With an exclamation of satisfaction, Solo eased the rope out from underneath a heavy tower jack and a roll of tools, and coiled it around his own waist beneath his jacket. Then, having untied the shoes from their position round his neck and slipped them on, he was ready to go.
For a moment he toyed with the idea of trying to find out what State he was in from the license plates of the cars. But it wasn't light enough to read them and he was by no means sure he could decipher them adequately by touch. Besides which, it was late... the stable clock had chimed four times several minutes ago.
Tiptoeing back to the garage door, he pried it open. And froze.
A man was standing four yards away, his back to the garage, staring up at the roof of the house. Holding his breath, Solo followed his gaze. All along the mellow facade, dark windows shinily reflected the light of the moon. All except one.
Of the four attic dormers piercing the tiled roof, one—the left-hand one—gaped open upon a black interior. In the silver light which poured down from the sky and etched in sharp relief every imperfection in the bricks, the window which Solo in his haste had left open stood wide to the night.
For a moment longer, the guard stood there. And then, dropping his machine pistol to the full extent of his arm, he turned slowly around to scrutinize the moonlit garden.
Luckily for Solo, the moon had shifted enough since he had entered the garage for the shadow of the gable to fall across the partly opened door. He would have to trust to the contrast between light and shade to hide this fact, for he dare not try to close it now.
The guard's eyes swept past the garage and on towards the corner of the house. And then, apparently making up his mind, the man strode off towards the front of the house.
As soon as he was out of sight, Solo was through the door and away in the opposite direction as hard as he could go. Treading silently on rubber soles, he flitted past the stables and skirted the wall enclosing the kitchen garden. A sweep of gravel drive separated him from the lawns. Pausing impatiently until the moon had sailed behind one of the banks of cloud that had been spreading across the sky from the east, he sped over it.
Twice, the fine stones crunched loudly under his feet; but he was past caring now whether people heard him. Cursing the carelessness which had led him to leave the dormer window open, he reached the grass... and began running like the wind towards the boundary of the estate.
He had decided to make his attempt at the spot where the electrified wire came nearest to the house, reasoning that most of the guards would probably be on the far side, where it was farthest away.
Once, on his way, he had to drop to the ground when he saw a guard crossing an open patch on the far side of a shrubbery. Otherwise he encountered nobody, and soon he was standing, a little out of breath, under a tall cedar tree just inside the wire fence. He withdrew the pieces of doctored food from inside his pocket.
Behind him, across a dark reach of lawn, lights had come on behind the front door of the house.
Solo uncoiled the rope from around his waist. Freeing about six feet of the end with the hook on it, he looped the rest over his left wrist and began to whirl the hook around his head. He was staring up at the tree as he tried to choose a suitable branch at which to aim, when a slight noise to his left drew his attention.
One of the guards was standing among the bushes with his FN raised to fire.
The agent acted almost by reflex. Like lightning, he fed more rope to his right hand, increased the thrust of his arm, and dropped his wrist a shade. The heavy iron hook altered its trajectory, whistling through the air in a flat arc, to thud wickedly into the side of the gunman's head. The man stiffened, dropped his weapon, and then crashed backwards among the branches, pole-axed.
Solo stole a glance over his shoulder. Windows blazed with light all along the upper floor of the house. At any moment, they would discover that his room was empty.
He whirled the rope again and cast upwards for a tangle of boughs about sixteen feet from the ground. At the third try, the hook caught firmly enough for the rope to take his weight. Then he turned to the fence and lobbed the pieces of drugged food over into the space between the wire and the outer wall.
He didn't see the dogs come, neither had he seen or heard them before—but they were on the stuff in an instant, a blur of heavy bodies snarling and snuffing in the dark as they wrestled for the tasty morsels.
Solo was half way up the rope, swinging like a pendulum, before the great beasts had swallowed the food. As they staggered and sank to the ground, he rocked the rope, Tarzan-like, to its zenith and released his grasp as he rose towards the electrified fence.
There was a rush of air against his face, a confused impression of lights, and a jarring impact that shook every bone in his body.
But he was over! He had fallen half way across the bare strip which lay between the wall and the fence, not far from the supine bodies of the drugged hounds. As he rose groggily to his feet, the moon swam out from behind the cloudbank, flooding the area with light.
Into the high, thin, singing silence, a clamor of voices burst distantly from the house. They must have discovered that he was missing....
He glanced desperately around. An alarm bell was ringing in the gatehouse fifty yards to his left, where the wire fence crossed the main drive by means of a steel grid gate. The outer gates themselves were housed in an arch piercing the building. So there would be no hope of escape that way.
He turned to his right just as a low and menacing growl throbbed into the air. A third Doberman was regarding him balefully from above the fallen bodies of its mates.
Solo took one look at the murderous blaze of its eyes and whirled into action.
Tearing off his jacket he advanced towards the dog with a suppressed snarl of rage. For an instant the beast, taken by surprise, backed away, its hackles raised. And in that moment the agent swerved aside and hared for the wall.
Pelting up, he swung the jacket round his head and dashed it at the top of the brickwork, where a flinty sierra of broken glass glittered in the moonlight.
By a miracle, the cloth caught and held. Gasping, Solo swung his feet forward and up as the killer dog bounded in, snapping at his heels. Seconds later, he had hauled himself up and dropped soundlessly to the grass verge on the far side.
Silently, he ran off down a white ribbon of road traversing a dream landscape under the moon.
Behind the demesne wall, floodlights were glaring on all over the grounds; voices shouted, dogs bayed and a car engine roared into action. He must get out of sight, and quickly! And since the only advantage he had was that Carlsen and his men would not yet know that he had only just escaped and might think he had got away hours ago, he might as well go to ground as near the house as possible, leaving them to search the roads for miles around....
He was now passing a gate which led into a large field. A little way down the road, the long, low outbuildings of a farm bulked against the night sky. And here, between the roadway and the gate, was a cattle grid, one of those iron grilles placed over a depression in the ground to deter livestock from straying off their owners' property.
Without pausing to think. Solo pried up the heavy grid, dropped into the space below it, and lowered it cautiously down over him.
For what seemed like many hours, he lay there with his face pressed to the cold, musty moisture of the earth. Cars, several of them it seemed, swept past two or three times. Once a spotlight moved slowly along the verge as some vehicle ground past in low gear. Bars of light fingered the dark in Solo's self-chosen prison, fanning out over the mud revealing a tuft of blanched leaves, a spider scurrying, the gluey end of a worm. Later the footsteps of several people clattered by. And finally it was quiet.