which means that these servers will essentially be eight-processor servers; two processors times four cores each.”