Immediately his body became a dam. He felt the current roiling against his back and shoulders, shoving him back toward the edge. He braced both palms against one side of the tunnel wall, his feet on the other, and arched his back, letting the water flow out below him. Hand over hand, foot over foot, back still bowed over the water, he walked himself up the tunnel until he reached the mouth, which rested half submerged in the dome’s pool. With a groan of relief, Fisher let himself slide headfirst into the water. He resurfaced and looked around.
The interior dome could indeed pass for a Disney World attraction. Landscaped to a picture-perfect replica of a jungle oasis, the dome was its own ecosystem, complete with shoreline littered with boulders, ferns, and miniature waterfalls lit from beneath by amber spotlights, which cast undulating shadows on the bushy stands of bamboo that curved over the pool all the way to the smoked glass ceiling, some thirty feet above Fisher’s head. Somewhere in the canopy came the squawking of night birds; Fisher couldn’t tell whether the sounds were real or recorded. Either way, true to form, Legard had spared no expense on his hobby.
The pool itself, which measured roughly two hundred feet by two hundred feet, was kidney-shaped, with six to eight Jacuzzi-size coves built into the sides at irregular intervals. Each cove featured its own waterfall, which splashed onto the surface and sluiced through a narrow opening and into the pool proper. At the far end, under an arch of ferns, he could see a flagstone walkway bordered by green miniature spotlights. An exit, Fisher thought.
He sound-keyed his SVT, then said, “At waypoint four.”
“Roger,” Grimsdottir responded. “Is it everything you’d hoped for?”
“Like Canada’s answer to Disney. I’m moving on.”
11
Hunched over, Fisher padded down the flagstone walkway, disabling the spotlights as he went with the SC pistol’s EM scrambling function, until he reached the exit door, a black walnut, ten-paneled monster with massive, black wrought-iron butterfly hinges.
Lacking the time for a detailed pre-mission surveillance or a pair of human eyes on the inside to feed him information, Fisher knew he would have to play much of the penetration by ear. He knew Legard was home but little else. The mansion had eight bedrooms large and lavish enough to serve as a master suite, and another twelve rooms that served as lounging or entertainment or recreation spaces. Legard was a notorious insomniac, according to Grimsdottir’s research, so there was no telling where Fisher would find the man.
He slipped his flexicam under the door’s bottom edge; the OSPAT’s screen showed a long hall done in brown travertine tile and Moroccan carpet runners, both lit by tulip-shaped Tiffany wall sconces. He switched to NV, then to IR, and saw no movement, so he switched finally to EM and scanned the corridor for signs of sensors or cameras. He saw nothing.
He withdrew the flexicam, then tried the doorknob. It was locked but, despite the door’s imposing appearance, the lock was easy, clicking open under his picks after only twenty seconds.
He eased the door open a few inches and peeked through. All clear. He stepped in, swung the door shut behind him, and started down the corridor, which appeared to be lined on only one side with rooms, four of them; the other wall contained three narrow doors — closets, Fisher surmised. The wall sconces were dimly lit and spaced at twenty-foot intervals; Fisher left them alone. Too many bad bulbs would alert any security guard worth his or her salt.
The first room, a lounging space complete with sectional leather sofas, a round, open-hearth fireplace, and a wet bar, was empty, as was the second, a game room complete with two poker tables and a billiard table, its baize surface glowing beneath a Craftsman-style billiard lamp.
As Fisher approached the last room, where the corridor ended and turned left, he could hear strains of a television playing — an American Idol rerun, it sounded like, along with the voices of two or three men.
To his right Fisher heard footsteps padding down stairs. Fisher stepped left, opened the closet door, stepped inside, and pulled it shut behind him. He pulled out the flexicam and slipped it under the door in time to see a pair of booted feet pass the closet and disappear into the TV room. The TV went mute.
Fisher cracked the door an inch.
“… the boss, anyway?” one voice said.
“Couldn’t sleep again. He’s upstairs, playing d’Artagnan with his sparring dummies,” came the reply from who Fisher assumed was the newcomer. “Bruno’s watching over him.”
“Lucky Bruno…”
So Legard had another hobby: fencing.
“I’m going outside for a smoke.”
Fisher eased the door shut again. The feet passed by the door and disappeared around the corner. Fisher waited until he heard a door slam somewhere in the distance.
He slipped out of the closet and started up the stairs.
A quick search of the second floor, which ran only half the length of the house, revealed only bedrooms and bathrooms, so Fisher continued to the third floor. The first three rooms were for recreational purposes: a handball court, an archery course, and a gym complete with elliptical machines, treadmills, vertical climbers, and a battery of Cybex weight-lifting machines.
As he moved toward the fourth room, he heard the clanging of steel on hardwood, followed by a shout, like a martial artist’s “Kee-yah.” Fisher bypassed the fourth room and crouched at the fifth door. He slipped his flexicam under the door and was greeted by a long, high-ceilinged white room lit by recessed halogen lighting. Floor-to-ceiling mirrors lined both the long walls, and between them a polished maple wood floor. Staggered down the center of the room were six to eight fencing dummies, like padded scarecrows with hardwood arms and legs and a round head made of black, vulcanized rubber.
Fisher panned the flexicam up toward the vaulted ceiling. At the junction of the wall and the curve of the ceiling was a long bank of windows running the length of the space. Fisher panned back down, angling the camera back and forth until he saw at the far end of the room a man in a black-and-white mesh mask and a white metallic-filament jumpsuit lunging and thrusting at one of the dummies. Also at the far end was a single guard, seated beside a door with his HK SL8-6 lying across his knees. The man looked bored, his shoulders slumped as he alternately watched the fencer and studied his fingernails.
Fisher withdrew the flexicam and retreated to the room he’d bypassed, which he found was a locker room: four shower stalls along one wall, a small dry sauna and cedar lounging benches on the other. Fisher turned off the lights, walked to the window, checked it for alarms and found none, then slipped the latch and swung both panes inward. The cool night air washed over him, sending a shiver up his arms and down his back. Over the treetops, he could see the moon had just passed its apogee and was now on its downward arc. He checked his watch. Still a good six hours before sunrise.
Outside the window was a stone ledge not more than six inches wide. Fisher climbed onto the sill and then, in a crouch, stepped out onto the ledge and closed the windows behind him. Carefully, slowly, he stood up, balanced forward on the balls of his feet so he was pressed against the wall. He could feel the reassuring solidity of the stone through the chest of his tac suit. He slid his hand along the wall until his fingertips found a gap in the stone; he wedged his fingers knuckle-deep into the crevice, then stepped right once, then again, then again. To his right and above, less than three feet away, he could see the roof’s drainpipe slope upward to meet the eaves trough of the vaulted fencing room.
Three more steps brought him even with the angled pipe. With his left hand, he reached up, grabbed the trough, and began to slowly put weight onto it. When he had almost half his body weight on it, the pipe gave a faint creak but held steady. It was bolted firmly into the stone, not simply screwed or wired into place. God bless a sturdy eaves trough, Fisher thought.