Page 34 of Wired Courage

Sophie unlocked the gate, pushed it open gently, and peered around it.

The aperture opened into her aunt’s gardens, a lush mix of flowers on one side, and practical rows of lettuces, tomatoes, bok choy, and staked runner beans on the other.

Sophie stared up at the house, searching for any signs of detection.

The dwelling was a smaller version of Sophie’s former abode, built high on wooden pilings in case of the nearby Ping River’s floods. The steeply peaked roofs and windows were of traditional design, and the exterior was brightly painted in charming contrasting colors.

The windows’ wooden shutters were closed. Sophie saw no signs of life inside or on the grounds, but the lushness and care given to the gardens belied abandonment.

Sophie adjusted her garments, hoping that none of her aunt’s servants were about—the last time she’d been here, her aunt had employed a couple of gardeners, housemaids, and a cook. If anyone confronted her, she planned to tell them the truth: she was Malee’s niece, come to visit. But no interference came as Sophie worked her way to the other side of the garden, moving along the fence between the two properties.

Sophie squeezed through the runner beans and bee-laden sunflowers to the loose board she remembered from the last time she had sneaked over to play with her cousins. As she pushed at the fence, testing each board, she couldn’t help smiling when the loose plank moved—it had appeared intact from the outside, and no one had nailed it back in.

Sophie was able to lift it away and peek through at her former home. Her heart thudded as she studied the large wooden house.

The shutters were closed and latched from the inside. Everything about the place had a neglected, abandoned look. She frowned as she took in the wild, overgrown grounds. Unlike her aunt’s place, the vegetable garden was a barren mound of leaves and yard debris, and the flower garden a sad morass of dried stalks and bent over seed heads.

The place looked like it had been deserted for years.

The property had been bought by a company, Mutual Imports, and the purpose on the documents she’d uncovered had been described as a “corporate retreat center.” Sophie wished she could go online now and dig a little deeper—the extreme neglect indicated the house had never been used for anything at all. She even spotted her father’s antique Mercedes, a project car he’d worked on during his brief times at home, still parked under the deck and covered with a filthy canvas.

Sophie tightened her voluminous garments and sucked in her stomach, wriggling through the gap in the fence. Her larger breasts and still-soft belly caught on the splintery wood; she had to work hard to squeeze through the narrow opening, grateful that a spreading berry bush concealed her vigorous movements from the house.

After replacing the board, Sophie hurried through the tangled undergrowth and slipped beneath the house. As soon as she was in the shadows cast by the building, she heard the creak of a floorboard overhead.

Someone was inside.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Sophie caught her breath at the sound of footsteps from above. She slid out of sight to take shelter under one of the large peeled logs that held up the two-story dwelling. The space beneath had been kept uncluttered in case of flooding, but was used for storage of unimportant items: stacks of fish traps, gardening tools, her father’s old car, and even a small scooter, thick with dust.

Sophie’s heart squeezed at the sight of a large woven basket filled with discarded children’s toys. She remembered that red truck, that traditional doll with its face paint peeling and garments moth-eaten, the purple soccer ball faded to pink from sun exposure. Whoever this company was, they had not altered anything left behind in her childhood home.

She would use that knowledge to her advantage.

Sophie tiptoed forward to the storage shed built directly under the main living area of the house. Once inside the dark, musty-smelling space, Sophie unslung her nylon bag, setting it down on a heavy wooden project bench and startling a mouse that skittered away with a squeak.

She opened her laptop and booted it up. While it was loading, she unwound the stiff fiber optic cable camera she liked to use for surveillance. A tiny node at one end was her eyes, a second, her ears.

Once again, she heard the creak of a footstep overhead. Now she could catch the murmur of voices.

And then, a sound that woke her entire system with a zap of pure adrenaline: the distinctive cry of a newborn baby.

The hairs on Sophie’s entire body lifted. Her breasts ached and her nipples tightened. She actually felt her uterus contract. Tears sprang to her eyes.That was her baby’s voice!

She had to stay calm and logical. She had to get audio and visual on whatever was going on in that room. She couldn’t rush in blind.

Sophie closed her eyes and took deep breaths until the urge to tear down anything between herself and her child had passed.

Sophie climbed carefully up onto the gardening bench. She took out the sound dampened, battery operated drill she had used on clandestine jobs for the FBI. She targeted a spot in the corner of the ceiling that she remembered being directly below a large armchair. If the new owners hadn’t even removed her old toys, perhaps they had left the inside furnishings of the house untouched, as well.

Sophie pressed her nose against her shoulder, trying not to inhale the wood dust that blew by on a warm stream from the drill as it whirred silently into the native hardwood floor above her. The last thing Sophie needed to do right now was to sneeze and give herself away. She felt the give of the drill as it punched through, and she withdrew it and set it down.

Sophie threaded a stiff fiber optic cable up through the hole she had made. The cable was flexible enough to bend and manipulate. She would look through it, using the window provided by her laptop.

She descended quietly from the workbench and plugged the cable into an exterior feed on her laptop. She pulled up the visual and plugged in an earbud to hear the audio.

The camera had, indeed, come up under the old armchair. An expanse of smooth dark wood floor in front of her was distorted by the convex surface of the camera’s eye. Sophie struggled to interpret what she was seeing, and rotated the cable slowly, looking for the people whose voices she had heard.

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