Chapter Three
Stepford is quiet at night. Streetlights hum. A dog, very occasionally, barks in the distance.
Nikki shakes her head. She isn’t as philosophical about things as Colonel Einhorn, but she’s a city girl. Parts of her lust for sirens, car horns, and noisy neighbors. Seemed more like the way things ought to be. She knows people move out to the suburbs because of all that. Pussies.
She ambles toward a nearby coke machine, digs in her loose, hip-hugging jeans for some change. There’s a series of thumps as the machine gives up the beverage. She uses the delay to look around, scan the street. There isn’t an obvious black van, or weather-worn cops sleeping in a squad car, or any other form of apparent live surveillance.
She and the Colonel had made these little checks several times already. Ein could be crazy paranoid. Nikki not so much; if whoever was bugging their room wanted some, they could come get some.
Still, she supposed it was better to be forewarned. She could get herself in the mood that way.
She had a little extra to do, this time out, though. She digs her coke out of the machine. She leaves a little something else behind, down in the innards of the caffeine dispenser. It’s not a bug, per se. It’s another of Ein’s little widgets. She knows it’s…some sort of tracer. The Colonel had given her the full explanation, but she’d tuned her out a bit. Nikki could grasp technical details, but rarely bothered.
Nikki cracks open her drink, spies the desk clerk watching her from inside his lonely office. She doesn’t think him watching her has anything to do with the surveillance. He looks to be barely out of his teens.
She makes her way back up the stairs. She sways her hips a little more, lets her jeans ride down a bit, showing more hip. His leering has lost what little subtlety it might’ve possessed. She grins.
* * *
Mindless television news drones in the background. Colonel Einhorn is mostly ignoring it, her attention focused on her laptop. She likes to have some background noise.
She looks up at Nikki as the door opens. The redhead grins. Ein nods, pushes a button on her computer. Data from the tracer Nikki planted is already steaming into her computer.
“Wonder if Lynn’s having fun,” Nikki asks idly, easing herself onto the other bed.
“How could she not be, they’re best friends.” The Colonel replies sarcastically. Nikki snorts out a laugh, takes a drink of her coke.
“She does not seem the type to be friends with Lynn.” Einhorn chatters. She’s not truly thinking about what she’s saying. The conversation was for the microphones.
“Eh.” Nikki thoughtfully replies.
“You don’t agree?” Ein asks. Hopefully conversation and Nikki’s tendency to spontaneously disrobe were keeping their watchers occupied enough to not notice certain things. Things like how Ein always kept her laptop’s screen out of the camera’s field of view.
“Lynn’s friendly. She likes a lot of people.”
“Yes. And most of them are intelligent, independent and…other things that woman is not,” Einhorn grumbles. She punches a few buttons. The bugs in the hotel were part of the building’s electrical infrastructure. Hardwired. Harder to detect than wireless devices, harder to trace. Without a sledgehammer, anyway.
That was what her tracer was for. But its had it’s own telltales, which were hopefully being masked by the interference from the coke machine.
“She seems pretty bright to me.” Nikki declares. The redhead is flipping through channels. Einhorn feels a twinge of annoyance; her mind can multitask, and she had been halfway listening to a report about new hybrid cars.
“Bright, yes, but not quite as bright as her husband. And Dave this, Dave that. Did she say anything about her own interests?”
“Maybe she’s worried Lynn won’t like ‘im.”
Ein growls. Everything about Judy Ross screamed ‘trophy wife’ to her. The Colonel is familiar with trophy wives, and subspecies thereof. In her homeland, her father’s generals had preferred women from rich families they wished to ally themselves with. In her college days, in Europe, the military officers she’d been obliged to talk to had leaned toward social butterflies who’s main duties involved organizing parties and schmoozing people important to their husband’s careers.
Judy was more of the second type. She certainly wasn’t option three, which came with copious silicone and usually hung off the arms of rock stars and the occasional superhero or super villain. That would’ve been mildly more interesting.
“You don’t like her either,” Ein halfway snaps. Nikki grins. The redhead is flipping through channels. Porn, sports, reruns, news.
“She’s boring,” Nikki says. For Nikki, that’s the cardinal sin.
Ein nods. She’s mapped out the building’s circuitry now. There are a few electronic pathways with no discernable purpose. They lead to a variety of rooms, not only theirs.
That was good. This…spying was routine after all. The pathways all lead to the same place. At first she thinks the motel office is too obvious, but the outgoing data is probably hidden amongst all the legitimate crap in the motel’s computer…or simply passes through it on it’s way to the cyber sea…
She briefly flirts with trying to hack into the computer remotely, find out where the surveillance data goes. But anyone spying would have decent security, wouldn’t they? She didn’t wish to risk whoever they were detecting her efforts just yet. Let them think they were the hunters a little bit longer.
“I feel like a walk.” She declares. She stands up, pulling blue jeans over the black boy shorts she’d been lounging in. Her matching tank top doesn’t require further coverage.
“Want company?” Nikki asks.
The Colonel shakes her head, slides her cell phone into her pocket.
“Just need some fresh air, “ She says, meeting the redhead’s eyes.
Nikki grins.
“Have fun.”
* * *
The boy in the office notices when the Colonel strolls out of the parking lot. He gives her a slightly more than cursory glance, then goes back to his magazine. Einhorn nods.
She glides casually down the street. She doubts midnight strolls are a popular pastime in Stepford. Ironic, really. Indulging in such things was quite dangerous in her usual stomping grounds, yet no one took advantage of the freedom here. More evidence of suburban stupidity, she decides.
Of course, at the moment, she’s not taking advantage of it either. Not in an innocent sense. She’s away from the motel and quite sure no one is watching when she cuts through a dimly lit parking lot, hops a fence, and ends up behind the motel’s office.
The hotel had made much of its free wireless and cable movie channels. That likely means cable internet. Sure enough, she finds the appropriate junction box, hidden behind some holly bushes.
There’s a window near the thing. She peeks in. It’s the back office. The interior door is open, and she can see the desk clerk hunched over the counter, reading. He probably wouldn’t bother her unless she made too much noise.
There is, of course, the issue of her neon blue hair. She smiles coldly. If anyone saw her…well she could do something naughty. She’s been restraining herself for days, and it’d be the perfect excuse.
The junction box doesn’t take much effort to open. Inside there are wires to splice and other such. She has some mini-tools in her pocket. Working with them is tedious, but they suffice. Soon she has one of her devices installed. She’ll retrieve it in a little while, once it’s had time to collect all the data streaming out of the motel’s computer, complete with destination codes.
They watchers would be cautious, of course. The path would be convoluted. It wouldn’t matter.
She leaves the junction box looking just as she found it, and another glance at the clerk reveals him to be napping. Ein chuckles to herself, and makes her way back to the sidewalk.
Topic: House and Garden (Read 7080 times)