Countermeasure (34 page)

While Cassandra explored the room and view in awe, she noticed Trevor didn’t show any hint that the extravagant surroundings affected him one way or the other. He set his laptop on the desk and went about his business as it were something he was used to—another red flag to explore later.

Trevor sat at his laptop, connected to the hotel’s network, and, without missing a beat, hacked into the hotel’s reservation system. Although Kenyon’s signal had triangulated to that immediate area, he could have been there for either business or pleasure. They had to be sure he was staying in the same hotel or they would have to modify the plan they’d hashed on the way there.

Infiltrating the hotel’s guest list, Trevor pulled up the arrivals from within the last day. “Only three guests were registered since the time Kenyon’s signal reached Monte Carlo.” While checking the information available on the three, Trevor snickered.

“What now?” Cassandra asked, coming from the bedroom with her laptop. She set it on the coffee table and joined Trevor. Reaching him, she rested her hand on his shoulder and gave it a slight squeeze. His heart warmed at her unconscious gesture, another sign she was growing more and more comfortable with him.

“Of the three guests, two are couples.”

“Well, he could have met and brought someone with him,” Cassandra commented, playing the devil’s advocate.

“True. But the eejit registered under his own name. He’s either dumb or ballsy. I guess he’s not too concerned about stabbing his own boss in the back, is he?”

She laughed. “You’re right. He
is
a dumbass. So, what floor is he on?”

“Two floors down from us. I have the room number. Let me tap into the surveillance system and see if I can retrieve any videos from last night. We need to know what he looks like so we’ll know who we’re dealing with.”

With quick commands, Trevor infiltrated the surveillance system and pulled up the videos available for Kenyon’s floor dated from the last twenty-four hours.

“You are a dangerous man, Mr. Bauer,” Cassandra drawled.

“Huh?”

She shook her head humorously. “I’m not beating myself over the head anymore regarding your infiltration into EXClinic’s servers. It seems that no matter what type of system it is or how tight the security is, it is not safe from you.”

“Admit it. You’re glad I’m on your team,” he joked, hoping she would get his deeper meaning.

For the first time, Cassandra didn’t shy away. “Yes. I am glad to have you…on my team.”

The subtle pause caused the rhythm of Trevor’s heart to rev a little faster, but he knew it wasn’t the right time yet to introduce the talk he wanted to have with her. He turned their focus back to the work at hand. “We need to catch Kenyon walking into his room.”

“Why don’t we split the files? That way we’ll finish faster. Teamwork.” Cassandra walked back, settled on the comfortable couch with her legs propped on a pillow on the coffee table, and jumped into work.

Several hours later, Cassandra gasped and Trevor snapped his eyes in her direction. “Oh my god…we were so close.” Her eyes were wide and her face white as a sheet.

Trevor joined her on the couch and looked at the scene frozen on her screen. It showed a fairly large man, slightly taller and heavier than Trevor, walking into the hotel room they knew to be occupied by Kenyon. The video was paused at the point where he’d turned to open the door, and his face was clearly visible. The photos Cassandra had found while researching for his profile differed greatly from the one on the laptop.

Cassandra’s eyes locked on the man displayed on her monitor. She knew that face and could clearly recall the first time she’d seen it. He was the man they’d crossed paths with at Allison’s apartment entrance on the horrific night they had found her bloodied and beaten. At the time, the hair on the back of Cassandra’s neck had stood on end; she had been strangely affected by him when he had brushed past them without a glance or a word. His face had been burned in her memory ever since—the same face that was now frozen in place on her laptop screen.

“It’s him! That’s man who came out of Allison’s building.” Cassandra glanced at Trevor, picking up on the tension around his lips, the focused look on his face, and his narrowed eyes as he stared hard at the image.

“Son of a bitch!” he cursed harshly. “We were so close to saving her…if we had been there a few minutes earlier….”

Cassandra could see the struggle in his eyes, the guilt over not having arrived there sooner.

“It was not our fault, Trev. Let it go,” she urged gently. “There’s nothing we could’ve done. She was already dying by the time we got there. It was her time. There’s nothing anybody can do when someone’s time is up,” she said, almost talking to herself.

Trevor inhaled deeply and became all business. “We know what he looks like, who he is. We need to watch his comings and goings so we can make our plan work,”

Cassandra pulled out her notes and checked the items she’d listed. “Can we confirm if he signed in any items to be placed in the hotel safe?”

“I can check that. Not a problem.”

“While you do, I’m going to check the safe in our closet. Chances are, all rooms have the same model. If I can break into ours, I can break into the one in his room.”

“Are you sure you want to do it this way? We can always approach him, or even report him to the police linking him to Allison’s murder.”

“And what proof do we have he did it, besides the fact we heard it from Allison? Once the police hear that we were with her at the time of her death, they’ll consider all three of us suspects. We’d have a hard time explaining what we were doing there, as well as why we left the scene of the crime before the police arrived. We would look more suspicious than Kenyon.” Cassandra shook her head. “This is the easier way to get the hard drive without putting ourselves at risk. No confrontations. We get what we want, we leave unscathed.”

“You seriously want me to ignore the fact that man killed an innocent woman?” Trevor bit out in disbelief, staring into her eyes with a fierce glint in his.

“No. I don’t want you to forget. We can’t forget. We’ll find a way to handle that once we have the hard drive. He won’t get away with it, Trev.”

Trevor frowned heavily but finally accepted the logic in her words and, after some hesitation, backed away to his chair.

While he tackled another hack into the hotel’s system, she checked their safe for ways to breach it. Thankfully, safe-cracking had been a part of her training at the Farm. It had included the basics on how to open a safe without a key or a combination. Some safes required heavy equipment, advanced tools, others—like the common hotel safe—were as easy as pie. On learning how useless those safes actually were, Cassandra had not made use of them while on trips ever again. So much for hotel security measures.

