When he got closer to the house, he ducked down in the flower bedding and grabbed a few pebbles. Staying low, Wilde threw the pebbles against the back sliding glass door and waited.
Nothing.
He did the same with the upstairs windows, throwing more pebbles, this time with a little more velocity. This was old-school—a crude yet effective way to see if anyone was home. If the lights came on, he could simply take off. No one would be able to track him before he disappeared back into the wooded area.
Wilde threw some more pebbles, slightly bigger ones, several at one time. They made plenty of noise. He wanted that, of course.
No reaction. No screams. No shouts. No lights. No silhouettes looking out the window.
Conclusion: No one home.
This conclusion, of course, was not definite. Someone could be a heavy sleeper, but again Wilde was not particularly worried. He would now search for an unlocked door or window. If that didn’t work, he had the tools to break into any residence. Funny when he thought about it—he had been breaking into homes since he was too young to remember. In those days, of course, the little “boy from the woods” didn’t use tools. He just tried windows and doors and if none opened, he would move on to the next house. Once—he was probably four or five—when he was super hungry and couldn’t find an empty and unlocked house, he had thrown a rock through a basement window and crawled in that way. He flashed back to that, the hunger pains of that child, his fear and desperation winning out over caution. He’d cut his stomach on shards of glass when he crawled through that basement window. Up until right now, he’d forgotten that event completely. What had he done after he’d cut himself? Did that little boy have the wherewithal to locate a first aid kit in an upstairs bathroom? Did he just press his shirt against the wounds? Were the wounds deep or superficial?
He didn’t remember. He just remembered cutting his flesh on the shards of glass. That was how the memories often came to him—in broken shards. His earliest memories: the red banister, dark woods, a portrait of a mustached man, and a woman’s scream. He had dreamt about those images for his entire life, but he still didn’t know what, if anything, they meant.
Wilde first tried the McAndrews’ lower-level windows. Locked. He tried the back door. Locked. He tried the sliding glass door.
Bingo.
That surprised Wilde somewhat. Why lock all your windows but not the sliding glass door? Could have just forgotten or been careless, of course. It wasn’t a big deal. And yet.
The tingle was back.
Wilde ducked low. He’d only slid the door open an inch. Now he slid it another inch. The door glided easily on the track. No sound. Wilde stayed low and slid it some more. Slowly. This could all be overkill, but overconfidence was often a bigger threat than any adversary. He waited and listened.
Nothing.
When he’d slid the door wide enough, Wilde crawled into the den. He debated closing the door behind him, but if he needed to make a quick exit, an open door would save time. For a full minute, Wilde stayed perfectly still, straining to hear any sound.
There was nothing.
Wilde spotted a mainframe computer on the desk in the corner.
Bingo again.
There was no one home. He was sure of it now. But he couldn’t shake that tingle. He wasn’t a woo-woo superstitious man. He didn’t really believe in any of that. Yet there was an unmistakable crackle in the air.
What was he missing?
He didn’t know. It could just be his imagination. He didn’t dismiss that. Then again, there was no harm in being extra cautious. Wilde stayed low and crept toward the desk. This was his goal and reason for breaking into the McAndrews’ home—to download everything he could off the McAndrews’ computer and then get it to Rola’s experts for a full analysis. He would at some point like to question the McAndrews family, though he was doubtful that could get him anywhere. The bigger key was to figure out how the troll DogLufegnev got those compromising photos that had sent Peter Bennett into a tailspin.
The computer was a PC with a Windows operating system and password protection. Wilde pulled out two USB flash drives. He stuck the first one into the USB port. The flash drive was an all-in-one hacker’s tool. It was loaded with self-running programs like mailpv.exe and mspass.exe, and once plugged into the USB port, it would collect various passwords from Facebook, Outlook, your bank account, whatever.
Wilde didn’t need all that.
He just needed the operating system password, so that he could back up the entire contents of the computer on the second flash drive. In the movies, this takes a relatively long time. In reality, the password is bypassed in seconds and the contents should be copied in no more than five minutes.