by Tom Clancy
“I’ve updated your OPSAT,” Grimsdottir said. “Got some tighter terrain imagery of your next waypoint. Exactly how much money does this guy have?”
Fisher didn’t know, and he didn’t care. If Aldric Legard wanted his own private indoor/outdoor white-water kayak course, so be it. Fisher was only too happy to use the indulgence to his own advantage.
“Heading to waypoint two,” Fisher said.
10
With no time restrictions except the coming dawn, which was still eight hours away, Fisher took his time picking his way through the forest surrounding Legard’s house. Wherever he crossed one of the bullmastiffs’ patrol trails, he planted a Sticky Ears on a nearby tree, then noted its location on his OPSAT map. Once he had planted a dozen Ears, he climbed a nearby tree and made himself comfortable. The dogs were eerily quiet, but with concentration Fisher was able to pick up their signature, a faint huffing as they moved down the trail, the crunch of pads on undergrowth or the click of claws on protruding roots, even the wet snuffling as one would stop to take in an interesting scent. Luckily, bullmastiffs were poor scent dogs, so Fisher had little worry about being tracked to his hiding perch. Even so, twice a dog passed beneath his tree, and Fisher would watch, breath held, until the massive creature would wander off and disappear. These were no ordinary bullmastiffs, he realized. Each weighed at least two hundred pounds, a solid mass of muscle with a head the size of a basketball.
Good doggies, Fisher thought.
For now, the guards didn’t concern him. Using his NV binoculars, he’d counted eight guards patrolling the grounds around the mansion, but none of their routes took them farther out than two hundred yards from the house proper.
* * *
After an hour of listening and watching, he was able to discern a pattern in the dogs’ movements as they patrolled the grounds. Using his stylus, he marked the routes and times on the OPSAT’s touch screen. Now the dogs appeared on his screen as orange triangles moving along the green lines of their paths. The guards’ movements, however, were much more erratic, so Fisher could only inscribe a rough circle around the mansion in which the guards seemed to stay.
So far Fisher had found no other sensors. No cameras, no laser grids, no motion detectors. Nothing. He was unsurprised. Men of Legard’s stature tend to believe their own press: Who would dare intrude on my territory, much less attack me? No one would be so foolish. All the better, Fisher thought. Like his kayak course, Legard’s arrogance and delusions of grandeur were weaknesses Fisher was only too happy to exploit.
He waited for the next dog to make his orbit near Fisher’s tree, then climbed down and started moving.
* * *
In Grimsdottir’s probe of Legard, she had been able to, as she put it, “digitally liberate” the blueprints for Legard’s custom-made French Country style mansion. While this alone would be invaluable to Fisher once he penetrated the house, it was the architectural nod to the crime lord’s hobby — kayaking — that most interested Fisher now. According to the architect’s landscaping blueprints, the man-made kayak course, complete with boulders, waterfalls, and switchbacks, carved a meandering, three-mile descending loop through the trees surrounding the mansion, starting and ending at an enclosed tunnel connected to a glass-domed, twenty thousand square-foot pool/arboretum. Powered by massive pumps and pneumatically driven incline planes that could adjust the current and force of the water, Legard’s course could, at the touch of a button, change from a sedate Class I stream, to raging Class V white-water rapids.
Fisher took his time moving from his tree perch to what he’d dubbed the “red zone,” the outer perimeter of the guards’ patrol ring. Three times he had to stop and go still as a dog neared his position. Frozen in place, barely breathing, Fisher was unable to check the OPSAT, so he had to simply listen for the telltale sign of a dog approaching: a random huff of breath or the crunch of a twig.
After an hour of picking his way through the trees and shadows, he reached the banks of Legard’s kayak course, which was currently set at stream speed. If he hadn’t known better and had this part of the course not been marked with slalom flags every twenty feet, Fisher wouldn’t have guessed he was looking at a man-made stream.
