Page 36 of The Chain

“I go in the back door. Scout the place. Maybe upload a little spyware bug of our own onto the family desktop.”

“You can do that?”

“Oh yes.”

“How?”

“The B-and-E stuff is pretty easy, as you found out at the Appenzellers’. The bugging tech I learned from my buddy Stan when I worked for him after the Corps.”

Rachel shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

“Gives us an advantage. We’ll know what they’re thinking. The shit’s going to get real when we take Toby.”

“Is it safe?”

“Is anything we’re doing safe?”

Mike Dunleavy finally leaves for work at 7:15. He drives himself to the Beverly train station and leaves his BMW in the lot. Helen gets her kids outside at 8:01. It’s not really cold enough for winter coats but Helen has bundled them up anyway. Rachel thinks they look adorable in their oversize parkas and their hats and scarves.

“Do you want to follow them?” Pete asks.

Rachel shakes her head. “No point. Helen will let us know when she drops them off at school and gets to the restaurant.”

They sit in the Volvo and wait, and, sure enough, at 8:15, Helen Facebooks a selfie taken inside the Seafarer.

Pete scans the street. A college-age kid is shooting hoops down the block, and across the street, a little girl comes out of her house and starts jumping up and down on an enclosed trampoline. “Look over there—front door’s closed, kid’s on that trampoline by herself. She’d be perfect,” Pete says.

“Yes,” Rachel agrees. “But that’s not the plan.”

“No? OK, I’m going in.”

Rachel grabs his hand. “Are you sure about this, Pete?”

“We need all the information we can get about these people. In a raid, you gather all the intel you can for days, sometimes weeks, before you move. But we don’t have days or weeks, so we gotta get as much info as quickly as possible.”

Rachel can see the sense of that.

“Which is why I’m going in now while the house is, presumably, empty. If crazy old Uncle Kevin’s in there with a shotgun, I guess I’m screwed. If I’m not back in fifteen minutes or so, you should go.”

“What are you actually going to do?”

“Whatever I can in fifteen minutes.”

“OK, so that would be eight thirty.”

“Yeah.”

“What does it mean if you’re not back by eight thirty?”

“It means I’m compromised somehow. I won’t talk, of course, but you should move on to target B or, better yet, make a completely new target list that I don’t know anything about.”

“I’ll call you if there’s trouble in the street.”

“OK, but if things are looking hairy, just get out of here.”

Pete puts his backpack over his shoulder, checks to see that no one is looking, and runs to the fence between the Dunleavy house and a little patch of wood sandwiched between the beach and the road. Rachel sees him climb over the fence into the Dunleavys’ backyard.

She listens for the sound of screaming or crazy Uncle Kevin firing his shotgun, but there’s nothing like that.