Chapter One

Devonshire, England

Wednesday, 1:51 a.m.

Headlights blazing, a car slowed at the turn-off to the
main house, hesitated, then accelerated down the road and
into the dark again.

"Tourists," Samantha Jellicoe muttered, straightening from
her crouch and watching the headlights disappear around
the bend. The passersby, both native British and general
fame-hunters on vacation, concentrated so much attention
on the tall, ornate gates behind her and the barely
visible estate house beyond that she could probably stand
on her head and juggle and they still wouldn't notice her
there in the shrubbery.

Tempting as scaring the shit out of some amateur paparazzi
might be, not being seen was kind of the point at the
moment. With another glance along the dark roadway,
Samantha backed up into the middle of it and took a run at
the wall, shoving her toes into a chink in the mortar
halfway up and using that for leverage to clamber to the
narrow and nicely finished top of the stone.

When she did a burglary, she actually preferred
disconnecting the gate alarms and simply going in from the
ground, but she happened to know that these gates had
embedded wires running through buried pipelines out to the
guard house on the north side of the Devonshire property.
To deactivate the gates she would have to cut the power to
the entire house, which would set off the battery-backed
perimeter alarms.

With a slight grin she dropped to the lawn inside. "Not
bad," she murmured to herself. Next she had to navigate
past motion detectors and digital video recorders, plus
the half-dozen security guards who patrolled the area
around the house. Fortunately tonight was breezy, so the
motion detectors would be overloaded and the guards tired
of monitoring and resetting them. It was always better to
go into a property on a windy night, though January in
central England meant the windchill took the temperature
down to somewhere around freezing.

Pulling a pair of pruners -- which doubled as wire
cutters -- from her pocket, she lopped off a large leafy
elm branch. Hefting it, she made her way along the wall to
the nearest of the cameras mounted at regular intervals
along the perimeter. Maybe her solution to the problem of
the digital cameras was simplistic, but hell, she knew
from experience that sometimes low-tech was the best way
to beat the most complex of systems. Besides, she could
see the headline: CHICK WITH STICK BEATS COUNTRY’S MOST
SOPHISTICATED ALARM SYSTEM. Neaner, neaner.

Swinging the branch, she thudded it across the side and
front of the camera, waited a few seconds, then did it
again. Matching her pummeling to the rhythm of the wind,
she smacked the side and the lens a few more times, then
hauled back and slammed the casing hard with the thicker
part of the branch. The camera jolted sideways, giving
whoever was monitoring it a great view of a west wing
chimney. After a few more swings, she flung the branch
over the outside wall and made her way toward the house.

Somebody would probably be out in a few minutes to reset
the camera, but by then she'd be inside. Hauling ass out
was a lot easier than sneaking into a place. Samantha drew
a breath and headed east along the base of the house until
she reached the slightly offset wall that designated the
kitchen. Kudos to whichever aristocrat five hundred years
ago had decided that the kitchen was too dangerous to be
set fully into the main house.

The window frames on the ground floor were wired to the
alarm system, and the glass was pressure sensitive. No
punching through to get in, unless she wanted to wake up
everybody in residence. Of course, no one was in
residence, except for staff and security, but they could
phone the police as easily as anybody else.

Making sure the pruners were secure in her pocket, she set
a foot onto the narrow window ledge and boosted herself
up. A few more careful footholds and she stood on top of
the kitchen roof. Fifteen feet up and over, the library
balcony beckoned to her.

Unslinging the rope she carried from over her shoulder,
she pulled the pruners free and tied one side of the
handle tight. On her first toss, it landed on the balcony,
and she tugged on the rope to make certain the pruners
were wedged tightly between the stone balustrades.

Her heart hammering with a welcome rush of adrenaline,
Samantha wrapped her hands into the rope, then stepped off
the kitchen roof. For a moment she hung there, swinging
slowly back and forth in midair. Once she was certain the
rope wouldn't give, she twined her legs into it and
shimmied up to the balcony. God, that had been simple.
Frequently, though, nerves were the only thing that
divided the shirtless and smoking thieves who appeared on
Cops from the ones nobody ever caught. Nerves and a well-
made piece of gardening equipment. Totally worth the
eighteen pounds she'd paid for it at the local nursery.

Hauling herself over the railing, she detached the pruners
from the rope, tucking both back where they belonged. The
full-length glass doors leading into the library were
closed and locked, but they didn't worry her. They were
wired, of course, but not pressure sensitive. Up this
high, they would catch the evening easterly breezes and
set off the alarms every five minutes. Nobody wanted to
deal with that, even at the expense of inferior security.

She unwound the length of copper wire that braceleted her
left wrist, tore off two pieces of duct tape from the
miniroll in her pocket, and carefully inserted one end
under each door to intercept and bypass the electrical
circuit. That done, it was simple to pick the lock and
shove open the doors in near total silence. "Piece of
cake," she murmured, hopping down the shallow step and
into the room.