Moving on flat feet, Fisher backed away from the trail. When he'd put enough distance between himself and the teenagers, he turned back to the east and began picking his way through the trees until he'd looped back to the main trail. Forty minutes later he heard a double beep in his subdermal, indicating he'd reached his final waypoint. He was now within a couple of hundred yards of the western edge of Ernsdorff's estate. He stopped and did an IR/NV scan and was about to move on when something caught his eye to the right: a too-straight vertical line among the trees. His first thought was a sensor or camera. Keeping his eye on the object, Fisher picked his way closer until he could identify what he was seeing: a diamond-shaped sign atop a fence post. In what he assumed was red lettering on a white background, it stated in Luxembourgish, German, and English: PRIVATE PROPERTY--KEEP OUT.
Either Ernsdorff had claimed a bit more land than he owned or the survey maps and records were mistaken; from what few glimpses Fisher got from Google Earth, the brick wall surrounding the grounds lay three hundred yards ahead. Either way, the sign told him something he'd already suspected: Ernsdorff and/or his security consultants had decided he wasn't a high-value target, at least for murder or kidnapping. People who are truly concerned about their personal safety don't try to warn off attackers, but rather they let their security measures handle intruders. Fisher would, of course, be thorough, but it was unlikely Ernsdorff had guards roving the property. If there was security here, it would likely be found inside and in close proximity to the house itself.
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.
THRICEmore 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.