Page 34 of Heart of Danger
“Great.” The blond was typing furiously. “Because I think we’re gonna have to know what they’re doing all through the house. So I will just work my magic, switch them on and…voilà!” he ended on a note of triumph.
Itwasmagic, because there were two holograms, side by side. Like a 3D movie. One showing her bedroom, from the point of view of the table where her laptop sat, and the other in the study, looking out from the monitor of her desktop. Crystal clear images, of the three men, crossing back and forth.
Surfer Dude had somehow switched on her computer webcams without opening the screens. That was seriously good hacking.
No sound, though. The men went about their business in complete silence.
No, wait. “Clear!” a voice shouted off screen.
“Clear! Clear!” two other voices echoed.
The man in her bedroom was looking at her comforter, fingers tracing something.
“What’s he doing?” she whispered.
“Something made a dent. He’s tracing the edges,” Mac said quietly behind her.
She swiveled her head and looked up at him blankly. This was so far outside her area of expertise, it felt like she really had fallen down that rabbit hole.
Baring fingered some clothes she’d left on the bed while packing and knowledge came to her in a sick rush. “He—” She swallowed heavily. “He knows I packed a bag.”
“Bingo.”
Baring cocked his head, eyes unfocused. She couldn’t figure out what he was doing, then realized he was listening to an ear bud. “Yeah, boss,” he said and pulled out a big black knife she hadn’t even noticed.
“Boss?” Nick turned to her. “Who’s his boss? Who does he mean?”
What was he doing with that knife?
“Huh? Oh. Well, technically, the CEO of our company, James Longman. But he’s away at a conference in Hong Kong. So I don’t know who he’s reporting to.”
Baring held the knife by its haft, blade down. He lifted the knife over his head, bent slightly, and slashed a pillow on her bed. It was so outlandish a move that Catherine could only watch, blinking.
“Whoever he’s reporting to is a real fuckhead,” the blond said, anger in his voice. “Baring’s been given orders to trash your house.”
Hehad. Under her horrified gaze, Baring and his two men set about systematically vandalizing her home. They were very fast and very systematic. She watched as that black knife slashed every soft surface in her bedroom and the living room. There was nothing much in the study except a work table and chair, so they hadn’t gotten to it yet, but the sounds of broken crockery and splintered wood could be heard from the kitchen.
And soon enough, the sound of splintered wood came from the bedroom itself. Baring went through her Shaker chest of drawers, thoroughly, systematically, throwing everything on the floor, then pulled out all the drawers and tipped it over.
She gasped. The knife rose and fell and soon her beautiful chest of drawers, with the lovely, elegant simple lines, was shattered. He hunkered down on his haunches and went swiftly through the contents.
He rose and went to her closet. The open door shielded him from view but there were ripping sounds and pieces of material floated in the air.
Catherine didn’t have that much. She was a saver and had simple tastes. In the space of a quarter of an hour, as she watched, shaking, every single item she owned was sliced or shattered or crushed.
“What on earth are they doing?” she said finally, when she could form words around the dryness in her mouth.
“Looking for something,” Nick said.
She swiveled to look at him. “Looking for something? Looking for what? What could I possibly have that would interest them? There’s nothing valuable there at all. Certainly nothing that would warrant a scorched-earth search like that.”
“They’re looking for intel,” Mac said behind her.
Nick and the blond man nodded grimly.
Intel—the military term for information. It confirmed a secret conviction that she had that Patient Nine and these men were ex-military.
“On what?” Her mouth was numb. It was hard to articulate words. “There’s nothing in my house to find.”
