Page 2 of Captured By the Pakhan

"Then we're agents standing in a Russian's living room in the middle of the night with no warrant and no jurisdiction with a very interesting, very unpleasant conversation ahead of us." I pull my own balaclava down around my neck. "So let's hope nobody's home."

The house feels wrong before I ever get inside it. We come up through the tree line on the north side and lie in the wet grass for eleven minutes watching it, and every minute makes it stranger. It's a private residence. Two floors, stained cedar and pretty stone, the kind of place a dentist retires to. There's a swing set on the lawn, tilted askew where the ground's gone soft under one leg.

But beneath the beauty and simplicity of the place it's wearing a security perimeter that would put a federal courthouse to shame.

"Tell me what I'm looking at," I murmur.

Perry's got his laptop balanced on a tree root, screen dimmed to almost nothing, eyes lit blue from the visible light. "I'm looking at three redundant loops on separate power. Cameras are commercial but the controller isn't. There's a cellular failover and a landline failover and something else — an additional safety mechanism I don't recognize."

"Is it beatable? Can you get us in?"

"Everything's beatable." He doesn't look up as he says it, eyes locked on the screen, fingers flying over the keys. "But it’s going to take me a while."

"How long is a while?"

"I’ll let you know in a while."

I roll my eyes, great answer.

I get my elbows under me and go back to examining the setting before us through the scope. No vehicles. No body heat reflecting in any windows. Two lights burning that are almost certainly on timers. It appears that our intel was right. Nobody's home.

Still my back teeth won't unlock.

Because here's what experience tells me: you don't put a secure perimeter with multiple levels of fail safes around a place you don't care about. Wealth alone doesn't do that. Fear does.

Somebody spent this much on a house in the middle of nowhere because there's something inside it that can't be replaced.

It takes Perry nineteen minutes to bypass the system and find a way to get us in. When he finally sits back his hands are shaking a little, which I don't hold against him.

"When I do this, three loops go down together and the controller reports a power laps event. Which is fine — that happens up here, it's the back country. But it alerts somebody the second it comes back online, and it comes back up on its own utilizing back-up power if the main source line doesn’t reconnect." He looks at me gravely. "Five minutes. Maybe five and a half if the generator's slow to kick in. But that’s all I can do. I can't give you more, and I can't give you a second window, because the second time it happens it isn't a power fluctuation anymore. They’ll know someone's here."

I nod, accepting the intel. Sometimes, you have to work with what you’ve got, no matter how little it is.

"Five minutes." I key the comms. "All units. Perry's going to buy us three hundred seconds and everyone better make them count. When I say sixty, you're already moving toward the door. Copy?"

Five voices come back through the small comm.

I look at Perry once more, nodding. "Do it."

"Going dark in three. Two–"

The little red constellation along the eaves blinks out all at once, and the house goes blind.

"Go." I say in the comm, my feet already under me. We run, shadows moving through the night. The back door takes Ortiz nine seconds and we're in.

The smell of the place registeres first, it's so aggressively normal that it throws me off — laundry detergent and floor cleaner and, under it, the residual smell of food. Somebody cooked here tonight. I glance around the room, taking in its features. There's a small coat on a hook by the door, and two sets of shoes beneath it.

The team splits off in their assigned directions, silence following each of them like wraiths.

The upper corridor is dark, carpeted, and clean. I move down it the way they teach you to — weight rolling through the outside of the foot, weapon low, checking each doorway, not lingering in any of them.

Guest room. Linen closet. Bathroom with a bathmat that’s still damp.

Someone’s here.

“Eyes open.” I whisper into the comm. Code for ‘we’re not alone’.

The office is the fourth door on the right and it's a real office, not just staging. Two computer monitors, a landline, a printer with a low paper light blinking. I pull out the digital camera from my vest pocket and photograph the desk before I touch anything, then start searching the drawers, top to bottom, left to right, one hand flat and stabilizing against the front of each so nothing shifts unless I want it to.