Don't Look Down

One

Devonshire, England
Wednesday, 1:51 a.m.
Headlights blazing, a car slowed at the turn-off to the main house, hesitated, then accelerated down the road and into the dark again.

"Tourists," Samantha Jellicoe muttered, straightening from her crouch and watching the headlights disappear around the bend. The passersby, both native British and general fame-hunters on vacation, concentrated so much attention on the tall, ornate gates behind her and the barely visible estate house beyond that she could probably stand on her head and juggle and they still wouldn't notice her there in the shrubbery.

Tempting as scaring the shit out of some amateur paparazzi might be, not being seen was kind of the point at the moment. With another glance along the dark roadway, Samantha backed up into the middle of it and took a run at the wall, shoving her toes into a chink in the mortar halfway up and using that for leverage to clamber to the narrow and nicely finished top of the stone.

When she did a burglary, she actually preferred disconnecting the gate alarms and simply going in from the ground, but she happened to know that these gates had embedded wires running through buried pipelines out to the guard house on the north side of the Devonshire property. To deactivate the gates she would have to cut the power to the entire house, which would set off the battery-backed perimeter alarms.

With a slight grin she dropped to the lawn inside. "Not bad," she murmured to herself. Next she had to navigate past motion detectors and digital video recorders, plus the half-dozen security guards who patrolled the area around the house. Fortunately tonight was breezy, so the motion detectors would be overloaded and the guards tired of monitoring and resetting them. It was always better to go into a property on a windy night, though January in central England meant the windchill took the temperature down to somewhere around freezing.

Pulling a pair of pruners--which doubled as wire cutters--from her pocket, she lopped off a large leafy elm branch. Hefting it, she made her way along the wall to the nearest of the cameras mounted at regular intervals along the perimeter. Maybe her solution to the problem of the digital cameras was simplistic, but hell, she knew from experience that sometimes low-tech was the best way to beat the most complex of systems. Besides, she could see the headline: CHICK WITH STICK BEATS COUNTRY'S MOST SOPHISTICATED ALARM SYSTEM. Neaner, neaner.

Swinging the branch, she thudded it across the side and front of the camera, waited a few seconds, then did it again. Matching her pummeling to the rhythm of the wind, she smacked the side and the lens a few more times, then hauled back and slammed the casing hard with the thicker part of the branch. The camera jolted sideways, giving whoever was monitoring it a great view of a west wing chimney. After a few more swings, she flung the branch over the outside wall and made her way toward the house.

Somebody would probably be out in a few minutes to reset the camera, but by then she'd be inside. Hauling ass out was a lot easier than sneaking into a place. Samantha drew a breath and headed east along the base of the house until she reached the slightly offset wall that designated the kitchen. Kudos to whichever aristocrat five hundred years ago had decided that the kitchen was too dangerous to be set fully into the main house.