Fisher spent the next twenty minutes mapping sign placements, adding digital pushpins to his OPSAT, until he had the western edge identified. Near each sign he had stopped to scan the ground ahead with night vision, infrared, and electromagnetic, and each time he saw nothing bothersome. He continued forward, taking his time, sidestepping twigs and fallen branches, occasionally cycling through the Tridents’ settings until at last the outer wall came into view. Unlike the wall he’d photographed on the lakeside of the property, this one was higher, perhaps six feet, and topped with shards of jagged ceramic embedded in mortar. This was of little concern to Fisher; the shards would barely scratch his RhinoPlate. What concerned him was what he saw when he studied the wall with the Tridents’ EM mode: Every third brick in the row just below the shards was pulsing with energy. The Tridents’ EM wasn’t sophisticated enough to tell him the precise nature of the energy, but experience told him radio waves. Fisher zoomed in and switched to night vision, then infrared. The former showed no signs of cameras or directional microphones; they were perfect replicas of weatherworn bricks. Infrared, however, showed that each third brick was warmer than its neighbors, which suggested it was being fed electricity. So: not visual, not auditory. Pressure or tremble, Fisher thought. If something of roughly human weight climbed the wall, the faux bricks would send a signal — probably to a monitoring center in the house.
He had two options. He could make his way to the front of the property, to the chest-high wall, but that would do him little good if it were similarly monitored. He’d clear the wall more quickly, but an intrusion-detection signal would nevertheless be sent. He would make his penetration here, he decided. If nothing else, it would establish the quality of guards with which he was dealing.
Fisher backtracked, found a jumble of fallen logs about fifty feet from the wall, and crouched down. Ernsdorff’s security experts had done something else right: They’d trimmed the nearby oak trees so no branch thicker than a thumb extended over the wall. There’d be no Tarzan-style penetration this time — unless he wanted to climb a hundred feet, tightrope walk thirty or more feet, then rappel back down. That, he decided, would be plan B.
At least the weather was cooperating. Shortly after he’d left his campsite the wind had begun to pick up, and now it was gusting to thirty miles per hour and driving a light rain before it. Heavy wind blew down branches, and rain made otherwise diligent guards lackadaisical.
Fisher curled himself into a kneeling firing position, braced the SC-20 on a log, laid his cheek against the stock, and zoomed in on the swaying canopy far above. He picked and rejected a number of candidate branches before finding the one he wanted. He fired. A miss. He took aim, trying to compensate for the branch’s movement, looking for a pattern… Pop. As he’d intended, his second shot struck the branch just off center, so it didn’t part cleanly but tore free, leaving behind streamers of bark. The branch plummeted, crashing wetly through the canopy before slamming into the top of the brick wall. Fisher started the timer on his watch. Now he moved the SC-20’s selector to STICKY CAM and swung the barrel around, zooming in on a bridge connecting a pair of tree houses on the other side of the wall. With a muffled thwump, the camera sailed over the wall and affixed itself to the bridge. Using the OPSAT, Fisher tested the cam, panning and zooming until satisfied it was operational. He aimed it in the direction of the main house and set it to SLOW AUTOPAN.
Eighty-seven seconds after the branch stuck the wall, the guards appeared: two Cushman electric carts, each carrying two guards, speeding down the gravel trail. When they reached the wall, the carts split off, each one slowing to a walk as the occupants shined flashlights along the wall and surrounding underbrush. Fisher took control of the Sticky Cam and followed the cart that had gone left. It stopped beside the fallen branch, which lay perched atop the wall like a seesaw. The driver got out, jerked the branch free of the shards, then examined the severed end. Apparently satisfied that the break was an act of nature, he tossed it aside. A radio came up to his mouth. What the guards did next told Fisher they weren’t your run-of-the-mill rent-a-cops, as each pair spent another five minutes patrolling the area, playing flashlights over the wall, the foliage, and up among the tree houses, dangling ropes, and zip lines.
Nicely done, gentlemen, Fisher thought. Now let’s see how you deal with frustration.
Thrice more over the next forty minutes Fisher repeated the process, taking care to choose branches at random locations but within range of the Sticky Cam. The first two times, the guards appeared in less than ninety seconds and performed with the same diligence: check the branch, check the surrounding area, then depart. But the third time, it took nearly two minutes and twenty seconds, the guard who removed the offending branch simply tossed it away, and their inspection of the area was perfunctory before returning to the house.
Fisher shot one more branch, this one directly above his head, then collected it and crawled out from his hiding place. After a final check of the wall through the NV, IR, and EM, he sprinted to it, tossed the branch over, then backed up ten feet and charged the wall again, this time vaulting at the last minute and snagging the top with both hands. He was on the other side four seconds later; ten seconds after that he was scaling the nearest tree-house ladder; a minute after the intrusion alarm would have gone off in the monitoring center, he was lying flat atop the tree-house roof.
It took the guards nearly three minutes to arrive. Fisher didn’t bother following their movements on the Sticky Cam. He didn’t need to. He could hear their curse-laden exchanges over their portable radios as they moved below him on foot and in their Cushmans. He saw flashlight beams flitting in the trees around him, but they came nowhere near him and ended quickly. A short while later he heard the whirring of the Cushmans departing. Fisher checked his watch. For the sake of continuity he would have to down one or two more branches before he left for the night.
He climbed back down to the ground, called up the Sticky Cam on the OPSAT, tapped DISENGAGE, then collected the camera where it had fallen a few feet away. One of the improvements Third Echelon had made was reusable adhesive pads for the Sticky Cams and Sticky Shockers, a feature that cut down not only on pack weight but also on after-the-fact detection. Sometimes having an enemy know that someone had been there was as bad as having them know someone was there.
He moved out, leapfrogging from cover to cover, using the walls and pits of the obstacle course and the thick oak trunks to close in on the house, until finally he saw the exterior lights filtering through the trees. He was a hundred yards away, and the oak trees were giving way to pine and poplar. He stopped and spread himself flat beside a curved concrete sewer pipe turned pirate cave.
The lights he was seeing were decorative — low-voltage path lights and mission-style sconces along the exterior walls, but Fisher had no doubt there would be spotlights somewhere, either set to automatic to detect motion or controlled by the monitoring center. Ernsdorff’s home was a three-story affair done in French-country style, with white stucco walls, heavy shutters, and dark wooden beams buttressing the rooflines and eaves. Conversely, the backyard was all Zen garden: winding paths of pristine white gravel, rock gardens with combed sand, short-span bridges over trickling streams, and stands of Japanese maple.