“This cable hack will last exactly sixty seconds,” the compelling voice said, as strong, clear eyes stared out from between bands of red and blue at the screen’s top and bottom, over which moving white letters (STREAMING FREEDOM VIDEO) were superimposed. “It cannot be traced, it cannot be stopped, and it is the only free voice left in this city.”
“’Cept for Original Cindy,” Original Cindy said.
Sketchy leaned in. “I dig this guy — he’s intense.”
“He’s just another scam artist,” Max said, pretending to be unimpressed.
“The mainstream media considers this small news. But Eyes Only wonders if there is a connection between the death of art dealer Harold Johnson and the very much alive-and-well art collector, Jared Sterling...”
After driving the boat onto the sand, sliding it up into some bushes, and securing it, the young woman in black made her catlike way up a rolling landscaped lawn to the wall of Jared Sterling’s estate. The fog hadn’t dissipated any, in fact was clinging to the earth like a cloud that lost its way; this would make Max harder to detect on video.
The wall — seven feet of brick topped with video cameras at every corner — proved to be little challenge to Max. She jumped to the top, easily got her footing, hopped down, and landed gently on more grass. Listening closely, she heard only silence, saw merely the general shape of the castlelike house in the fog.
Edging low along the wall, she avoided the cameras even though she felt sure they couldn’t catch her in this soup unless she was on top of one. It was a hundred yards across a pool-table green lawn — no slope, now, nice and flat — to the looming tan-brick house, and Max covered the turf quickly, making time an Olympic runner would have envied.
She had half expected dogs, but she sensed no animal presence: canines would have made her cat’s nose twitch. Her only other real fear... make that, apprehension... would be motion detectors that might trigger yard lights. Nothing. And the only lights on in the entire immense house were in two windows on the first floor in the back.
Security room, Max thought.
Up close, the three-story house seemed huge. An article in the on-line Architectural Digest said the place had seven bedrooms, two kitchens, and four bathrooms; a carriage house on the opposite side of the estate housed Sterling’s full-time ten-man security team (this fact she had hacked from the security company’s Web site, having learned their I.D. from info lifted from the Sterling Enterprises official Web site). Eight-foot evergreens stood between the windows like giant green sentinels. Centered on the near side of the house were French doors with two windows on either side, the whole thing wired to that security room in the back of the mansion.
She wouldn’t be going in this way.
Most home invaders avoided the one point of entry that wouldn’t start sirens screaming and or bells clanging, the moment it got popped: the front door.
That was only because most home invaders lacked Max’s singular skills.
Even here, behind the security-up-the-wazooed walls of a paranoid ka-zillionaire like Jared Sterling, Max would have a good thirty seconds to punch in the correct security code, before the ten-man team came scrambling after her. The keypad and its pin did make this a little tougher than taking candy from babies.
A little.
Four wide concrete stairs, with a huge concrete lion presiding over either side, led to a small landing in front of a formidable green door (it looked to Max like a big dollar bill) with a fancy brass knob and above that a centered, ornate brass knocker. Thankfully, the porch light was not on.
Large dark-curtained windows, each about thirty inches wide, bookended the door, and for a brief second Max considered just breaking one, climbing in, and kicking the shit out of those security boys... just for practice... just for fun...
Pleasing though the notion was, Max thought of Moody (“Only amateurs take unnecessary chances on a score”), and she withdrew her switchblade from her jacket pocket and eased its tip into the latch of the big green door. Less than ten seconds later, that oversized dollar bill yawned open, and Max silently started to count.
Thirty, twenty-nine, twenty-eight...
She stepped inside the entryway, and was swallowed by the darkness of the slumbering house; her night vision would kick in soon. She folded the knife, slipped it away, the world in here so silent she heard only the ticking of a few clocks, her own breathing, and the counting in her head.
Twenty-five, twenty-four...
The keypad was on the wall to her right, each touchpad conveniently aglow, a red light shining in the right bottom corner, a green light in the left, with a copper-colored window to display the code above the numbered pad. She’d been correct: ten digits. Typically, a four-number code.
Twenty-two, twenty-one...
Her extraordinary eyesight determined which of these keys — four of them: 1, 3, 7, 8 — had wear; the code would be twenty-four combinations thereof...
Sixteen, fifteen, fourteen...
Her hands flew over the keyboard, her eyes, ears, and brain working in concert at a pace only nanoseconds slower than a computer.
Ten, nine...
Eleven combinations tried.
Eight, seven...
Seventeen tried.
Six, five, four...
Finally the correct combo kicked in and the red light blinked green. Thinking, It would have been more fun to just break a window, she smiled nonetheless with satisfaction, touched a button marked IN, and the light blinked back red.
The house was secure...
... at least that’s what Jared Sterling’s security staff would be thinking.
Max’s night vision was in full force now. She was in a foyer larger than most homes. The floor was marble (pale yellow in the photos on-line), the walls plaster, and the furnishings here, and elsewhere in the house, were Mission-style, some of them vintage pieces, including some Frank Lloyd Wright originals. She had entered a starkly beautiful, masculine world where every item, however mundane, might be a valuable object d’art.
Straight ahead a staircase wide enough to accommodate ten people abreast led to an upper floor where a long hallway would extend to either end of the house. Glancing up at the landing, Max could make out a couple of dark wood doors, ironically making the second floor, with its plaster walls, look like a hallway in an inexpensive hotel.
On the left side of the staircase, maybe halfway up, was a small wall-mounted video camera trained on the entryway.
To Max’s left and right, closed doors led to living rooms and billiards rooms, dens, and a few other rooms whose functions were not spelled out in her online research. She had tried to find plans for the house, but even with her hacking of both the security company and Sterling’s own firm, plus the web site of the architect who’d built the castle, the plans for Sterling’s home remained elusive, apparently guarded as if they were a government secret. What she did know, Max owed Architectural Digest...
The curtains on the windows bordering the front door were heavy masculine maroon brocade, Pretty fancy, Max thought, but then my digs run more to taped drywall and sheet plastic. Sterling could afford to live well, and his quality of life was reflected in the quality of his things. If she’d been able to, Max would have backed a moving van to that front door, and spent the rest of the night hauling enough swag out of this joint to retire at nineteen.