The back entrance to Buckingham Palace was just a few blocks ahead of her as she turned off Belgrave and onto Chester Street, but she wasn’t infiltrating the queen’s residence. Instead she quickly made her first right onto Wilton Mews.
It looked like a nondescript row of buildings on both sides of a street barely wider than an alleyway, but Zoya had done her homework, and she knew that every home and every flat in every building on this tiny street cost in the tens of millions of pounds and were packed with all manner of high-end technology.
She passed by an archway and made a sharp left into an alley off Wilton Mews. From here she ran through the darkness until she came to a brick wall on her left.
From Google Maps she saw that on the opposite side of this wall was a back garden for the mansion at 1 Milton Mews. She leapt into the air and grabbed hold of some vent pipes affixed to the brick wall. Scaling her way up to the top, she encountered a row of three-inch-high razor-sharp spikes.
Zoya unslung the yoga mat carrier off her back, put it between her knees as she held on to the pipe with one hand, and reached inside. From out of the tube she pulled the welcome mat. Zoya carefully draped the mat over the top of the brick wall, covering the spikes. She climbed the wall, used great effort to distribute what weight she did have to load there as evenly and lightly as possible and, on the far side, she dropped down into the backyard, crouching between perfectly manicured topiaries.
Zoya pulled the knit balaclava down over her face.
It was a narrow garden, only ten meters to the opposite brick wall, but long. There was a back wall, the same size and with the same metal spikes as the other two, and to her left was the rear of the house.
The house itself was wide and three stories high, but even though the rear garden was not expansive, it did have one feature that stood out.
A single-lane swimming pool, glowing and shimmering blue with the underwater lighting, started right in front of her and continued all the way to the back of the home, twenty meters away.
She looked over the house for a while from where she squatted in the landscaping, trying to figure out a way in, but as she eyed the long swimming pool she saw that it butted up to the home itself, and there was a clear window in the wall there.
She could tell by the odd design that it was an indoor/outdoor pool, and that meant there would be some sort of access below the water line for swimmers.
A pair of guards walked across the wraparound balcony on the third floor, strolling lazily together, and she heard notes of idle conversation. The black mat and the rope on the top of the wall behind her were not hidden, but it was dark there and the color of the mat and cord matched the dark brick wall closely enough.
She waited for the guards to make their slow circuit out of view, then ran across the lawn and made it to the wall next to the pool. By staying low she could avoid being seen from the window next to her, but she glanced through it to see that she had been correct. The interior section of the pool extended into a large dark room with a hot tub and several chaises. A spiral staircase led to a door one level above, and there appeared to be a changing room on the far end of the pool.
The only real light in the room came from the glowing indoor pool itself.
She crouched at the back door, preparing to pick the lock, but before she’d even begun to do so, a man entered the pool room. She watched him through the glass on the second-floor mezzanine; he looked out into the night through the floor-to-ceiling windows.
Zoya froze and made herself small. Here in the darkness she was banking on the man taking her for one of several planters on the patio next to the lap pool.
The man was security; he had a tiny Czech-made submachine gun hanging from a strap over his neck. Zoya thought he’d turn away after a moment, but instead he sat down on a recliner overlooking the pool, kicked his feet up on it, and lay back. Here he began looking through