Fisher moved on to the next room — a study furnished almost identically to the library save for the domed ceiling and bookshelves. A quick scan with the EM showed nothing of interest.
Next room. Ernsdorff’s office. Unlike the previous two, the office decor was contemporary: quasi-industrial-style shelving and furniture, an all-glass crescent-shaped desk, and area rugs in red and black. Fisher did his EM sweep. Strike three. What had he missed? Given the size of the house, and without knowing the exact location of the server, Fisher had been forced to make an assumption, namely that since the server was business related it would be stored in a business-related area. Now Fisher rethought this. Ernsdorff kept his servants’ quarters separate from the main house; he kept his security personnel in the basement; he probably forbade the guards to patrol the bedroom floor. Would he treat the computer nerd of Data Guardians any differently? Fisher doubted it. The next likely location for the server seemed to be the basement, near the monitoring center. He should have scanned the hallway for EM signals. Live and learn.
Fisher returned to the head of the stairs and waited at the railing — crouched down with the flexicam curled over the edge and doing the watching for him — until the roving guard reappeared in the first-floor hallway and headed back down to the basement. Fisher followed, moving quickly, more confident in the layout and the guards’ movements. He stepped through the arch outside the monitoring center and switched the Tridents to EM.
Fisher smiled. There you are.
The door at the end of the hall swirled with various shades of blue electromagnetic waves. Fisher checked his watch: thirty-five minutes before the next roving patrol. Stepping carefully now, he moved past the monitoring center and knelt down before the server room. He tried the knob; unsurprisingly, it was locked. Yet another Medeco industrial-grade dead bolt — one for which only Ernsdorff had the key, Fisher suspected. This lock took four minutes; while no more complex than the one he’d encountered in the breezeway, this one happened to be within a few feet of a room full of security guards. Here silence, not speed, was his primary concern.
The lock snicked open. Fisher switched to night vision, gently swung the door inward, then crab-walked as he closed the door behind him. The home’s utility room was the size of a small bedroom and divided by a half wall, one portion devoted to the water heater, furnace, and air-conditioning unit, the other portion to telephone lines, coaxial and Ethernet cables, modems, and routers — and sitting alone on a shelf on the wall like a pizza box: Ernsdorff’s IBM System x3350 server.
Now came the easy part. Having been preloaded with the requisite software, the OPSAT simply needed a digital handshake with the server. To accomplish this, Fisher fitted the OPSAT with its Ethernet adaptor, then plugged the cable into the server’s empty dual gigabit port. The OPSAT went to work, its screen flowing with the numbers and characters that were the language of digital computing. Little of it was recognizable to Fisher, but the script was quick enough. Two minutes after he initiated the handshake, the OPSAT’s screen announced:
process complete… establishing uplink… uplink established… uploading… upload complete.
Fisher unplugged the cable.
He retraced his steps — back down the main hall, through the kitchen and the breezeway to the servants’ quarters, then back over the fence and along the wall to the property’s western edge — the lakefront side. Here he repeated his windblown branch routine, vaulting the wall and leaving the branch teetering in place before sprinting down the drainage ditch running along the wall. By the time the Cushmans arrived, he would be a quarter mile away. Ahead lay an intersection: One road curved northwest along the shore, a second headed roughly west in the direction of the bridge near Fisher’s campsite, and a third swung south and east, meandering its way back toward Vianden. The wind was still gusting, whipping branches and causing the canopies to sway against the night sky, but the rain had slackened to a drizzle.
As he approached the bend, a pair of headlights appeared over the grassy berm. The car was moving so fast Fisher barely had time to dive headfirst into the weeds at the bottom of the ditch. Then the car was gone, its engine fading.
Tires screeched. He heard the clunk of a transmission being shifted, then the unmistakable whir of an engine in reverse. Fisher didn’t bother looking, he simply got up and ran.
11
He didn’t have time to think, to entertain the only question that popped into his head: How did they find me? He only had time to react. His mind switched over to evasion-and-escape mode.
He sprinted down the ditch, around the bend, then up the slope, across the road into the opposite ditch, and then through a hedgerow bordering a farmer’s field. Now on even ground — the field had not yet been tilled — he picked up speed, running southeast in the general direction of Vianden; the road back to town was to his right, a hundred yards away.
He covered the quarter-mile field in just over a minute. He was almost to the far tree line. Come on, come on… If it was Hansen and his team, they would be in two cars. Do your job… He glanced over his shoulder and saw a dark sedan turning onto the Vianden road. A figure was leaning out the driver’s-side rear window, panning a handheld spotlight over the ditch and the field beyond. Fisher slowed his pace ever so slightly, and as he closed to within twenty feet of the tree line, the spotlight pinned him. A moment later he was in the trees. He ran for another twenty feet and stopped to catch his breath. He checked the OPSAT, pulled up the area map. This stand of trees was merely a border between two fields. If the sedan kept going, after another five hundred feet the road would curve again, coming within twenty feet of the next field over. If the team was going to try to flush him, that was where they would start. He had a hunch about the other car, but only time would tell if he was correct.
He took off running again, heading due east. The trees gave way to a strip of open ground, then another hedgerow; Fisher pushed through this and into the next field and kept running. To his left, across two more fields, Fisher could see a pair of headlights heading east down the bridge road. Though he couldn’t make out the model, it was similar to the first car. Hansen was learning. Rather than going “all in” and sending all his troops on a foot chase, he’d split his forces and hedged his bets in case Fisher decided to double back — which was exactly what he’d done. With team members probably in the trees behind him and the second sedan on the bridge road to act as a blocking force, they had him in a nicely designed pincer movement. Unfortunately, nicely designed wasn’t going to be good enough. He hoped.
He kept running due east. The car on the bridge road had spotted him but hadn’t stopped, acting instead as forward observer for the flushing team. The next hedgerow came into view. The field beyond was rectangular and separated from the road by a narrow wedge of trees. When Fisher was fifty feet from the hedgerow, the sedan disappeared behind the trees. He veered left and put everything he had into a full sprint, covering the distance to the road in thirty seconds. He slid headfirst into the ditch, crawled up the other side, and stopped a few feet short of the shoulder. The sedan was still moving east, negotiating a slight incline. As its taillights disappeared over the top, Fisher stood up, ran across the road and into the trees beyond. Another short sprint brought him within sight of the southern wall of Ernsdorff’s property. He turned right-east-and kept going until the trees to his right thinned out slightly. He stopped and dropped flat. A few moments later the sedan came speeding back west. Having reached the eastern edge of the wedge and realized Fisher had not kept to his course; they’d doubled back. They would search the wedge of trees first, then the ditches, and only then would they realize he’d taken to the larger forest — thousands of acres’ worth.