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Flirting With Danger

Chapter One

Tuesday, 2:17 a.m.

Samantha Jellicoe wondered who, precisely, had written the rule that thieves breaking into anything larger than a paper bag must always scale walls. Everyone knew it. Everyone counted on it, from prisons to castles to the movies to theme parks to the impressive east Florida estate sprawling before her. Stone walls, electric fences, cameras, motion detectors, security guards, all for the purpose of preventing an enterprising lawbreaker from climbing over the walls into the sanctity of private space beyond.

She looked from the stone wall in front of her to the wrought-iron double gate at the front of sprawling Solano Dorado House and gave a small smile. Some lawbreakers were more enterprising than others. So much for the rules.

Drawing in a slow breath to steady her heartbeat, she unslung the weapon from her shoulder, sank deeper into the shadows outside the gate, aimed at the camera mounted atop the fifteen-foot-high stone wall to the left of it, and fired. With a small puff of air, a paint ball splatted hard against the side of the casing, tilting it crazily up toward the treetops and streaking the lens with white paint. An owl, disturbed by the motion, hooted and launched from a branch of the overhanging sycamore, one wing passing right in front of the redirected camera.

Nice touch, she thought, slinging the paint gun back over her shoulder. Her horoscope had said that today would be her lucky day. Normally she didn't put much stock in astrology, but ten percent of one-and-a-half million for an evening's work seemed lucky enough to qualify. She scooted forward, sliding a pair of long-handled mirrors into place on either side of the heavy gates to deflect the sensors into themselves. That done, it only took a second to bypass the circuitry in the control box and shove one of the gates open far enough for her to slip through.

She'd spent all day memorizing the location of the remainder of the cameras and the three motion detectors she needed to pass, and in two minutes she'd crossed through the trees and landscaped garden to sink into a crouch at the base of a red stone staircase. Thanks to blueprints and schematics, she knew the location of every window and door, and the make and model of every lock and wiring connection. What the drawings hadn't done was tell her color and scope, and she took a second while she caught her breath to admire the sprawl of decadence.

Solano Dorado had been built in the 1920s before the stock market crash, and each successive owner had added rooms and floors—and increasingly sophisticated security. Its current incarnation was probably the most attractive so far, all whitewashed and red-tile-roofed and massive, surrounded by palms and old sycamores, with a hockey-rinksized fishpond in the front. At the back of the house where she crouched, two tennis courts lay beyond an Olympicsized swimming pool. The actual tidal pools at the edge of the actual ocean gurgled and sighed only a hundred yards away, but that was for public consumption.

The estate was private and protected, and created to suit the whims of man rather than nature. After eighty years of tasteful modifications and expansion, it was now the house of someone with a massive pocketbook and an equally massive ego. Someone whose horoscope read the opposite of hers and who happened to be out of the country at the moment.

Doors and window casings would be wired to within an inch of their lives, but sometimes the old, simple tricks were best. As Star Trek's Mr. Scott had once said, the more elaborate the plumbing, the easier it was to plug up the drain. With a check of her watch to confirm her timing, she pulled out a roll of gray duct tape. Samantha taped down a rough, threefoot circle low on the patio window, then pulled a suction cup and glass cutter from her pack. The glass was thick and heavy, the pop and squeak when she jerked the cut round piece free louder than she would have liked. Wincing, she set the circle into the flower bed and returned to the opening she'd made.

Swiftly she ran down the list of anyone who might have heard the glass separate. Not the security guard downstairs in the video bank, but at least two more guards patrolled the inside of the house while the owner wasn't in residence. She waited a moment, listening, then, with a deep breath and the customary adrenaline flowing into her system, she slipped inside.

Two more pieces of duct tape kept the curtains in place over the hole. No sense in revealing her exit to the first guard who wandered by. Next came the stairs, a genuine Picasso hanging from the wall at the first landing. Sam passed it with barely a glance. Another would be hanging in an upstairs conference room, both wired with sensors and worth millions. She knew about them already, and tempting as they were, they weren't the reason she was there.

Samantha paused at the third-floor landing, crouching on the stairs and leaning around to view the dim, long, gallery hall. Even as she reflected that she'd seen lesser collections of arms and armament in museums, she checked for any sign of movement or sensors newer than her blueprints and scowled at the number of shadowed places a guard could be standing, where she'd never see anything until she was right on top of him.

Her target was in the middle of the hallway, through a door on the left. Sam didn't bother glancing at her watch again; she knew how long she'd been in the house, and how much longer she was likely to have before an outside patrol discovered either the hole in the glass patio door or the small mirrors at the front gate ...