Page 85 of Fight or Flight
Keeping out of view of the cameras, I make my way to the door at the far end of the kitchen and unlock it to let Jax in.
“Took you long enough.” He hands me a black backpack that’s identical to the one he’s wearing.
“My bad.” I dig my phone out of the front pocket of the bag, then sling the straps over my shoulders. “I’ll be sure to hurry up the next time so you don’t have to waste your time waitingwhile I’m sneaking around secret corridors and darting between cameras to let your ass in.”
“Are you done complaining so we can get this over with?” he asks as I pull up the floor plans for the house on my phone.
“Are you done bellyaching about how long it’s taking me to do all the actual work so we can get this over with?”
“Considering I just scaled a twenty-foot wall and played dodge the cameras with almost no cover to get here so I could wait for you, no, definitely not done bellyaching.”
“Come on.” I tuck my phone away. “And that wall is only nineteen and a half feet.”
“My mistake,” he says dryly as we retrace the route I took to get to him.
Once we’re back in the pantry, we slip into the corridor and follow the route I mapped out that takes us to a trapdoor in the ceiling that leads to the second floor.
“You sure that’s not going to make me pop up in someone’s room or another common space like a real-life game of whack-a-mole?” he asks, shining his flashlight on the trapdoor.
“Oh, ye of little faith. Have I ever steered you wrong?”
“Yes. Constantly. Usually on purpose.”
I grin. “Yeah, can’t argue that. But not this time. This will take you to a supply closet, and as long as you wait for me to get control of the cameras before you start your sleuthing, you’ll be fine.”
He presses on his earpiece to turn it on. “I’ll be waiting for your command.”
“You forgot to call me ‘Oh great one,’” I tell him as he pushes the trapdoor open.
He flips me off and boosts himself up. I watch as he disappears into the inky darkness and closes it behind him.
“All good?” I ask him through the earpiece. “No whack-a-mole danger?”
“All good,” he confirms. “Now hurry the fuck up.”
“So impatient.” I look back down at my phone to double-check my route. “It’ll take me about ninety seconds to get there.”
“Roger that.”
The line goes quiet as I hurry through the corridor, and this time, I exit into the electrical room for the house’s security system.
“I’m in,” I tell my brother and dig my burner laptop and some other supplies I need out of the backpack. “Now keep your pants on until I tell you it’s time.”
“Roger that.”
It takes another minute or so to hook into the system and get control of the cameras. When I do, I promptly set the ones around the private server room on a loop so they play the same thirty seconds of footage over and over again.
“I’m in,” I tell Jax.
“How does it look?”
I cycle through the cameras between where he is and where he needs to be. “Not a soul in sight. You good to get on the move?”
“Yep.”
“Okie dokie.” I set the camera outside of the room he’s still hiding in so it continuously re-records the past thirty seconds of footage while still letting me see the live feed. “First camera is clear.”
“Roger that.”
