“What time is it here?” Bodie asked.
“Two a.m.,” Heidi said with a yawn. “The night is already passing.”
“Not in this club, baby,” Cassidy said. “We party hardcore, right until dawn.”
The team established a Bluetooth link with Lucie and Heidi, and drove away in a midnight-black Toyota off-roader, leaving them behind. Within minutes they had found a road and were climbing through the Swiss Alps. Darkness lay over the mountains like a thick fleece, wrapping the uneven land. Bodie cranked the heater up high as the team discussed the finer points of their plan.
Soon, they parked and climbed out of the car. The night air hit them like an icy dart.
“Right,” Bodie said. “To recap. We gain entry via the solar panels, hack the system… or as much of it as we can… and make straight for the safe room on the second floor. Eyes and ears open for any extra security on the inside. Got it?”
Up here, the sense of vastness was absolute. Though the snow-covered mountains were dark, their shapes registered a colossal magnificence and radiated an utter silence. Bodie stood immobile for a minute, taking in the feeling. Time registered, he was sure, but the landscape did not entertain it.
A rough, lightly grassed slope, speckled with snow, ran up the sides of the mountain to their right. At this height, the slope was gentle. Ahead, where Carl Kirke’s house sat, the gradient became much sharper. Initially it looked like three separate dwellings set on three huge mountain steps, one behind the other, but Bodie knew each building was joined to the one above by way of two parallel roofed bridges and also a twisting path at ground level. It was entirely built of stone but with wooden cladding, decks and balconies all the way around, and huge timber roofs that overhung everything. Yellow lights shone from several windows. An imposing, towering chimney built of stone and slate reared up out of the topmost dwelling, but no smoke emerged.
Bodie turned to Jemma, who knew their plan right down to the finest detail. “Keep going?”
Jemma pulled her thin thermal gloves even tighter. “Just up a ways, and the lighter snow there is where his property begins. We circumvent through that.” She pointed at a stand of trees adjacent to Kirke’s impressive home.
They moved carefully onward through the dark. The cold bit hard, but Bodie ignored it. Movement would raise their core temperature and then, he knew from experience, the job and the thrill it wrought would take over.
“It’s not so cold”—Cassidy blew on her fingers—“if you’re a seal.”
“We’re not all used to the West Coast,” Cross mumbled. “It appears that can have its disadvantages.”
“Piss off, redneck.”
“That’s Mr. Redneck to you.” Cross forged ahead, the older man now playing on his age to give the redhead a feisty look.
Cassidy grinned and fell in alongside him, happy to be part of something. Bodie checked their link back to Heidi for the third time and followed close behind. They wound through the high trees, taking advantage of the thick, verdant branches. They stayed low and moved a step at a time. Kirke didn’t appear to have any outside security, but Bodie’s team remained ever cautious.
Eventually, they came to the end of the tree cover.
“Ready to hug the house?” Jemma whispered.
“Security measures start now,” Bodie reminded them.
The care they took was infinite. Where Kirke’s safety measures consisted of a swivel camera, they waited for the lens to move, watching it through a high-powered, super-compact scope. They were crawling so close to the earth they tasted snow, felt it sprinkle across their faces when they moved. The area before Kirke’s home was nothing but a flat, meandering path of square paving amid rolling hills. It was entirely unassuming. Where cameras were fixed and positioned in pairs to observe everything, maybe even with infrared sensors attached, Gunn came forward and hacked their systems. He didn’t try to gain entry to Carl Kirke’s entire network yet — the team had discovered it had an internal server that approached military spec and was almost unhackable, and, without further investigation, thought it better to leave it alone. Kirke could keep his secrets — all but one.
Half an hour passed quickly. Bodie breathed a sigh of relief when they approached the apex of the uppermost step, and the roof of Kirke’s highest building. When they reached it, they expected a new level of exposure, with no walls to hide them and the seemingly endless mountain rising toward blackness above.
They would be required to move fast.
Cross led the way, stepping lightly off the slope and onto Kirke’s roof. The angle was about thirty degrees and the timbers were lipped, making it easy to navigate. Cross moved over to the first of the solar panels, which were “in-roof,” the rectangles having replaced the tiles that used to live there. Where the design was secure enough, Bodie had yet to come across one that was correctly security-shielded.
Cross used a laser to break the seal, then removed four of the narrow panels with help from Bodie and Cassidy. This gave them a three-foot gap. Bodie was the first to lower himself inside, grabbing hold of a cross timber and balancing on another to pause and study the scene below.
“All good.”
They descended into the loft space and made their way to a standard doorway, rather than the traditional hatch both Bodie and Cross were used to seeing. Gunn scanned it for every kind of machine-based apparatus, sensors, or spy technology that he could imagine but came up blank.
“Clear.”
Bodie clicked the door open and the team eased into a darkened hallway. They waited, listening for movement, taking as much time as they needed. Nothing happened. Three thirty a.m. passed by uneventfully. For some unknown reason, Kirke’s safe room was located inside the house’s second “step,” according to the blueprints Gunn had found in the federal state’s secure registry. Switzerland comprised twenty-six cantons and so consisted of twenty-six different building laws. All were governed by the local building authority, which kept precise records.
Bodie found the staircase and studied the layout. They hadn’t had time to locate every security measure, so were having to wing it more than he was comfortable with. Still, experience counted for much.
They descended to the bottom floor of the highest building, which stood entirely in darkness. Now they would have to traverse the bridge that joined it to the lower building. There was no other way down, thus the team saw this as the greatest risk.
Gunn scanned the way ahead with an infrared detector. Jemma snooped for an alarm system by checking for control panels or monitors, searching for any sign of technology. In seconds, they had found what they were looking for: interior cameras and beams linked to an internal system. Gunn set about hacking it, working fastidiously at first but then starting to frown.
Bodie tapped him on the shoulder. “Problem?”
“Yeah, they’ve wired in extra redundancies that I can’t hack. Not enough time. I can force my way in, but it could set off an alarm.”
“Shit, what are the odds?”
Gunn waved a hand. “Fifty-fifty.”
“Says the best hacker in the business,” Cassidy said with disappointment.
“I never said that, Cass,” Gunn snapped back.
Bodie felt the sweat beading on his brow. “If the alarm goes off, how long until someone gets here?”
“Apart from the owner? Well, we’re in the middle of bloody nowhere.”
“That’s what I thought you’d say.” Bodie stared at the others for a second, all but Cross appearing just a little anxious. “Do it. Everyone else get ready to run just in case.”
“We’re not leaving now,” Jemma said.