He crab-walked down the embankment to the stream, which lay three to four feet below ground level, then stepped into the waist-deep water and started paddling upstream. After twenty minutes and fifty yards, Fisher saw the first glimmer of the mansion’s floodlights through the tall grass that lined the stream’s banks. Now he would start seeing guards. He removed the SC-20 from its back sling, then moved to the opposite bank — the mansion-side bank, he’d dubbed it — and belly-crawled up it until his head touched the grass, then inched forward until he could see the grounds.
The mansion lay a hundred yards away. The mansion’s rear exterior was done in traditional French Country white stucco and brown, rough-hewn vertical beaming. Affixed to the apex of each of the eight peaks of the roof was a halogen spotlight that shone down on either the lawn or the paving-stone patio that ran the length of the house to the kayak course’s dome. Lit from within by amber lighting dulled by tinted glass, the dome rose from the mansion’s right side like a Disney World attraction. Fisher zoomed in on its base until he could make out the dark circle that marked the kayak course’s exit from the dome. Somewhere on the back side would be a corresponding entrance, where the course emptied into the dome’s pool.
Fisher switched his goggles to NV and then, through squinted eyes to obscure the glare, zoomed in on one of the spotlights. By touch he adjusted the controls on the side of the goggles, moving an eclipse ring over the bright dot of the spotlight. He zoomed in again and focused below the spotlight. There you are… A camera. He scanned the rest of the lawn and patio, counting three guards moving along the rear of the house.
The camera and spotlight were both rotatable and slaved to one another, Fisher assumed. Where the spotlight went, the camera followed. One more hunch to indulge, Fisher thought. He shimmied back down the bank to the water, found a squash ball-size stone, then crawled back up to the grass. He waited until the nearest guard closed to within thirty yards of him, then hurled the stone. It landed with a thud in a patch of darkness between spotlights. The guard turned at the sound. He pulled what looked like a portable radio off his belt, brought it to his lips for a few seconds, then reached into his pocket and retrieved a thumb-size rectangular object, which he pointed toward the nearest spotlight. The spotlight began rotating, the beam skimming across the grass until it reached the stone’s landing point, where it stopped. The beam shifted several times, gliding up and back, left and right, until the guard, seemingly satisfied nothing was amiss, pointed the remote control back at the spotlight, which rotated back to its original position.
Fisher sat still for five more minutes, then brought the SC-20 to his shoulder, thumbed the selector to STICKY CAM, then focused the scope on a tree along the bank about fifty feet upstream. He fired. With a soft whoosh-pop of compressed air, the Sticky Cam arced out and planted itself against the tree’s trunk about twenty feet off the ground, just below the lowermost branches. Using the OPSAT’s touch screen, Fisher panned the camera left and right to make sure he’d placed it correctly. He had. At full extension, the camera could scan the entire length of the mansion’s backyard. He set the Sticky Cam to slow auto pan, then crawled back down the bank, reholstered the SC-20, and started upstream again.
Each step upstream brought him not only closer to the mansion but closer to the guards, so Fisher took care, stopping every dozen steps to crouch down and study the OPSAT’s screen, which he’d programmed to give him a real-time feed of the Sticky Cam’s pan. The guards were still accounted for, each either standing in place near one of the mansion’s doors or walking across the lawn or patio.
Now the stream started to gain elevation. With every step closer to the dome, the grade increased, first from a gentle twenty degrees, then to a steep forty-five degrees, until Fisher was climbing
through the water from boulder to boulder. The watercourse, now propelled by gravity, splashed around him, tossing up clouds of spray and froth. Occasionally Fisher’s hand, groping for a hold, would land on one of the mechanical incline planes or the rim of one of the water conduits.
Ten feet from the dome, Fisher was climbing vertically through what was essentially a waterfall sluicing from the tunnel entrance. Careful to stay behind the curtain of water, he worked mostly by feel until at last his right hand found the curved lower rim of the tunnel. He paused to catch his breath, then placed his left hand next to his right and chinned himself up until his sternum was level with the rim. He raised his knee, hooked it over the edge, then braced his foot against the tunnel’s side and pushed hard, rolling himself into the tunnel.
