Page 72 of Vienna Betrayal

Grinning, Alena carefully brushed the fingerprint dust off the number pad, then put the flowers back in position.

A minute later, she gingerly opened the parlor door and slid inside.

Now, so close to her goal and high on the fact that she’d figured out the code without having to use any of her nifty toys, her heart was racing, her whole body humming with adrenaline.

She resisted the urge to whistle the theme song to various heist movies. After all, she was a professional.

Looking around at all the beautiful art, she took a moment to mourn the fact that she wasn’t here for a painting or sculpture.

In the far corner of the room, Alena knelt, then popped the barrel off of the blowdryer.

Using only the light spilling in through the windows, she chose a section of floor that had clearly been repaired. She objected, morally, to ruining some long ago artisan’s handiwork by drilling through hundred-year-old hand-laid parquet.

Alena set the drill bit on a seam of two rectangles of wood, and started to drill. The tool had been specially built to be quiet, but it wasn’t completely silent. If anyone was up and walking by the door, they’d hear.

If she was caught right now she was probably screwed, so she held her breath until the drill finally broke through the floor, and the ceiling of the room below.

Working quickly now, relying in part on muscle memory, she added the button camera to the end of the robotic laparoscopic arm, and slid it through the seven-millimeter hole. The feed from the camera appeared on her phone screen, which she propped up against the wall, looking at it, rather than her hands.

The temperature controlled server farm was illuminated by the lights on the racks of servers, red and blue pinpoints like a thousand regimented colored stars in the vast inky darkness of space. She worked the control and slowly rotated the head of the laparoscope, the camera feed shifting little by little.

The back of her neck was sweaty and it felt like ten minutes had passed before she located the cluster servers.

Luckily they weren’t far from where she’d made the hole in the ceiling.

When she withdrew the laparoscope to thread the fire-wire cable into the room below, a tiny stream of cool air caressed her face.

She remembered Alexander’s hand on her cheek and her stomach rolled.

She plugged the other end of the cable into the hardware protocol analyzer, with more force than was necessary.

Dangerously impatient, she slid the laparoscope back into the hole. It barely fit, thanks to the thickness of the cable sharing the space.

Watching the camera feed, she used the robotic clamp to grab the end of the dangling cable.

It took her several tries to get the plug of the cable lined up with a free port, but once she had it, she pressed the small button that controlled the robotic section of the laparoscope. The tip of the scope jerked forward, providing enough force to plug the fire wire cable into the stack.

Alena sagged in relief, hating the feeling of cold sweat on her back.

Aware that time was not on her side, Alena turned to the HPA.

It wasn’t a consumer device, so it didn’t have helpful things like a display to tell her it was working. The black hat who’d built it for her had grudgingly added a small light that would blink if the unit was picking up data packets.

The light was solid red.

Sweet suffering Jesus, why wasn’t this damned thing—

The light started to blink.

Alena nearly whooped with joy, but managed to restrain herself.

Taking a small satellite uplink transmitter from her pocket—it had been in the first tampon—she plugged it into a port on the opposite side of the HPA.

As data flowed through the cable into the HPA, it was then transmitted via satellite signal to her computer, which would in turn back up the data to an external hard drive, and encrypted cloud storage.

Gathering up everything she didn’t need, she left the HPA on the floor, its light merrily blinking, the laparoscope embedded in the floor, and headed for her room.

She would have preferred to stay with the device, but with her timetable thrown off, she needed to make sure to rehide her tools in her luggage. She wouldn’t have time to do it all later.

She started up the steps, moving quickly and quietly.

She didn’t see the shadowy figure standing at the far end of the hall when she opened the door to her room and slipped inside.

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