She figured out what she would need to breach it and walked back to the living room with a smile on her face. “Well. If that’s all they got, it’ll be a walk in the park.”

“Okay lass. You’re it. There are no records of items being signed into the safe under his name. He must have it in the room. We can assume he put it in the safe—although, considering how cocky he’s been, he might have left it out in the open on the coffee table for all we know.”

Cassandra chuckled.

Trevor became pensive. “First, we need a way to get into his room.”

Trevor continued with his review of the videos, looking for additional shots of Kenyon, and came across the housekeeping cart on one dated that morning. He rewound the video to nine a.m., when the housekeeper had started her run. He watched as she parked the cart outside one of the rooms, grabbed the keycard hanging from what appeared to be an elastic string attached to the handle, and opened the room’s door. She then proceeded to enter to complete the morning cleaning routine. He fast-forwarded the video and watched her repeat the same routine for every single room on the floor. The only rooms she didn’t touch were those that had
Do Not Disturb
signs hanging from the handles. Ideas flooded Trevor’s mind. Suddenly he knew exactly what to do to secure Cassandra’s access to the room.

They’d spent the night watching
Kenyon’s every move. Based on his cell signal geolocation, George had tracked him via live satellite feed. Once George had determined Kenyon had entered the Monte Carlo Casino, Trevor had then infiltrated its security systems to follow his movements inside the building. They had observed him having a high time at the tables. Kenyon had spent the whole night gambling, drinking, and laughing with fellow gamblers until the early hours of the morning.

During the long night, Trevor had also pulled up additional security videos of the typical daily hotel operations and observed that each floor was assigned to one housekeeper. He had studied the housekeeping routine on all floors and selected video sequences of the corridors to be used as loops to override the video feed in preparation for the little stunt he planned to pull to help with Cassandra’s incursion.

Cassandra had slipped out earlier in the morning to shop for the small items she would need to crack the safe, while Trevor slept in for a little while longer. He got up in time to tap into the security system and catch the housekeeper for Kenyon’s floor arriving for her morning rounds.

Trevor zoomed in and counted the number of rooms without
Do Not Disturb
signs hanging on the handles to determine how many rooms she had to clean that morning. Then he watched her go from room to room in an almost automated fashion, spending the same amount of time inside each. When she had only one room left to clean, Trevor overrode the security cameras for both the stairwell and Kenyon’s floor with the video loops he had doctored. He set the timer on his computer, slipped out of the room surreptitiously, and hung the
Do Not Disturb
sign outside before he made his way down the stairs to Kenyon’s floor.

He waited in the stairwell for the right time. When he observed the woman open the door to the last room, leave the keycard hanging from the cart’s handle by a retractable cord, and walk inside to begin the last of her routine, he casually walked down the corridor toward the cart.

Based on the video reviews, Trevor knew how many times she would pop outside to dump stuff in the cart’s basket or retrieve cleaning equipment and supplies. With that knowledge, he walked by the cart right about the time the woman had made her last trip outside. Once she walked back inside the room, he released the card from the cord located at the back of the cart and slipped it into his back pocket.

The woman appeared at the door unexpectedly. “Can I help you, sir?” she asked in a helpful tone.

“My wife used all the towels in our room. Do you have any I can have?” he replied in French, attempting to divert her attention toward the front of the cart where the towels were neatly stacked.

“Of course.” She grabbed a couple of towels from the cart and looked him over with an appreciative glimmer in her eyes.

He took the towels from her hands sporting a friendly smile. “Thank you.”

He headed back down the corridor. When he reached the last room before the stairwell, he placed his hand on the handle, pretending to open it. He checked to be sure she was no longer watching him and, when the coast was clear, slipped back into the stairwell, rushing up to their room.

****

The evening descended, bringing with it the impending retrieval operation.

“Cassie,” Trevor called out and walked to her. “Be careful. The first sign of anything going off, you get your cute ass out of there. Promise me.”

Cassandra fingered the room key Trevor had swiped earlier that morning, the mini screwdriver, wires, and nine-volt battery stuffed in her pocket. “This will be a walk in the park, Trev. I have everything I need and Kenyon should be spending the next few hours or so in the casino. Plenty of time.”

When she turned to leave, Trevor grabbed her hand and spun her back into his arms, capturing her lips in a hard kiss. “Just saying.” He released her hesitantly, returned to his computer, and cued her. “Ready, set, go.”

Cassandra nodded and swallowed hard before exiting the room. Closing the door, she rested against it for a minute to regain her footing. With a deep breath, she hurried to the stairwell, following the timing Trevor had worked into their little infiltration. The video loops would give her plenty of time to make it down the stairs, to Kenyon’s door, and into the room. Trevor had her back, running a parallel video stream to keep watch on the elevators and corridors while she was hitting the safe.

She checked both ends of the hall as she swiped the key and entered the room. In the dressing area, she quickly located the safe in the closet by the entrance, pulled everything out of her pocket, and set to work unscrewing the name plate hiding the safe’s emergency key hole.

Prying the motor cable through the plate’s screw hole with a bent paper clip, she anchored it with the screwdriver before applying the two wires—already attached to the battery—to the cable itself. When the negative and positive poles were connected to the wire, she listened for the telltale click of the lock release. Once unlocked, she pulled open the door and breathed a sigh of relief. The compact hard drive was sitting inside. She checked her phone to see her time. She had beaten her own estimate. She smiled as she pocketed the drive, reversed the process, and relocked the safe. Kenyon would have no clue the safe had been opened and, in the hotel’s audit trail, the event would be shown as a regular key opening, covering her intrusion nicely. Grinning to herself, she commented under her breath, “Like I said, a walk in the park.”