She was glad for the platform soles. Without them, she never would have been able to reach the button.
She watched the KorenSur’s light bank until all the lights had blinked from green to yellow, then stepped into an open-plan room containing a lot of antique Scandinavian furniture painted with flower motifs. “I need a power scan—” KC stepped forward into the room and heard, from the light bank of the KorenSur, the soft, nearly inaudible click of a connecting circuit. “No.” She bit her lip.
“No, you don’t need a power scan? Confirm?” Yardley asked.
“I do, but first I have to know if there is a laser field or a heat-sensing field in this room before I take another step. You probably have another twenty, twenty-five seconds to figure it out.”
“Copy,” Yardley said, and then, a second later, “Both. What do you need?”
“I’m going to have to finish tripping it, and what I want tech to do is just silence the alarm and block the notification to whoever has it set up on whatever device. This is KorenSur’s app-based system. Kind of cheap on Mirabel’s part.”
“Like what Tabasco did for me in Berlin a couple years ago?” Yardley said.
“Exactly that. I’m going to proceed to where I am assuming the safe is, based on what kind of laser and heat fields cover this room. Don’t love that it looks like my Portuguese friend set me up. I’m guessing my time here is limited.”
“Copy, clear to proceed. We’ll have a fat twenty seconds before the notification goes out. Easy. And Lorena is power mad. Don’t take it personally.”
KC walked through the room, holding her breath, mentally counting down the seconds as she strode through the invisible field that was changing the voltage of every sensor and thereby tripping the alarm, even as she couldn’t hear it. Once she crossed the room, she came to a pony wall that looked strange, given the open plan. “I assume I’m good?”
“So good,” Yardley said. “You get any better, I won’t survive this mission, and I’m safely tucked away in a warm van, not eluding henchmen and lasers.”
KC’s helpless grin in the empty room was the only thing about her reaction to Yardley’s flirting on an open comm channel that she could safely assume belonged to her and her alone. It felt precisely like one of the dozens of times Yardley had flung a bit of sass her way in the middle of a run, stopping KC dead in her tracks to laugh, or to protest, or to grab her by the waist and kiss her.
It had been a long time.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said, running her fingertips along the pony wall and making sure her cameras took in every inch of it, because the agents in the van could pick up more than she would.
“I already like what you’re thinking,” Yardley said. “See if there is a door somewhere to the left of you.”
“Should we all reconsider ‘Tabasco’? Because Tabasco’s from Louisiana, as you pointed out.” She found the invisible seam and pressed two fingers into it. She heard a soft pneumatic hiss, and then the hidden door, thick and heavy, came open an inch. “And it’s kind of insulting? It implies a certain heedlessness normally associated with men who have friends everyone calls ‘Rooster.’ Or ‘Jug Belly.’”
“Absolutely not my associations, but I take your point,” Yardley said. “Unfortunately, you’re stuck with it. You can open that up. We have around seven minutes until the auction begins.”
KC opened the heavy door to a panel with an embedded computer console. Not the safe—another layer of security in front of it. She put her fingers on the keys, waking up the computer into standby mode.
“You need tech?”
“What do you think?” KC ran through a few opening lines of code just to see what she was dealing with, overriding the screen view so she could see the source.
Damn it all to hell.
“I need our asset to join us on the comm link,” she said.
“Negative,” Atlas broke in. “The asset’s authorization is limited to confirming we have the right product.”
“I thought we were authorized to save the world. Look, Mirabel locked this with, for lack of a better term, a riddle he got from the asset. These are kind of her thing. My hope of cracking it and making time are less than zero. I can’t torch my way in. If I blow it up, we lose what’s inside. So I either get the asset on comm, or I’m going to have to belly crawl out of here and swim home.”
“I have the asset on comm link,” Yardley said. “Please don’t get in the water. It’s forty-one degrees Fahrenheit, and you’re wearing boots. Bride, you can go ahead.”
“You catch my code name, then?” Kris’s cheerful, extremely loud voice made KC touch her ear as though she could turn down the volume. She could not. “You’re going to want to start with running a regular password request. Doesn’t matter what kind.”
“Are congratulations in order?” KC prompted the system to ask for a password. “Got it.”
“Do you remember the Sphinx Questions code from back in the day? Do that. And, yes, Declan showed up here with three juicy carats, and I said yes!”
“Is a proposal less romantic, do you think, when it happens behind bars?” KC tapped the screen. “All right, I’ve been hit with one of your skeleton key codes, so you’re going to have to give up one of your famous secrets.”
“Does it matter where a girl finds herself when she’s in love?” Kris’s voice had gone a little dreamy, and KC’s heart softened in response. “Seems to me the only thing you can choose in this life is love or fear. That’s it, really. Love or fear. I do hate to give up my secrets, but this one’s old. It’s just the code to the start screen of the originalMario Kart. It will autofill if you give it the first line.”
