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“Stand by.”

I looked at Jennifer and said, “Get ready to climb.”

She was wearing yoga pants, Vibram FiveFingers shoes, and a Lycra top, her hair in a ponytail. Her preferred method for breaking into something. She said, “I’m ready. You guys are the weak link.”

I laughed and said, “We’ll be there, just drop the rope.”

I looked at Shoshana and said, “You go up first, I’ll follow. Get inside and wait. No crazy stuff.”

She finally got aggravated and said, “If you think I’m such a risk, then take someone else up there. Aaron is here. And so is Knuckles. You don’t want me to go in with you, just say so.”

And she was right. If I could take either one of them, I would have done so in a heartbeat, but she had something they did not. I’d left Brett back at the hotel to coordinate with the Taskforce, and I needed Jennifer to climb the wall, but honestly, we were looking for a needle in a haystack here. We only had the information from Lia, and all she knew from the secretary she’d talked to was that Garrett had an office in the basement.

I didn’t want to give Shoshana too much credit, but I wanted her ability to see things. Not that I’d ever tell her I believed in that crap. But I did. And so I’d left Aaron and Knuckles on the outside as a reserve to get us out of trouble if things went bad.

Knuckles thought it was crazy, telling me that he should go in, and in any other situation I would have agreed. This time I didn’t, and Aaron, knowing Shoshana’s capabilities, understood why.

I said, “Hey, Carrie, I need your mental skill here, not your physical. Don’t let me down.”

She looked at me in surprise, saying, “Seriously? You finally believe?”

She looked at me with her wolf eyes and smiled, knowing I was lying. Not wanting to give her too much credit, I said, “No, I don’t. But I might after tonight. Just don’t kill anyone.”

Brett came on, saying, “Creed’s got the cameras. It’s all you guys now.”

“Can he see us even as he freezes the feeds to the guard shack?”

“Yeah, we can see it all.”

I said, “Okay, we’re on the way. Tell us when we spike on the feeds.”

The palace itself took up damn near a complete block, with the ground floor housing multiple retail outlets. We needed to get inside and get down to the basement to search for anything involving the “Ninja Turtles.” The easiest way would be through the courtyard, which, of course, would mean taking out the front guards. While I would have loved to do that, we needed to accomplish the entire thing covertly, which is why I’d decided to use my own personal spider monkey.

Our biggest problem was the retail stores on the ground floor. They were very expensive outlets, Jimmy Choo and Hermès and others, all literally built into the outside walls of the palace. They would have their own surveillance and alarm systems above and beyond the palace, so we had to defeat that. I went with the old-school way: just get above it and in.

We exited the van, then raced down an alley until we were underneath a small outside balcony with French doors three floors up, the balcony itself looking like a place someone would only use to step out and start singing. I crouched below it, waiting on an alert from a nosy neighbor. The light from the street was muted, but still bright enough to highlight us if someone in the building next door happened to glance out the window.

I took a knee underneath it, handed Jennifer a roll of knotted rope, and said, “Koko, get going. The longer we wait here, the more the opportunity for compromise.”

She slung it over her shoulder, tested a piece of stone from the building, and then began climbing the old structure like she was scrambling up a climbing wall at a gym. Shoshana watched her go up and said, “That never fails to amaze me.”

I chuckled and said, “Me, either.”

In short order, she was on the balcony, and the rope slapped down to us. I said, “Up you go.”

Shoshana looked at me and said, “I promise I won’t kill anyone.”

She was dead serious, like she thought I didn’t trust her. She still didn’t get sarcasm. I didn’t have the time now to correct her. I said, “Okay, thanks. Get your ass up the rope.”

She said, “I want you to trust me. Like you do Jennifer.”

Exasperated, I hissed, “I trust you, damn it. I trust you. Get up the rope!”

She started climbing, and I waited until Jennifer said, “Secure.”

I scrambled up after her, pulled up the rope, and we all sat on the balcony, listening for any alert. We knew there were guards inside from Knuckles’s earlier reconnaissance but had no idea how many.

I heard nothing and clicked into the net, saying, “Blood, Blood, we’re about to penetrate.”