downtime.
Bringing the house into close focus, she made her assessment. Garage doors. Back door. Half
windows that she guessed looked out of the kitchen. And then the full floor-to-ceiling glass sliders started up, running down the rear flank and around the corner that turned to the river’s shoreline.
Three stories up.
Nothing moving inside that she could see.
Man, that was a lot of glass. And depending on the angle of the light, she could actually see into
some of the rooms, especially the big open space that appeared to take up at least half of the first floor. Furniture was sparse and modern, as if the owner didn’t welcome people loitering.
Bet the view was unbelievable. Especially now, with the partial cloud cover and the sun.
Training the binocs on the eaves under the roofline, she looked for security cameras, expecting
one every twenty feet.
Yup.
Okay, that made sense. From what she’d been told, the homeowner was cagey as hell—and that
kind of relentless mistrust tended to be accessorized with a good dose of security-conscious
behavior, including but not limited to personal guards, bulletproof cars, and most certainly, constant monitoring of any environment the individual spent any amount of time in.
The man who’d hired her had all those and more, for example.
“What the…” she whispered, refocusing the binoculars.
She stopped breathing to make sure nothing shifted.
This was…all wrong. There was a wave pattern to what was inside the house: What furniture she
could see was subtly undulating.
Dropping the high-powered lenses, she looked around, wondering if maybe her eyes were the
problem.
Nope. All the pine trees in the forest were behaving appropriately, standing still, their branches
unmoving in the cold air. And when she put the magnifiers up again, she traced the rooftop of the
house and the contours of the stone chimneys.
All were utterly inanimate.
Back to the glass.
Inhaling deep, she held the oxygen in her lungs and balanced against the nearest birch trunk to give her body extra stability.
Something continued to be off. The frames of those sliding glass doors and the lines of the porches and everything about the house? Static and solid. The interiors, however, seemed…pixilated
somehow, like a composite image had been created to make things appear as if there were furniture…
and that image had been superimposed on something like a curtain…that happened to be subjected to
a soft current of air.
This was going to be a more interesting project than she’d assumed. Reporting on the activities of
this business associate of a “friend” of hers had not exactly lit a fire under her ass. She much
preferred greater challenges.
But maybe there was more to this than first appeared.
After all, camouflage meant you were hiding something—and she’d made a career out of taking
things from people that they wanted to keep: Secrets. Items of value. Information. Documents.
The vocabulary used to define the nouns was irrelevant to her. The act of penetrating a locked
house or car or safe or briefcase and extracting what she was after was what mattered.
She was a hunter.
And the man in that house, whoever he was, was her prey.
TEN
Blay had no business getting near a hand weight, much less the kind of iron that was down in
the training center’s gym. Hammering back that port on an empty stomach had made him fuzzy
and uncoordinated. But he had to have some kind of a direction…a plan, a destination to drag
his sorry ass to. Anything other than going up to his room, sitting on that bed again, and
starting the day in the same way he’d started the night—smoking and staring off into space.
Probably with a lot more port added in.
Stepping out of the underground tunnel, he walked through the office and pushed the glass door
open.
As he went along, still drinking from a half-full glass, his mind was circling itself, wondering
when all this bullcrap between him
Bringing the house into close focus, she made her assessment. Garage doors. Back door. Half
windows that she guessed looked out of the kitchen. And then the full floor-to-ceiling glass sliders started up, running down the rear flank and around the corner that turned to the river’s shoreline.
Three stories up.
Nothing moving inside that she could see.
Man, that was a lot of glass. And depending on the angle of the light, she could actually see into
some of the rooms, especially the big open space that appeared to take up at least half of the first floor. Furniture was sparse and modern, as if the owner didn’t welcome people loitering.
Bet the view was unbelievable. Especially now, with the partial cloud cover and the sun.
Training the binocs on the eaves under the roofline, she looked for security cameras, expecting
one every twenty feet.
Yup.
Okay, that made sense. From what she’d been told, the homeowner was cagey as hell—and that
kind of relentless mistrust tended to be accessorized with a good dose of security-conscious
behavior, including but not limited to personal guards, bulletproof cars, and most certainly, constant monitoring of any environment the individual spent any amount of time in.
The man who’d hired her had all those and more, for example.
“What the…” she whispered, refocusing the binoculars.
She stopped breathing to make sure nothing shifted.
This was…all wrong. There was a wave pattern to what was inside the house: What furniture she
could see was subtly undulating.
Dropping the high-powered lenses, she looked around, wondering if maybe her eyes were the
problem.
Nope. All the pine trees in the forest were behaving appropriately, standing still, their branches
unmoving in the cold air. And when she put the magnifiers up again, she traced the rooftop of the
house and the contours of the stone chimneys.
All were utterly inanimate.
Back to the glass.
Inhaling deep, she held the oxygen in her lungs and balanced against the nearest birch trunk to give her body extra stability.
Something continued to be off. The frames of those sliding glass doors and the lines of the porches and everything about the house? Static and solid. The interiors, however, seemed…pixilated
somehow, like a composite image had been created to make things appear as if there were furniture…
and that image had been superimposed on something like a curtain…that happened to be subjected to
a soft current of air.
This was going to be a more interesting project than she’d assumed. Reporting on the activities of
this business associate of a “friend” of hers had not exactly lit a fire under her ass. She much
preferred greater challenges.
But maybe there was more to this than first appeared.
After all, camouflage meant you were hiding something—and she’d made a career out of taking
things from people that they wanted to keep: Secrets. Items of value. Information. Documents.
The vocabulary used to define the nouns was irrelevant to her. The act of penetrating a locked
house or car or safe or briefcase and extracting what she was after was what mattered.
She was a hunter.
And the man in that house, whoever he was, was her prey.
TEN
Blay had no business getting near a hand weight, much less the kind of iron that was down in
the training center’s gym. Hammering back that port on an empty stomach had made him fuzzy
and uncoordinated. But he had to have some kind of a direction…a plan, a destination to drag
his sorry ass to. Anything other than going up to his room, sitting on that bed again, and
starting the day in the same way he’d started the night—smoking and staring off into space.
Probably with a lot more port added in.
Stepping out of the underground tunnel, he walked through the office and pushed the glass door
open.
As he went along, still drinking from a half-full glass, his mind was circling itself, wondering
when all this bullcrap between him
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