Richard listened to the plan with furrowed brows, a deadset frown, and an ever so slightly increasing heartbeat. As the briefing continued, he felt a slowly rising panic emanating from his diaphragm and, when the subject fell on 'infiltration', climaxed to a palpable, prickly sensation in his mouth. He inhaled and exhaled loudly, and everyone turned to look at him. He excused himself. How he wished he could also excuse himself from this bloody mess altogether. 

He again took another deep breath, and allowed the information floating about him form themselves into readable mental bullet points - this was one of Richard's ways of coping with the babbledegook his professors spouted in their lectures. He made sense of three things:

[list]
[*]Something was to be stolen from some bloke's house in Cambridge.
[*]The thing to be stolen was electronically locked.
[*]The only possible way to unlock it was if they made an entirely new flash drive to-
[/list]
[i]Oh, fuck it.[/i]

This couldn't be the only way.

Richard peered over the balcony. The sun was beginning to heave itself over the horizon, as evidenced by the faint mantle of blue to the east. The walls of the apartment building, could, perhaps, be able to be held onto. Richard desperately looked around for bedsheets, or some sort of long cloth to fashion a rope out of. On the other hand, if he ran fast enough, he could barge out the door, make it to the fire escape at the other end of the hall, and disappear into the urban labryinth below. For a brief moment, he briskly strode across the apartment, momentarily putting his hand on the door's brass handle, hoping to god there wasn't a CCTV (though he knew in his heart of hearts there was). He remembered the other male employee that refused to cooperate. He pushed it out of his mind. He was faster. Stronger. He wasn't going to end up like him. He would get out of here.

Then, he noticed the two girls.

Should he leave them?

One side of Richard, long suppressed, yet was just now getting louder, yelling, screaming his situation to him. He could die. He [i]would[/i] die. They'd find his body in a bloody ditch, his face plastered all over the bloody [i]Sun[/i] or [i]Telegraph[/i] or whatever, his legacy merely to be the face of a shock-value frontline news story. He would be the subject of tabloid gossip, the sort of thing that made people hate the evening news. His mark on the world would be that - just that. If he remained here any longer, that is.

Yet another voice told him to stay.

Stay for the others. 

Stay because it's [i]the right thing to do[/i].

Richard sat in the tower of his own thoughts for a long time. 

Then he sighed, and turned away from the door.

He definitely wasn't going to go anywhere with the plan. Perhaps make conversation, gain a little trust before they made it out of here.

"Fucking hell, I'm a bloody [i]politics[/i] student. What do they want [i]me[/i] for?"