Forty miles off, in the secure command office at the medical facility, Richard stood beside Sarah’s desk, staring at a matched pair of high-definition monitors.

The left screen carried the live color feed from the camera in the mansion’s laundry room.

The right screen scrolled lines of yellow code as the task force’s data specialists decrypted the cloned server files live.

“Signal’s strong,” Sarah said, propping her elbows on the desk as she watched the data load.

A video file popped up on the right monitor, carrying an automatic timestamp from three weeks earlier.

The camera angle was high, shot from a hidden sensor in a corner of the mansion’s kitchen.