Connor glanced around.
“Was that you?” he asked incredulously.
“Yes. I managed to get into the smart home’s controls. I can’t access his devices, though. I tried, but I couldn’t get past his firewalls. But I can get to some other things. I can lock the doors, so that they would have to bypass them manually,” Cami said. “Once you get into a smart home’s control system, you can work with whatever’s on the list there. So, I guess the more chaos we can cause, the more chance we have of getting to Rowan.”
The alarm stopped abruptly. So, they’d managed to override that because it was no longer available to activate again.
“Give the doors a try,” Connor agreed. “Lock the doors. Let’s see if we can flush him out to the front.”
Cami pressed more buttons. She needed to work quickly, but the rainy weather was delaying the interface. She tried again, as the first command hadn’t worked. She hoped the guards were not busy overriding everything manually.
Connor was relying on her, and she did not want to fail him. Right now, failure was surely not an option. She needed to show him that she could do what he now expected her to be able to do. That put the pressure on, especially working at that speed. If she’d had an hour, it would have been different.
There it was, there was the shortcut she needed. With a flash of relief, she activated the interior locking system. It might not do much, but it would slow him down if he was planning to escape by a side door. Especially if the locking control panel happened to be near the front door, which she was sure it was.
“Okay, it looks as if all the interior doors are now locked,” she said. “And there’s a notification here I can activate. ‘Exit Front Door’. I wonder, if I press that, whether it might go through to his phone as a security message? There are several others, but this one will lead him straight to us if he sees it.”
“Give it a try?” Connor said.
Feeling expectant, Cami activated the notification. Then she waited.
A minute later, footsteps sounded, and the door was wrenched impatiently open.
“What’s going on out there? What’s the reason for this message?” a man said irritably.
Cami found herself staring at a tall man with silver-blond hair wearing a red leather jacket, with silver rings on his fingers, and a heavy platinum chain around his neck.
Without a doubt, this was Rowan himself, and she could see the shock in his face as he stared at the FBI agents on his doorstep.