THIRTY-THREE

I bolted for the desk, but stopped as I realized I’d never get there in time.

I fell to my knees instead, sorting through my satchel like a real drain-cleaning guy looking for the electronic instrument he needed to find the problem. The maid would never buy it, of course, but it was the best I could do. I waited for the door to open, for the questions she’d want answered.

But it didn’t open.

I stared at the knob. It was no longer turning. I heard the maid’s footsteps retreating down the hall.

My chest rose and fell as I reminded myself not to celebrate too early, that the maid was still out there someplace. Might even be calling the police for all I knew. Certainly might be listening for me from some other part of the house.

I turned to inspect the windows behind the desk. No help. They were sealed tight, the leaded-glass panes designed never to be opened. I slipped over to the door and put my ear against it, but couldn’t hear a sound. I turned the knob and opened it a sliver. Now I could hear music—salsa—a radio playing, or a television set. The sound was distant, so I opened the door a little wider. The music was coming from the other end of the house, far in the back. The maid was most likely closer to the music than she was to me. It was now or never.

I pulled the door open and ran on my toes to the front entry, out the door and back to the van. I sat for a moment while my breathing returned to normal. Damn it, that had been far too close, and that wasn’t even the worst of it.

The maid had obviously come in after I was already there, but I’d heard nothing from the alarm system. It hadn’t been reset properly by the kid back at the office switchboard. The maid was bound to have noticed. She would have been ordered to call Finnerty or his wife any time there was a problem with the alarm. Bureau tech people could be on their way right now.

I started the van and drove slowly up the street, then called Lisa and told her to come back to me, that there wasn’t any reason for her to stay on the wife anymore. I directed her toward where she could find me, a couple of blocks away from the Finnerty residence.

“Did you have time?” she wanted to know, after she’d joined me in the French van, after I’d told her what had happened with the maid, and what I feared might happen when she discovered the alarm malfunction.

“The bugs are in there all right,” I said, “but we’ve still got work to do with the feed.”

I crawled past the black curtain into the back of the van to inspect the monitors. The pictures from the house were clear as a digital camcorder’s, but the transmission quality was only part of the equation.

“Great pictures,” I called to Lisa, “but we’re still too close to the house. If the cops or the bureau show up we can’t take the chance of being anywhere near the place.”

“So what do we do?”

“Get behind the wheel and drive. I’ll tell you when to stop.”

I watched the monitors as she drove us farther away from the house. She stopped half a minute later. “How are they now?” she called back to me.

“Just as good. Where are we?”

“Still too close, I think. But I see a grove of sycamores down the way. Big trees.”

She drove more quickly now. The pictures began to degrade, then turn unusable. A minute or so later she stopped again, asked again.

“No good,” I told her. “We’re out of range now. All we’ve got is white noise … nothing but snow … no picture at all.” I looked around the inside of the van, saw what we needed. “Find me a tree,” I told her. “A nice fat tree.”

“I can do better than that. I can give you a choice from a hundred of them.”

I went up to the driving compartment and looked over her shoulder. She’d delivered us into the middle of a sycamore grove, a forest of trees that would do just fine, although they were a little too winter-bare to be perfect.

The grove was at the edge of a forest that stretched off toward Rock Creek Park. I could still see Finnerty’s street in the distance, so line of sight for the transmitter would be adequate, and hiding the van back here couldn’t be better.

“Pull as far into the trees as you can,” I told Lisa, then went back and grabbed the relay transmitter that would make the whole setup work for us. Shaped like a boomerang but smaller, the transmitter came with its own battery pack and heavy-duty cabling.

A moment later the van stopped. Lisa walked around and opened the back door. I carried the relay transmitter to the door and hopped to the ground.

We worked quickly.

Lisa stood lookout as I used wood screws to fasten the boomerang to the back side of the broad trunk of a sycamore that was ten feet deep into the forest and had a clear line of sight to the house. The boomerang was omnidirectional, would accept the signals from the bugs I’d put in the house and shoot them out in every direction at once. With a range exceeding one mile, we could sit axle-deep in the waters of Rock Creek and still enjoy both picture and sound.

Back in the van, I drove this time while Lisa watched the monitors. Down toward Rock Creek, up a wide dirt path, into a clearing between heavy bushes. I pulled to a stop.

“Well?” I asked over my shoulder.

“Couldn’t be better.”

I parked the van and climbed back to join her. The pictures were not quite as good as they’d been at the curb outside the house itself, but I could fix that. I twisted and tweaked the switches and knobs, dials and LCD displays, until the picture was perfect. Finnertys living room, TV room, and office lay perfectly centered, each room crystal clear on its own monitor screen.

I fine-tuned the volume on the sound board next to the monitors. The maid’s salsa music was still there, louder toward the living room but indistinct in the office. I nodded at Lisa. However this thing ended up playing out, we were as ready as we’d ever be to getting it started.