Kat slid the switch on her waist pack to hot mike. Everything she said now would broadcast live without her having to press a microphone button. She’d need both hands to do her job pretty soon. “Cobra ready to proceed.”
“You are cleared to proceed,” Jeff said. “Give us a time hack.”
Kat pushed up her sleeve and opened her mouth. The pair of two-inch-long Cyalume sticks she’d tucked into her cheeks emitted a faint glow from between her teeth-enough to see her watch face. “On my mark, it will be 1:30 a.m. Three, two, one, mark.”
And with the last syllable, she took off running toward the house. The pressure sensors in the lawn reported wirelessly to the security computer inside, but Bravo 51 had that covered.
On cue, an electronic warfare specialist came up on frequency and announced, “The pressure sensors are jammed. You are clear to cross the grass.”
She reached the expanse of green a few seconds later. In her mind, this was the most dangerous part of the mission. She was to run across the lawn in plain view of anyone who might be lurking nearby. After all, the idea was to let the hostiles know she was here. Once she gained the cover of the house, there’d be much less chance to take her out. The working theory was that the commandos would want to capture the Ghost to ask him where the disk was now, and that they wouldn’t want to kill him. At least not right away. But if that calculation were wrong, now was the moment they would find out-when bullets slammed into her exposed self.
And then she was across the lawn, crouching in the shadows of an oleander bush. One of its narrow leaves tickled her nose, and she pushed it aside absently. She had about thirty seconds to wait while Bravo 51 did its magic on the house’s outside phone lines. They were going to do something having to do with setting up a feedback loop that blocked a dial tone. The end result would be that when the house’s automated alarm system tried to summon the police, no call would get out. At least, that was the plan.
She recognized Jennifer Blackfoot’s voice in her ear. “We show no hostile heat signatures on satellite imagery at this time. You are clear to proceed.”
“Phones are down,” Bravo 51 reported.
That was her signal. She stood up and went to work on the window above her. It was an easy enough matter to cut a foot-wide circle out of the glass and lift it aside. Trickier was the maneuver to use a thin steel rod to manipulate the window latch without breaking the grid of laser beams an inch beyond the window’s surface. But with patience and concentration, she got it. After sliding a flat metal strip under the window to maintain contact on the pressure sensors there, she slid the window up gingerly. The house alarms remained silent. Gripping the window frame, she leaped up lightly until she was poised on the narrow sill, balancing on her toes. Carefully, she slipped mirrors into the laser grid until she’d created a gap about ten inches high and eighteen inches wide. It would be a tight squeeze, but that’s why she was doing this and not a hulk like Jeff.
The thought of him momentarily broke her breathing rhythm, and she had to pause to remind herself to breathe lightly and evenly. Her calm restored for the moment, she eased through the narrow gap, reaching across a three-foot gap to the back of a leather sofa. Never touching the floor, she slid over the sofa back and twisted to land lightly on its cushioned surface.
“I’m in,” she murmured.
The laser grid in here was visible to the naked eye, which made her job of sliding, climbing, leaping and squeezing past it easy. She reached the bookcase beside the door. She commenced pressing, pulling and shifting books in the shelf until she found the dummy book that actually was a switch. It tilted outward from the shelf, and to the right of the library door, a small panel slid open to reveal a numeric keypad.
She described it quickly over her radios. A new voice came up on frequency and didn’t identify himself. He did, however, identify the model of alarm system pad she’d described. She spent the next ten minutes following his detailed instructions on how to open the box and disable the alarm.
“Okay, Cobra, give the doorknob a try. If we’ve done it right, you should be able to open the door and get no alarm siren.”
She took a deep breath. Here went nothing. From this moment forward, she’d be on her own inside the house. She turned the cool brass knob slowly. Cracked the door open an inch. Silence. She’d done it.
In point of fact, they expected any bad guys to jump her as she left the house. She ought to be able to proceed from here unhindered. Nonetheless, she eased forward cautiously. It was a short trip down the hall to her right, across the foyer and left into the expansive living room where her target-a magnificent Van der Meer painting-hung.
She eased down the carpeted hall, her passage utterly silent, and frowned. Something didn’t feel right. It was nothing she could put her finger on, but an uneasy intuition stole over her. Maybe it was the fact that she was committing a major felony that bugged her.
For no reason she could explain, she paused at the edge of the three-story-high foyer and examined it suspiciously. A huge chandelier dripped with crystal. An ornate table in the middle of the space held a giant Limoges porcelain vase she couldn’t wrap her arms around. It was empty at the moment, but would no doubt hold a large floral display when the house was occupied.
The floor was a marble so glossy it glistened like glass in the scant light. Her senses kicked over to another level altogether, her military and martial arts training blending until she was vibrating with awareness at a level so minute her teammates wouldn’t believe her if she tried to explain it. And that was probably why she noticed the infinitesimal flicker of movement in a dark shadow under the far leg of the table. She pulled out her sniper scope, a palm-sized telescope she usually used to measure distance to targets. She zoomed it in on the spot where she’d seen the movement.
She frowned. It was a gnat. Lying on its side, one wing beating sporadically in an attempt to free itself. How was the bug trapped? It ought to be able to use its legs to right itself. It was probably just a dying bug and happened to have ended up in that pose. Except…
She sniffed the air experimentally. The faintest odor of something familiar-lightly sweet with a musty undertone-just barely registered. She knew that scent. But where from? She sniffed again, letting its essence flow over her and through her. Summers in Korea. Hidoshi’s snug little barn, where the pigs and sheep spent their nights. The paper fly strips that spiraled down from the ceiling, mustard yellow and sticky…and smelling exactly like this.
Flypaper? What did that have to do with this opulent home? Alarm bells went off in her head. Something was not right here. She knelt down to get a better look at that gnat. Now that she thought about it, the gnat was acting just like one of the myriad flies that used to bumble onto Hidoshi’s flypaper and then buzz frantically until they died.
The floor. It smelled more strongly of the flypaper glue. From this angle, it looked like a thick layer of polyurethane had been freshly spread over the marble, drying to that glossy sheen. There wasn’t a single nick on that satin-smooth surface. What floor had absolutely no nicks or scuffs?
She reached out tentatively to touch the floor and started as it gave way, viscous beneath her touch. She withdrew her hand, and her fingertips stuck to the gooey surface hard enough that she had to yank her hand back, leaving a little skin behind.
That was a powerful epoxy of some kind. The entire floor was coated with glue! Had she stepped in it, she doubted she’d have been able to walk across the floor without sacrificing her shoes, and then her socks, to the glue. Who in their right mind lived in a house like this and poured glue all over their foyer?