"Heading to waypoint two," Fisher said.
10
WITHno time restrictions except the coming dawn, which was still eight hours away, Fisher took his time picking his way through the forest surrounding Legard's house. Wherever he crossed one of the bullmastiffs' patrol trails, he planted a Sticky Ears on a nearby tree, then noted its location on his OPSAT map. Once he had planted a dozen Ears, he climbed a nearby tree and made himself comfortable. The dogs were eerily quiet, but with concentration Fisher was able to pick up their signature, a faint huffing as they moved down the trail, the crunch of pads on undergrowth or the click of claws on protruding roots, even the wet snuffling as one would stop to take in an interesting scent. Luckily, bullmastiffs were poor scent dogs, so Fisher had little worry about being tracked to his hiding perch. Even so, twice a dog passed beneath his tree, and Fisher would watch, breath held, until the massive creature would wander off and disappear. These were no ordinary bullmastiffs, he realized. Each weighed at least two hundred pounds, a solid mass of muscle with a head the size of a basketball.
Good doggies,Fisher thought.
For now, the guards didn't concern him. Using his NV binoculars, he'd counted eight guards patrolling the grounds around the mansion, but none of their routes took them farther out than two hundred yards from the house proper.
AFTERan hour of listening and watching, he was able to discern a pattern in the dogs' movements as they patrolled the grounds. Using his stylus, he marked the routes and times on the OPSAT's touch screen. Now the dogs appeared on his screen as orange triangles moving along the green lines of their paths. The guards' movements, however, were much more erratic, so Fisher could only inscribe a rough circle around the mansion in which the guards seemed to stay.
So far Fisher had found no other sensors. No cameras, no laser grids, no motion detectors. Nothing. He was unsurprised. Men of Legard's stature tend to believe their own press: Who would dare intrude on my territory, much less attack me? No one would be so foolish. All the better,Fisher thought. Like his kayak course, Legard's arrogance and delusions of grandeur were weaknesses Fisher was only too happy to exploit.
He waited for the next dog to make his orbit near Fisher's tree, then climbed down and started moving.
INGrimsdottir's probe of Legard, she had been able to, as she put it, "digitally liberate" the blueprints for Legard's custom-made French Country style mansion. While this alone would be invaluable to Fisher once he penetrated the house, it was the architectural nod to the crime lord's hobby--kayaking--that most interested Fisher now. According to the architect's landscaping blueprints, the man-made kayak course, complete with boulders, waterfalls, and switchbacks, carved a meandering, three-mile descending loop through the trees surrounding the mansion, starting and ending at an enclosed tunnel connected to a glass-domed, twenty thousand square-foot pool/arboretum. Powered by massive pumps and pneumatically driven incline planes that could adjust the current and force of the water, Legard's course could, at the touch of a button, change from a sedate Class I stream, to raging Class V white-water rapids.
Fisher took his time moving from his tree perch to what he'd dubbed the "red zone," the outer perimeter of the guards' patrol ring. Three times he had to stop and go still as a dog neared his position. Frozen in place, barely breathing, Fisher was unable to check the OPSAT, so he had to simply listen for the telltale sign of a dog approaching: a random huff of breath or the crunch of a twig.
After an hour of picking his way through the trees and shadows, he reached the banks of Legard's kayak course, which was currently set at stream speed. If he hadn't known better and had this part of the course not been marked with slalom flags every twenty feet, Fisher wouldn't have guessed he was looking at a man-made stream.
He crab-walked down the embankment to the stream, which lay three to four feet below ground level, then stepped into the waist-deep water and started paddling upstream. After twenty minutes and fifty yards, Fisher saw the first glimmer of the mansion's floodlights through the tall grass that lined the stream's banks. Now he would start seeing guards. He removed the SC-20 from its back sling, then moved to the opposite bank--the mansion-side bank, he'd dubbed it--and belly-crawled up it until his head touched the grass, then inched forward until he could see the grounds.
The mansion lay a hundred yards away. The mansion's rear exterior was done in traditional French Country white stucco and brown, rough-hewn vertical beaming. Affixed to the apex of each of the eight peaks of the roof was a halogen spotlight that shone down on either the lawn or the paving-stone patio that ran the length of the house to the kayak course's dome. Lit from within by amber lighting dulled by tinted glass, the dome rose from the mansion's right side like a Disney World attraction. Fisher zoomed in on its base until he could make out the dark circle that marked the kayak course's exit from the dome. Somewhere on the back side would be a corresponding entrance, where the course emptied into the dome's pool.
Fisher switched his goggles to NV and then, through squinted eyes to obscure the glare, zoomed in on one of the spotlights. By touch he adjusted the controls on the side of the goggles, moving an eclipse ring over the bright dot of the spotlight. He zoomed in again and focused below the spotlight. There you are. . . A camera. He scanned the rest of the lawn and patio, counting three guards moving along the rear of the house.
The camera and spotlight were both rotatable and slaved to one another, Fisher assumed. Where the spotlight went, the camera followed. One more hunch to indulge,Fisher thought. He shimmied back down the bank to the water, found a squash ball-size stone, then crawled back up to the grass. He waited until the nearest guard closed to within thirty yards of him, then hurled the stone. It landed with a thudin a patch of darkness between spotlights. The guard turned at the sound. He pulled what looked like a portable radio off his belt, brought it to his lips for a few seconds, then reached into his pocket and retrieved a thumb-size rectangular object, which he pointed toward the nearest spotlight. The spotlight began rotating, the beam skimming across the grass until it reached the stone's landing point, where it stopped. The beam shifted several times, gliding up and back, left and right, until the guard, seemingly satisfied nothing was amiss, pointed the remote control back at the spotlight, which rotated back to its original position.
Fisher sat still for five more minutes, then brought the SC-20 to his shoulder, thumbed the selector to STICKY CAM, then focused the scope on a tree along the bank about fifty feet upstream. He fired. With a soft whoosh-popof compressed air, the Sticky Cam arced out and planted itself against the tree's trunk about twenty feet off the ground, just below the lowermost branches. Using the OPSAT's touch screen, Fisher panned the camera left and right to make sure he'd placed it correctly. He had. At full extension, the camera could scan the entire length of the mansion's backyard. He set the Sticky Cam to slow auto pan, then crawled back down the bank, reholstered the SC-20, and started upstream again.