KITCHENER — Peggy Kyriacou felt a strange chill in the air.

"Did the idiots leave the air conditioning on?" the head waitress at the Country Boy family restaurant wondered as a stiff draft hit her while she stepped inside her workplace.

It was just after six on Sunday morning. It was time to put the coffee on at the well-known 267-seat eatery at the corner of Manitou Drive and Fairway Road.

She had taken a cab to work. She had punched in the code to disarm the alarm.

Kyriacou, a 20-year fixture at the landmark Kitchener restaurant, still had no idea the Country Boy's deepest overall pocket had just been picked clean, apparently by a team of safecracking, alarm-thwarting cat burglars.

She had no clue that police detectives would soon be out to solve the Country Boy Caper or that restaurant owner Terry Voulcaridis would be baffled by the brashness of the home-fried heist.

"Never in my wildest dreams," Voulcaridis said.

But things got really wild last Sunday morning as Kyriacou followed the trail of frigid air into The Royal Room in the back of the restaurant.

The parlour, where two prime ministers have dined, was dark. An out-of-place breeze blew through. Kyriacou flipped on the light switch to see tiny pieces of plasterboard coating the table and carpet. At first, she thought the ceiling had caved in.

The self-described "potato girl" from Prince Edward Island looked up where the skylight used to be in the centre of the ceiling. She saw only sky, no glass.

"I look up and there's a big hole," Kyriacou said on Thursday. "I said, 'Holy Geez.' "

Country Boy had just been broken into for the first time in 22 years. And not just some run-of-the mill, smash-in-through-the-roof, grab-what-you-can-and-go-bust-in, either.

This appears to be something much different.

We're talking about a team of thieves lowering themselves through the roof in the middle of the night. No alarms tripped. No cameras recorded intruders. No fingerprints or footprints left behind. That's how Voulcaridis, who's been working with investigators, tells it.

"This is right out of 'Mission: Impossible,' " Voulcaridis said on Thursday.

"These guys did it better than Tom Cruise."

A 3,000-pound safe once bolted to the floor behind Voulcaridis' office desk was cut free, torched, emptied and left behind in a closet alcove.

About $51,000 worth of cash and family valuables — including gold lira that Voulcaridis' mother had kept to give her grandkids — were gone by dawn.

"These people never put a foot in the restaurant," Voulcaridis said. "Everything was done in the air."

The cinematic scope of this safecracking raid is breathtaking in its boldness and meticulously-planned execution, even to regional police.

"It's pretty dramatic," police spokesperson Mike Haffner said.

"Obviously, a planned or prepared break-and-enter."

An inside job? Of course, it had to be, Voulcaridis said. Someone on the inside — he has 73 current employees — had to be feeding information to the thieves.

They seemed to know the Country Boy restaurant and its plaza as well as Voulcaridis, the owner of both.

How did they know the owner's office, with its hefty safe, was the only place in the building that wasn't watched by cameras and motion sensors?

How did they know the only side of the building where none of dozen outside cameras could catch them shimmying up some piping in the dark, after the last nighttime cleaners had left around 11 o'clock Saturday? Scuff marks remain on the wall.

Oh, and then there's the opportunistic timing of the heist.

Just so happens that Voulcaridis' youngest son Criss — pictured as a little boy in the restaurant's well-known signs and ads — is getting married this weekend with a big reception in Cambridge.

And the newlyweds are honeymooning in Vegas. And family is flying in from Greece.

So Voulcaridis had just made a big cash withdrawal from the bank so he could give the kids some spending money and have gifts for his overseas wedding guests.

There was about $27,000 cash in that safe, Voulcaridis said, including the cash earnings from Saturday's dining room business.

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The sickening thing? A week earlier or later, and the thieves would have found no more than $8,000 cash in that safe. Somehow, they knew this was the week to hit Country Boy.

"These people found the gold pot," Voulcaridis, who expects his insurance will only cover about $4,000.

But how did they get to that gold pot? The lingering trail of the descent remains, as Voulcaridis gives a guided tour.

The burglars gently lifted the skylight window and set it down on the far end of the roof, where it was found. Had they smashed the heavy window or dropped it, the motion sensors would have gone off and the working alarms would have sounded.

The tiny pieces of debris were too light to set off alarms.

On ropes or wires, the burglars would have lowered themselves just below the open skylight in the middle of The Royal Room — but not too far down.

They didn't want to be seen on the cameras mounted just below them. They even hung a garbage bag to catch any falling objects that might trigger an alarm. While suspended, they cut a hole into the upper wall and climbed between the ceiling and roof.

They walked on a structural beam, which led them to Voulcaridis' office.

Once above the office, which is beside The Royal Room but had no cameras or sensors, they cut into the ceiling and lowered themselves into the office closet.

Inside the sealed office, with its door shut, they were protected from the cameras watching almost ever other inch of the restaurant.

Bolt cutters. Blow torch. Portable oxygen. Those were the likely tools. The sprinkler heads in the office ceiling were covered in plastic so smoke wouldn't set them off.

"You tell me there was no planning in this," Voulcaridis said. "They were probably three hours in there."

The closet has scuff marks up and down the wall too. The intruders left little else, other than the cut-through carcass of the looted safe.

They presumably made their exit the same way the entered.

"It's pretty intriguing that they were able to manoeuvre themselves in certain situations and directions to get where they needed to be," Haffner said.

Now, Voulcaridis is making a few manoeuvres of his own as police work on the case.

He's spent thousands on more security cameras and a new safe. He just paid $300 to install a camera and motion sensor in his little office.

He never thought he would need them in this place. He always thought his seemingly-impenetrable office was a well-protected island. He was wrong.

If only he'd spent that $300 a week earlier.

"I would have been ahead by a mile right now."