The coating he had applied to his entire body was another. Some of the night creatures out in the Badlands, including the deadly prairie rattlesnake, relied on a type of heat-sensing vision, and he and his friends had regularly coated their bodies with cold mud when on night hunts, in order to avoid unfortunate accidents with such predators. He had done the same to himself now, every inch of his body covered with cold mud drawn up from the thick pools back at the campsite. It wouldn’t necessarily fool the body-heat sensors that were supposed to be located all about the property, but it was a good back-up to his main plan, and with security like this, every little helped.
His eyes now fully adjusted to the conditions, he studied the wall, the barbed wire, the cameras, and the trees that surrounded them. It was as Najana had described: the trees from the park ran right up to the wall, while the treeline on the private side had been cut back ten feet for security reasons. He was pretty sure Jacobs would have wanted the park’s side cut back too, but Adams was pleased to see that the man’s influence didn’t seem to extend to cutting down acres of woodland in a state park. Adams supposed the public outcry would have outweighed the beneficial effects to security. Jacobs’ primary safety mechanism was probably that nobody knew where he was, and a public scene would destroy that in an instant.
The people responsible for security at Jacobs’ estate would have been concerned about people simply crossing over from tree to tree, circumventing the wall by going over the top of it, which is why they had cut the trees back on their side. It wasn’t going to stop Adams, though, and he examined the trees closely, walking down the line of the wall — careful to remain out of camera shot — until he came to what he thought was ideal. A big oak, whose huge, thick branches came to within ten inches of the property, four feet above the wall.
Wasting no time, Adams clambered up it, scaling the thick trunk in seconds and hauling himself along the chosen branch until he was hanging within inches of the wall. Legs clamped tightly round the branch, lying flat on top, he looked out across the barbed wire for his first real glimpse of the estate beyond.
As he suspected, both CCTV and body-heat sensors were scattered along the open space between the wall and the treeline, ready to catch anyone foolish enough to jump from the state park side. But the sensors were designed to catch someone landing on the ground, and that wasn’t Adams’ intention at all.
The ten feet between the trees was too far to jump — at least in a straight line. But from a height, jumping down, Adams knew he would be able to cover more than ten feet.
And so he reversed back to the big trunk and kept on climbing — twenty feet, thirty feet, until he was forty feet above the ground, the branches thinner now, his position precarious as he manoeuvred out towards the end of his chosen platform.
He looked down to the trees on the other side, so far away it seemed, although they were as tall as the ones on his side. He studied the trees opposite, looking for a landing site. He knew the tree he wanted, now it was just a question of where on that tree.
The location selected, he crouched down on his branch, coiling his body like a spring, and then he released himself, launching out across the void like a jungle cat.
His extended body sailed high over the wire-topped wall, and he could feel himself plummeting to the ground with alarming speed. But the tree was also coming nearer — nearer, nearer…
Adams dropped thirty feet for the ten that he made across the clearing, and then he was at the tree on the far side, hands grasping wildly, seizing hold of branches, twigs, anything that he could, his leg catching on a thick branch, his fall broken. Then he was swinging, hands clasping other branches, until he had a secure hold, swaying upside down between two branches, still ten feet above the ground but now ten feet inside Jacobs’ property.
As he lay there swinging, looking back across the monitored clearing, he allowed himself a brief smile. He had made it.
If he had been running on a track, it would have taken just a couple of minutes or so to cover the half-mile between the wall and Jacobs’ house. The method of locomotion Adams had chosen, however, was going to take a lot longer.
Using the same rationale as that of entering the estate — the cameras and body-heat monitors were used at ground level, as that was where security would expect a threat to be moving — Adams decided the best way to get to the house undetected would be to use the trees. And so — slowly, carefully, often painfully — Adams used his superior climbing skills to stay up in the trees, working his way towards the house high up in the branches of the trees.
He was careful to keep his breathing, his heart rate and his physical movements as slow and deliberate as possible, not wanting to disturb the animals that used the trees as their home, knowing that a flock of birds escaping the treetops en masse at this time of night would be as good as a high-decible alarm call to the guards. And so what should have taken two or three minutes stretched to over three hours as he negotiated each and every tree branch by branch, sometimes able to step easily to the next tree along, other times having to jump, while on other occasions having to work his way around small clearings, which added even more time to his journey.
Twice, dog patrols passed through the woods, although never directly below him; Adams heard them a long way out, assessed their likely route, and laid up high in the treetops until they passed. The covering of mud of his body also reduced his natural scents, giving nothing to alert the dogs’ acute senses.
It was a long and drawn-out process, but by the time Adams approached the edge of the treeline on the house side — the lights of the east wing shining brightly through the branches — he was sure that he had got there completely undetected.
He had considered getting the Najana brothers to create some sort of distraction, to take the security force’s attention away to another part of the estate, but had eventually decided against it. Better that the security forces were not alerted at all, he had figured.
He had taken even more time to manoeuvre his way through the last few trees, knowing that the lights of the estate might now serve to illuminate him. He had a natural instinct, honed by years of practice, that enabled him to keep to the darkest areas, understanding how the trees would appear to anyone looking directly at them. He had now succeeded in attaining an excellent observation point, hidden in the treetops in direct line of sight of the east wing of the mansion house.
The brothers had offered him a collapsible, micro parabolic mic, with which he could have listened in to voices within the house from his current position. But he had been worried about the electrical charge given off by the device, keenly aware of the security group’s counter-electronic surveillance capabilities. He had therefore decided to go in ‘naked’, without any electrical or technological equipment. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust it, or thought that such equipment was useless; on the contrary, during his time in the Shadow Wolves he had used many such devices, and had at times found them invaluable. In this particular situation, however, he decided that relying on his natural resources was going to be the best option. Which meant he was going to have to get closer.
He had memorized the layout of the house — the living areas, the kitchens, dining room, study and library, the bathrooms and the bedrooms — and knew that he was looking directly at the first-floor guest bedroom, with the kitchen on the floor below. Jacobs’ own bedroom was on the rear side of the east wing, facing the lawn and the bay. His private study was also to the rear, with French doors leading to the lawn’s terrace. The rear façade of the house was illuminated by garden lights aimed directly at the white stucco exterior. Conversely, the eastern edge of the building that Adams was looking at was dark, unlit and shaded by the trees.