“I’m sure you would. I’m going to go see if there are sheets on the beds upstairs.”
“I’ll come with you. There’s a little favor you can do for me before you go to sleep.”
“Seriously? Didn’t we vow never again after the last time?”
“You know how I get when I find a good exploit and hack the holy living shit out of some asshole. I can’t help it. It’s like when regular people eat oysters or watch porn or whatever it is they do.”
****
I woke up around three PM. Ashna wasn’t in the bed. I knew where I was but it took me a moment to remember why. I sat up and looked around the room while the fog cleared from my head. Beige Berber carpet, cream colored walls, white trim. The bed did have sheets. The bedspread—pink roses on a mint background—lay on the floor to my left, half dull, half bright in a shaft of sun from the window. A print hung on the wall directly across from the bed—a painting in a loose, impressionistic style showing a bucolic windmill nestled into a field of tulips. It made me think of Dworkin, his friend, and the less bucolic mill I had visited the day before. It had not been what I expected. The asylum would not be either. I felt a dull tide of dread wash over me, weighing me down. I pictured going in blind, with no plan and Jutting’s security on a tight leash, having to find an unguarded entrance, having to slip through the net when everyone would be on high alert—it didn’t make me happy. So far, nothing had gone as planned. The job had been chaos from start to finish. I couldn’t go in thinking it would be easy—stride in there with my usual level of confidence and walk out with what I came for. I thought back to the remote Chateau, deep in the woods, where I had been trapped in the basement vault, bound, shoved into the trunk of a car, taken to a clearing to be executed. It had all happened less than a year before, I could see the scene in my head as if I was looking down a long tunnel or watching a television screen from a distance in a darkened room. Miniature people were arrayed around the gloomy clearing like action figures placed by a child. One of them was me. One of them was pointing a gun. I pushed the memory away with an effort of will. The dread was still fresh in my mind. I had saved myself then but would I be lucky again? I couldn’t count on it. Above all, I needed to know beforehand where in the building the notes were being kept. Was St. Martin still working on the solution? If not, why had they brought him? If I had to creep around the asylum looking for St. Martin’s quarters it would make things astronomically more difficult. I got out of bed, agitated, still thinking through the problem, and wandered into the en suite bathroom. The decorator who staged the house had even thought to provide bath towels, also mint green. I turned the taps in the shower, hoping there would be hot water.
Downstairs, Ashna was sprawled on the sectional sofa, laptop on her chest, staring at the screen.
“I’m deep into this network Justin. It’s like I’m a dog and this network is another dog’s butt. I’ve got it all figured out.”
I sat down in a recliner. “Good. I need to know where people are located in the building. I need to know which room St. Martin is in most of all. I don’t want to go blundering around.”
“You’re in luck. At least partially. This place is saturated with wireless access points. They’ve got one for each flat, one in the lobby, a couple of big rooms with two each, boiler room, offices, conference room. I found the architectural plans from the remodel on the file server. They have a nifty cloud based network management system. I’m in that too. It lets me view each access point and see what clients are currently connected to it.”
“Clients?”
“Computers or other connected devices. We call them clients when talking about a LAN architecture to differentiate them from servers. So, I can at least tell you what access point people’s laptops and phones are currently connected to. Doesn’t necessarily mean they are still there, just that they were there recently and haven’t connected to a different one yet. In a mesh network clients get passed off to the closest access point so you will see them jump from one to another as they move around in the physical space. Also, I found an email from Victoria Butler that Jutting was copied on. It was to your friend Angela James telling her to get three of the flats ready. Jutting’s in the fancy one at the end of the east wing. Victoria Butler and St. Martin are on the second floor, also in the east wing but close to the central building. Security is based in the lobby and roaming the building." Ashna pulled up the floor plan and pointed the units out.
"That’s good news. Now I just need to figure out the best way to get into those flats. But first, I’m starving. Did we bring anything to eat?"
"I should let you starve for sleeping through the whole day but I’ll take pity. There are some protein bars in my pack. I brought a whole case with me. New diet."
I chewed one of Ashna’s dry, flavorless bars while we went over the plans of the building. There was a side door at the rear of the main building, just before the chapel if you were working your way back, giving access to a stairwell that snaked back and forth from basement to the fourth floor and on