Immediately his body became a dam. He felt the current roiling against his back and shoulders, shoving him back toward the edge. He braced both palms against one side of the tunnel wall, his feet on the other, and arched his back, letting the water flow out below him. Hand over hand, foot over foot, back still bowed over the water, he walked himself up the tunnel until he reached the mouth, which rested half submerged in the dome’s pool. With a groan of relief, Fisher let himself slide headfirst into the water. He resurfaced and looked around.
The interior dome could indeed pass for a Disney World attraction. Landscaped to a picture-perfect replica of a jungle oasis, the dome was its own ecosystem, complete with shoreline littered with boulders, ferns, and miniature waterfalls lit from beneath by amber spotlights, which cast undulating shadows on the bushy stands of bamboo that curved over the pool all the way to the smoked glass ceiling, some thirty feet above Fisher’s head. Somewhere in the canopy came the squawking of night birds; Fisher couldn’t tell whether the sounds were real or recorded. Either way, true to form, Legard had spared no expense on his hobby.
The pool itself, which measured roughly two hundred feet by two hundred feet, was kidney-shaped, with six to eight Jacuzzi-size coves built into the sides at irregular intervals. Each cove featured its own waterfall, which splashed onto the surface and sluiced through a narrow opening and into the pool proper. At the far end, under an arch of ferns, he could see a flagstone walkway bordered by green miniature spotlights. An exit, Fisher thought.
He sound-keyed his SVT, then said, “At waypoint four.”
“Roger,” Grimsdottir responded. “Is it everything you’d hoped for?”
“Like Canada’s answer to Disney. I’m moving on.”
11
Hunched over, Fisher padded down the flagstone walkway, disabling the spotlights as he went with the SC pistol’s EM scrambling function, until he reached the exit door, a black walnut, ten-paneled monster with massive, black wrought-iron butterfly hinges.
Lacking the time for a detailed pre-mission surveillance or a pair of human eyes on the inside to feed him information, Fisher knew he would have to play much of the penetration by ear. He knew Legard was home but little else. The mansion had eight bedrooms large and lavish enough to serve as a master suite, and another twelve rooms that served as lounging or entertainment or recreation spaces. Legard was a notorious insomniac, according to Grimsdottir’s research, so there was no telling where Fisher would find the man.
He slipped his flexicam under the door’s bottom edge; the OSPAT’s screen showed a long hall done in brown travertine tile and Moroccan carpet runners, both lit by tulip-shaped Tiffany wall sconces. He switched to NV, then to IR, and saw no movement, so he switched finally to EM and scanned the corridor for signs of sensors or cameras. He saw nothing.
He withdrew the flexicam, then tried the doorknob. It was locked but, despite the door’s imposing appearance, the lock was easy, clicking open under his picks after only twenty seconds.
He eased the door open a few inches and peeked through. All clear. He stepped in, swung the door shut behind him, and started down the corridor, which appeared to be lined on only one side with rooms, four of them; the other wall contained three narrow doors — closets, Fisher surmised. The wall sconces were dimly lit and spaced at twenty-foot intervals; Fisher left them alone. Too many bad bulbs would alert any security guard worth his or her salt.
The first room, a lounging space complete with sectional leather sofas, a round, open-hearth fireplace, and a wet bar, was empty, as was the second, a game room complete with two poker tables and a billiard table, its baize surface glowing beneath a Craftsman-style billiard lamp.
As Fisher approached the last room, where the corridor ended and turned left, he could hear strains of a television playing — an American Idol rerun, it sounded like, along with the voices of two or three men.
To his right Fisher heard footsteps padding down stairs. Fisher stepped left, opened the closet door, stepped inside, and pulled it shut behind him. He pulled out the flexicam and slipped it under the door in time to see a pair of booted feet pass the closet and disappear into the TV room. The TV went mute.
Fisher cracked the door an inch.
