The front door opened. I stood up, my hands buried in my jacket pockets. Luckily for me, Shane Stoats was a man of regular habits. He had risen up the ranks to become Eva’s second in command, ousting Jarvis. My original intention had been to go after Jarvis, but that was pointless now. He was no longer part of Eva’s inner sanctum. Shane was now my best bet to get what I wanted. And, as someone within Eva’s sacred inner circle, I’d been observing him for a while.

Being a belt-and-braces kind of person, a month ago, wearing overalls and under the guise of installing a compulsory smart utilities meter in his five-bedroom home, I’d managed to obtain the wireless-network name and password of the house router from his wife, Jill. She’d let me in, given me the information I requested and left me to it with a pitiful lack of curiosity. After fifteen minutes of banging on this wall and tapping at that wall in the garage where the utility meters were, I’d informed her that the wireless signal from her house was not strong enough to install the smart meter, but that the technology was improving all the time so she should expect to hear from us within the year when the hardware had sufficiently improved.

Of course, once I had the wireless name and password, neither Shane, his wife nor his two teenage kids could use their phones, their laptops, the computers within their house without me being able to log in and track every call made, every Internet page visited, every password input. And, like most people once they’d used the given router password, they never changed it. I had access to all Shane’s emails, bank accounts, even the texts that he sent and received in his home.

So I knew he could tell me what I needed to know.