They had seen nothing amiss and waved the visitor on after returning his papers.
On his way toward the mission quadrangle, Kuhl had passed some branching roads that ran toward a gated cantonment and noticed additional barricaded checkpoints posted with signs reading FPCON LEVEL ALPHA. These indicated an elevated alert for terrorist activity that had been implemented as a rule at all military installations in the United States after the strike on New York City a few years before — a step up from FPCON Normal, but significantly below the Bravo, Charlie, and Delta force protection levels exercised whenever specific threat warnings were issued by federal authorities. Kuhl would not have chanced his trip if any of the higher stages of alert had been in current effect, but his men had determined otherwise, and the mission grounds had been a considerable lure to him — the prospect of an easy penetration spicing the venture with a provocative element of scorn.
It was also a preparatory drill of sorts. The moment approached when Kuhl would have to plunge deeper into hiding than at any previous time in his mercenary existence. Knowing he faced a manhunt of long duration and unprecedented intensity, he had wanted to test his reflexes for survival and subterfuge — smooth any hitches that may have developed over his latent period — in a climate of heightened but nonurgent scrutiny.
More than two hundred years after its founding, a small order of Franciscans still occupied the mission. While some of them chose to live in meditative solitude, others worked in its gift shop and offered guided tours of its grounds on a regular schedule. Kuhl was mostly able to avoid the organized tour groups and prowl the compound alone, stopping to see its olive gardens, its chapel, its cloistered tile-roofed archways, its centuries-old aqueducts and gristmill. Near the end of his wanderings he had found himself in a chamber with simple forms of musical notation painted on the walls. There he studied the instruments on display: a native American hand drum, a violin and cello, a baroque lute and lyre. One wall of the room was covered with a diagram of a huge upraised hand, the front of each finger marked with numbers and Spanish calligraphy. This had caught Kuhl’s attention like a barbed hook, and he had stood taking photographs of the diagram, thinking it would be a fine reference for the construction of a possible scale replica, should he ever choose to resume that pursuit.
As Kuhl stood with his eye to the lens, one of the tonsured monks had noticed him from the outer hall and paused in the entryway.
“The chart you see shows the hand signals our fraternal predecessors used to use to teach their Indian converts Western scales,” he said. “As new believers, they were taught not only to petition the Lord with their prayers, but exalt him with music.”
Kuhl had turned toward the entrance and stared coldly at him over his lowered camera.
“It is good they were given their diversions,” he said. “All God’s prisoners are in need of them.”
Kuhl paid no heed to the monk’s reaction. With a slight bow, he had touched a hand to the Saint Christopher’s charm around his neck and brushed past him into the hall.
Minutes afterward, he had driven west from the compound. It was not yet one P.M., giving him plenty of time to do his work.
In an oak- and pine-forested stretch of rolling highland some thirty miles back toward Big Sur, Kuhl shifted the Explorer into four-wheel drive, eased it off the roadside into the cover of some scrub growth, and cut the engine. Then he went around to the rear section and got out his hiking boots, backpack, and tools. He changed from his loafers into the boots, loaded the tools into the pack, strapped it over his shoulders, closed the Explorer’s tailgate, and started into the brush.
Kuhl had thoroughly scouted the terrain en route to the San Antonio de Padua Mission, concentrating on its prominent rock formations, and was convinced the jutting outcrops would afford the precise geological features he required.
He had searched about for a while before the hollow presented itself to him. At the base of a sandstone rise effaced by weather and the roots of the scrub oak studding its surface, a portion of the hillside had worn away beneath an overhanging ledge to create a moderately deep cave that seemed well suited to his purposes. Here, he believed, was an excellent fallback shelter.
Kuhl had stooped low as he entered the ragged hole of its mouth to investigate, beamed his electric torch into the dark space beyond, and within seconds known his initial impression was correct. The entrance would require covering, but there was an abundance of raw material around him, and he had all the necessary tools in his backpack.
Kuhl found that the long hours he’d spent carving scale miniatures from featureless pieces of wood had yielded a surplus of patience for his work, even a kind of gratification in it, that he would not have known before. Time slipped from his notice as he cut limbs from the trees and underbrush, cleaning the leaves and twigs from the oak branches to form base poles of the proper height, leaving the pine boughs more or less intact, shagged with needles for a rainproof thatch screen. When Kuhl had finished, he sorted the poles and thatching into separate bundles, tied them together with lengths of rope, and brought them into the cave, where they would remain hidden until such occasion as they might be of use.
Returning to his Explorer, Kuhl had checked his watch for the first time since he’d pulled into the thicket. It was just after six o’clock in the evening. The hours had truly gone winging by.
He had been back on the road, headed for his rented cabin, before the last of the sunlight was drained from the sky.
Now midnight had come and gone, and Kuhl could hear the engines of the false power company vehicles awakening as Ciras and Anton started them up and swung away into the darkness. At the door of the cabin, Lido greeted him, licking and sniffing his hand. Kuhl paused to scratch the dog under its muzzle, then strode forward through the foyer. He padded close behind him, treading softly for a creature of its immense size.
Kuhl’s bond with the Schutzhunds had been immediate and was strongest with the alpha.
He entered the living room, Lido at his heels. Four men sat waiting there in silence. On the carpeted floor, the two other shepherds peered up at him with their gleaming, attentive black eyes.
Kuhl looked around at his men.
“Let’s have one of you put up some coffee,” he said. “I want to review tomorrow’s action in detail before we rest.”
Startled awake by the sound of his own prolonged adenoidal snore, Rob Howell lifted his chin off his pillow and realized the baseball game he’d been watching on TV had been replaced by an infomercial.
Rob glanced at his alarm clock in the flickering glow of the set. It was almost two o’clock in the morning. Wonderful, he thought. The Seattle Mariners and Oakland A’s in a match that might very well decide which team won the hotly contested AL West playoff slot, and he’d slipped into dreamland with the score tied at the bottom of the seventh. If that wasn’t evidence of a man suffering from acute overwork, Rob didn’t know what was.
He groped blearily around on his nightstand for the remote, couldn’t locate it, felt for it on the bed, and found it wedged between himself and the vague shape under the quilt that was Cynthia snuggled into a sleeping ball.
“Later for you, Mr. Crap-o-matic Veggie Master,” he muttered to the tube, ready to thumb off the power. Then he reconsidered. There was always ESPN to give him the game highlights.
Rob raised the clicker to change channels, landed on the station just as it cut away from a repeat of some NASCAR tournament to a plug for Sports Illustrated magazine. Sure, why not, what gave him the right to catch a break? He snorted, thinking he could still look forward to the news crawl at the bottom of the screen when the race footage came back on.