“… the boss, anyway?” one voice said.
“Couldn’t sleep again. He’s upstairs, playing d’Artagnan with his sparring dummies,” came the reply from who Fisher assumed was the newcomer. “Bruno’s watching over him.”
“Lucky Bruno…”
So Legard had another hobby: fencing.
“I’m going outside for a smoke.”
Fisher eased the door shut again. The feet passed by the door and disappeared around the corner. Fisher waited until he heard a door slam somewhere in the distance.
He slipped out of the closet and started up the stairs.
* * *
A quick search of the second floor, which ran only half the length of the house, revealed only bedrooms and bathrooms, so Fisher continued to the third floor. The first three rooms were for recreational purposes: a handball court, an archery course, and a gym complete with elliptical machines, treadmills, vertical climbers, and a battery of Cybex weight-lifting machines.
As he moved toward the fourth room, he heard the clanging of steel on hardwood, followed by a shout, like a martial artist’s “Kee-yah.” Fisher bypassed the fourth room and crouched at the fifth door. He slipped his flexicam under the door and was greeted by a long, high-ceilinged white room lit by recessed halogen lighting. Floor-to-ceiling mirrors lined both the long walls, and between them a polished maple wood floor. Staggered down the center of the room were six to eight fencing dummies, like padded scarecrows with hardwood arms and legs and a round head made of black, vulcanized rubber.
Fisher panned the flexicam up toward the vaulted ceiling. At the junction of the wall and the curve of the ceiling was a long bank of windows running the length of the space. Fisher panned back down, angling the camera back and forth until he saw at the far end of the room a man in a black-and-white mesh mask and a white metallic-filament jumpsuit lunging and thrusting at one of the dummies. Also at the far end was a single guard, seated beside a door with his HK SL8-6 lying across his knees. The man looked bored, his shoulders slumped as he alternately watched the fencer and studied his fingernails.
Fisher withdrew the flexicam and retreated to the room he’d bypassed, which he found was a locker room: four shower stalls along one wall, a small dry sauna and cedar lounging benches on the other. Fisher turned off the lights, walked to the window, checked it for alarms and found none, then slipped the latch and swung both panes inward. The cool night air washed over him, sending a shiver up his arms and down his back. Over the treetops, he could see the moon had just passed its apogee and was now on its downward arc. He checked his watch. Still a good six hours before sunrise.
Outside the window was a stone ledge not more than six inches wide. Fisher climbed onto the sill and then, in a crouch, stepped out onto the ledge and closed the windows behind him. Carefully, slowly, he stood up, balanced forward on the balls of his feet so he was pressed against the wall. He could feel the reassuring solidity of the stone through the chest of his tac suit. He slid his hand alon
g the wall until his fingertips found a gap in the stone; he wedged his fingers knuckle-deep into the crevice, then stepped right once, then again, then again. To his right and above, less than three feet away, he could see the roof’s drainpipe slope upward to meet the eaves trough of the vaulted fencing room.
Three more steps brought him even with the angled pipe. With his left hand, he reached up, grabbed the trough, and began to slowly put weight onto it. When he had almost half his body weight on it, the pipe gave a faint creak but held steady. It was bolted firmly into the stone, not simply screwed or wired into place. God bless a sturdy eaves trough, Fisher thought.
He got a firm grip on the pipe with his left hand, then extricated his right hand from the crevice, stretched up, and hooked his right hand higher on the pipe. His legs swung off the ledge, now dangling in space. He repeated this move twice more, sliding his left hand forward, reaching higher with his right, until finally his fingertips found the open edge of the fencing room’s eaves trough. On the forward third of his fingertips, he chinned himself up to the roofline, then hooked a foot onto the trough and levered himself up. He dropped flat on the cedar shingles and lay still for a few moments.
Grimsdottir’s voice came into his ear: “Fisher, I’ve managed to untangle Legard’s wireless Internet signal. They had some decent firewalls up; took me more time than I’d anticipated.”