But part of that ‘custom build’ involved a sensored, reinforced fence, a sturdy gate operable in VR, and extensive and active security on the house itself, complete with alerts delivered to their respective departments in virtual reality. Two experienced police officers, used to dealing with a corrupt system, were not foolhardy enough to move so far out of the city proper without having extensive security built into the entire design.
More, the fact that it was a new subdivision meant that the street layout maps – at least the ones to which Brandt and Hennig had access – didn’t have Carter’s home address anywhere on them.
So it took the pair of saboteurs a couple of days to even figure out where it was, let alone reach it.
“And now that we’ve found the damn place,” Hennig grumbled, as he stood on the muddy sidewalk, soiled from all the construction in the vicinity, and stared at the locked gate, “we gotta figure out how to get in there, dammit.”
“This ain’t gonna be quite as easy as we’d hoped,” Brandt agreed.
But the pair of infiltrators didn’t take into account the ingenuity of four experienced police investigative types who were eager to bust a group of conspiracists. Carter & Co. expressly wanted these two crooks to find a way into the property. So the night before, and with some help from The Team, they had made a way. A reasonably easy way.
As the two ‘enforcers’ walked the fenced perimeter, looking for a weakness, Brandt suddenly stopped dead, then ran to a small copse of trees.
“Joe! Hey, Joe! Come ‘ere!”
Hennig scurried over.
“Whatcha got, Pete?”
“Look here. In this buncha trees. One of ‘em musta fell in the storm the other night.” He pointed.
“Well, damn, wouldja look at that,” Hennig said with a broad grin. “It took the fence down with it.”
“C’mon, let’s go,” Brandt said, slipping through the opening created by the fallen tree.
“Yeah,” Jones told Colonel Peterson. “The security alert came in a couple minutes ago – I guess it pinged you, too, huh? – and I pulled it straight up, soon as I got it. I see ‘em in the security video. They came in through the ‘downed tree’ and are sneaking through the back yard, right now.”
“Good,” Peterson said with a wicked smirk. “Make sure none of the security systems have alerted at the house, or we could lose ‘em. I want to see everything they do, let ‘em do it, record it, then catch them and all the rest of their confederates red-handed. Lee agrees with me, and is even more vehement, if that’s possible. Let me know as soon as they reach the house.”
“All over it,” Jones confirmed.
Hennig and Brandt approached the low, sprawling house from the rear; the wooded lot in the rear of the house allowed for that surprisingly easily… or so it seemed. Looking for security monitoring, and consequently spotting several panning cameras on the rear of the house, they timed their movements to the cameras in order to avoid being in the line of sight of any given camera. Hennig knelt abruptly.
“Whatcha got, Joe?” Brandt asked, doubling back to his partner’s side.
“Incoming gas line,” Hennig noted, fingering the pipeline. “Like we figured. That looks promising. Keep moving. We don’t want the cameras to spot us.”
The cameras the pair of ‘enforcers’ saw were actually dummies that Carter, Ashton, Ames, and Peterson had set up for the purpose a couple of nights before; the real security cameras were well camouflaged in the trimwork of the house and the trees in the back, their feeds run through virtual reality channels to the household security control panel, and Maia Peterson’s people in ICPD. They, in turn, kept Ashton and Carter apprised of all activity. So once Hennig and Brandt reached the back of the house, Jones notified them, and within moments, Jones, Carter, Peterson, Ashton, and Ames were in a ‘room’ floating outside a three-dimensional simulacrum of the house, watching the two crooks explore the outside of the structure.
“Lee, honey, they’ll come around the corner in another minute or two,” Peterson noted.
“I know. I’m on it, Maia,” Carter said, splitting his attention between their group VR room and another channel in the lower part of his vision. “I left everything in the garage just so this morning for a reason. I’m raising the garage door now. It’ll look like I left it open this morning, or that the automatic-close function glitched.”
“This would be funny if it wasn’t so serious,” Ames noted, stifling a snicker, as their view – but not their perps’ view – of the house depicted the garage door opening silently.
“You’re not gonna let ‘em in the house itself, are you, honey?” Peterson asked then.
“Not planning on it, no,” Carter replied. “Just the garage. I’m thinking what they’ll see in the garage will do the trick, as far as that’s concerned. I have the door into the house triple-locked, anyway.”
Just then, they saw Brandt and Hennig round the corner of the house, and stop dead, gaping at the open garage door.
“Holy shit,” Brandt remarked in surprise. “Today must be our lucky day.”
“That seems awful damn weird to me,” Hennig said, suspicious. “What the hell is the damn door doing wide open like that? Lemme see something, here. C’mon in here, so’s we don’t accidentally lock ourselves out or something...”
Brandt followed, curious, as Hennig eased into the garage proper, keeping his eyes peeled for any security traps. Hennig then made straight for the door
