Fine, I’ll tell you.
I’ll tell you about my secret master plan.
But you must promise not to tell anyone.
Around the turn of the 19th century, Peter Carl Fabergé designed 50 Easter eggs for the Russian imperial family, each one a masterpiece of craftsmanship.
The Winter Egg is sprinkled with 1,660 diamonds, made from quartz, platinum and gold. The miniature surprise basket that comes inside of it holds another 1,378 diamonds – not too bad!
It’s one of the few eggs that’s neither lost nor catching dust in a museum. When it was auctioned away to the Emir of Qatar in 2002, the reported price was $9.6 million.
I can work with that. But where is it?
The Emir passed it on to his son, so I bet it’s usually hidden deep down in the vaults of the royal palace, which I presume looks something like this:
That’s a fortress. I’m not going near that. Instead, I’ll wait until for some inexplicable reason, the egg will be on display in a convenient, accessible place.
Like the Tornado Tower in downtown Doha.
Oh yeah. That looks easy. While the exhibition is going on, I’ll make a smooth entrance.
But I can’t do it without some help from my friends!
I think I’ll bring…
- Paul, the thinker, who’ll make sure we don’t forget any details and go over the plan enough times to make it foolproof.
- Matt, the smooth talker, who’ll draw the attention of the event on himself to create a distraction.
- Alex, the joker, who’ll make a joke when things go wrong and keep a cool head so we stay flexible and can adapt the plan when we need to.
- Ted, the handyman, who’ll set up the mechanics and bust open a door or punch a guard if it’s necessary.
While they’re covering my ass, I’ll climb to the right floor. Shouldn’t take too long.
Once I’m in and Matt’s distracting everyone…
…I’ll just pull the old switcheroo and exchange it for a holographic replica that looks just like it.
Yeah, Paul and I still need to work on the graphic details.
But with that all done and nobody any the wiser, I’ll just climb back to the floor where we set up shop. Might need some help from my friends to get back in though.
When we realize all exits are blocked, Alex is gonna crack some joke about how we shouldn’t have put all our “eggs” in one basket before Ted hot-wires a hypercar that also just happens to be there.
Guess our escape won’t be as smooth, but oh well…
Yup, that should work. No, that’ll definitely work.
We’ll walk out of there, egg in a plain backpack and take the next leasable private jet out of there.
Adjusting for inflation, the egg will now be worth $13 million, give or take. That’s about $2.6 million for each one of us.
Me and my friends will return home, casually walk in, say something inconspicuous like “Honey, I’m home!”
The only remaining proof of the greatest heist of all time will be the smirks as we exchange looks over the Poker table that night.
Everything will be the same.
Except we’re now globally wanted master thieves and secret millionaires.
And if that sounds like nothing but a secret fantasy to you, well, then all I can say is that the closer you look, the less you see…
