Africa: An International Thriller (The Flense Book 3) by Tanpepper Saul

Author:Tanpepper, Saul
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brinestone Press
Published: 2017-12-12T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirty-Seven

The place was as silent as a tomb and utterly devoid of echoes, as if all vibrancy had been sucked out of the air.

Padraig shut the front door behind him and looked around. He already knew the layout of the de l'Enfantine family home, having memorized the plans from the packet Director Heeder had provided him. The snow all around the house, days old, showed no signs of disturbance. No one had come or gone since it had fallen. And no one had responded to his knocking or calls.

And yet, a computer inside the house was communicating a ton of data over the internet.

Was he alone or wasn't he? Standing here in the cold, silent foyer, the house felt as empty as he had expected it to be. And yet the sensation of being watched had never been stronger.

"Hello?" he shouted.

The sound of his voice rang in his ears.

"Just find the bloody computer and get out of here," he muttered to himself. He mounted the stairs two at a time, reveling in the speed and ease with which he did.

He found the double doors to the master bedroom locked. He jiggled the knob, knocked loudly, then placed his ear against the wood and listened. Not a sound came from within.

The single-cylinder pin tumbler mechanism was an easy pick. He was inside the room in under seven seconds.

Quick glance to the right: master bed, sheets rumpled, a few items of men's clothing tossed about. His mind automatically filed the information away.

To the left: a dresser, old takeout food containers piled up on top. He went over and quickly sifted through them. None appeared any more recent than a week old.

Between him and the walk-in closet was a desk— actually more of a table with open sides. On top were several monitors. A hard-drive hummed on the floor to one side, random lights blinking away. According to Norstrom's notes, Cheong's people had tried to crack the security and mostly come up empty. The consensus was that the system had been installed by the father years before and now ran some kind of arcane firewall utilizing an algorithm based on multiple programming languages, making it nearly impossible to understand, and even harder to break. After a week's worth of attempts, the best they'd been able to do was glimpse a bit of the system's architecture. A month later, they'd finally broken through it to gain access to the memory itself, but there they encountered another puzzle, because the drive appeared to be either unused or inert, neither of which they knew had to be true. No one ran this much processing power for so little data. The drive had obviously been configured to mask its true contents.

Which raised only more questions, foremost of which was why someone like Angelique de l'Enfantine needed such extreme measures.

Perhaps she had it installed after the Israel story, he thought. He was aware the article had angered the small nation and brought her to the attention of Mossad agents.

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