His Princess (A Royal Romance)(88)

I wonder if his wife knows he’s f*cking the barely legal receptionist at his office and trying to put the moves on the milf.

Stop thinking of her as a milf, Quentin.

This isn’t enough.I need more.

So I head to the information market.

What’s available for free on the Internet is scary. What can be dug up by an expert in systems and social engineering is f*cking terrifying. I put out the call and start taking bids. Everything is paid for in cryptocurrency—secure and virtually untraceable. It’s going to take a while before I get enough bites, but it should be fairly easy and cheap. I’m not looking for details on a senator or something here. He’s just some guy.

It’s seven o’clock already. I pick Rose up at nine. First I take meticulous care to properly shut everything off, closing my connection and giving the computer enough time to encrypt and dump the 256-bit keys from the RAM. If someone busted into the house right now they’d have about six minutes to get the computer’s memory chips into liquid nitrogen and try to extract the keys the computer uses to solve an insanely complex equation, and access my data.

At ten minutes after seven I slip into the car and pull out in a light drizzle, the rain having subsided a bit. On my passenger’s seat is a sticky pad with some relevant info about my new best friend, Burt.

First off we’re going to check out his house.

It’s a short drive, but I’m not getting into his neighborhood just by rolling up to the gate. All of these places have a guard at the front entrance, it’s so f*cking weird. What’s so important that they have to pay some guy to sit out front and eye f*ck everybody driving in? Besides, it’s not like they’re securing anything. I haven’t been challenged once and even if I was all I’d have to do is park the car and walk right in.

That’s what I do now. I park off the road and walk through the trees. Problem is they just cut off where the neighborhood starts; they must have bulldozed everything when they started building the place. No cover.

Fortunately for me, Burt must have paid extra for a house on a cul-de-sac, backing up to the woods. Perfect. I circle around the whole way, watching for someone to spot me. They all have these huge backyards, but no one in them. There are barbecue grills and hot tubs, all sitting there lonely and empty.

Burt’s house is one of the biggest in the neighborhood, a six-bedroom, three-floor monstrosity with an enormous backyard, complete with in-ground pool and brick barbecue, the works.

There’s no one outside. I slip up to the shed then sprint across the open space to the back of the house. It’s easy to reach up, pull, and hang off the back deck.

Burt is inside with the wife, sitting at his kitchen table. By the looks of things they’re doing their monthly bills. She’s a cute one, the wife. Twenty years younger, at least, and apparently he likes redheads.

I’m not here for that. I drop down and circle around, crouching and checking to see if anyone might spot me. It’s so damned open, but I love a challenge.

In a pouch on my belt I’ve got a device called a packet sniffer. I check the basement through the window to see what kind of Internet connection he has. It’s a fiber line, so I move around to the corner of the house and find where the fiber emerges from the ground and flows back into the house, next to the electrical conduit box. From there it’s a simple job to splice the packet sniffer into the line.

I work my way along the foundation of the house, to the garage. Going in through the garage door itself is a no-go, too loud. Fortunately there’s a back door, and there’s no deadbolt so it’s easily picked, takes me two seconds with a pick gun. I stop and scan the room; Burt might be the type to have a security camera system, but no, he feels too safe for that.

Must be nice, feeling safe. Too bad your employees don’t get a taste of that.

Rolling onto the floor, I slide under his Benz. I figure if this guy is going out for any clandestine trysts he’s going to take the flashy car; his wife’s grocery getter isn’t going to pull the cooze like a brand new SLK.

He bought the AMG package. God, this car is wasted on this *.

The GPS tracker is pretty unobtrusive. I attach it to the frame with some zip ties; drilling it into place would be too loud and adhesive would lose integrity too quickly. I flick it on and wait for the green light. It has a lithium battery, should last about a month, plenty of time.

I sigh. What the hell am I doing this for? I should be watching cartoons and crawling into a bottle.

I slip out from the car and lock the door before pulling it shut. Quarter after eight, plenty of time to pick up Rose.

Back to the car by eight thirty. I pull into the parking lot at the college at nine on the dot, and wait.

Wait.

Wait some more.

It’s 9:20 when students finally start piling out of the doors, heading for their cars. Rose trudges out wearily, her messenger bag over her shoulder, and scrubs her hand through her hair. Even in the harsh street lamps, she’s pretty. The sharp contrasts give her a hazy, femme-fatale look.

I wheel the car around to the sidewalk and wince when I realize I’m drawing a lot of attention. Rose looks around with some trepidation on her face and slips into the car, sighing.

“Sorry. This one likes to give us our money’s worth.”

She glances at the dash clock.

“I’m glad you’re here. I’d have missed the bus. The other profs usually let out a little early but Hevermeyer insists we take a dinner break, blathers on up until nine on the dot and makes us meet with our groups for… I’m boring you,” she sighs.