Firebreak

Parker said, 'Let's take a look at this staff house.'

Elkins said, 'Why?'

'Because you've got to take that out first,' Parker said, 'or you don't have a score.'

They walked around the perimeter, another light on a tall pole always ahead of them like a marker, the lights at equal spacings, all aimed inward toward the center, where the main house would be, too far away to see from out here. Which also meant the lights wouldn't bother anybody in the house. But they'd bother anybody trying to get in the house.

It was easy walking, mostly downslope, because clearing had been done when this security system had been put in, just a month or two ago. The cables were all buried, and the result was a narrow path through the forest, curving gently from light to light.

Lloyd led the way, Wiss behind him, then Parker, then Elkins, so it was Lloyd who said, quietly, 'Here's a road.'

The others came up with him. This was the reverse of the road on the other side, where they'd left the car,

where the road had come downslope from darkness to continue on into the light, disappearing among the trees. Here the road came down out of the lit forest, went past them, and continued on down into black.

Elkins said, 'This is it. Main house up that way, staff house down there.'

'I don't see it,' Lloyd said.

'It's probably a quarter mile from here,' Elkins told him.

The fun part,' Wiss said, 'is when we walk all this way back up the mountain.'

They walked down the road, leaving the amber light behind them, and as it faded they picked out another light ahead, a yellowish rectangle. That'll be security, with the light on,' Wiss said.

It was, the one lit window in a dark house. Parker said, 'Lloyd, why don't I see any protection here?'

'Well, there's nothing valuable here,' Lloyd told him. They're just supposed to keep guard on the main house.'

Closer to the yellow rectangle of window, Parker could dimly make out a two-story boxy house with a wide front porch, the kind of building you'd find on a well-to-do side street anywhere in the midwest. Here in a forest on a mountain it had a lost look, as though the people who'd put it up hadn't stopped first to look around at the setting.

Almost four in the morning. It would be day before they got back to the car, mid-morning before they got back to Havre, and then Lloyd had to start taking planes. Parker said, 'We need to know how many people they got in there, and what kind of guns.'

Wiss said, 'Parker, I like to be a sneak thief when I can. You don't think there's any way to bypass this?'

'None,' Parker told him.

Lloyd said, 'I have to agree with that.'

Elkins said, 'After all this, do we have a score or not? Parker, what do you think?'

'Maybe,' Parker said.

Lloyd had brought with him Wiss's goggles. Now he put them on, saying, 'I've got to see where the cables come in.'

They walked down past the house, slowly, Lloyd with the goggles leading the way, looking back and forth, bending to study the ground, finally dropping to all fours to crawl over to the house across a recently mowed lawn. He'd found the service box there, where the underground cables came up to be split to bring power and communication to the house. The others stayed back by the road, trying to see what he was doing, keeping watch that he didn't attract attention from anybody inside the house.

He spent ten minutes there, then crawled back, standing when he reached the road. 'I can get in,' he said.

'The question is,' Elkins said, 'can we?'

7

'Time to go home,' Elkins said, 'think it over, figure something out.'

Saturday morning, their fifth day here, and they were seated around breakfast again at the family restaurant. Wiss said, 'Parker? What do you think? There's something there?'

'Your paintings are there,' Parker said.

Lloyd had taken the Cherokee with him, to turn in at the airport at Great Falls. The others had rented a pair of nondescript Tauruses, muddy maroon and muddy green, to spend their week learning about the staff and their house.

It had been Parker's job to chart the movements of the staff. The mountains around here were heavily forested in pine, but the lower slopes, where the roads and towns were located, were much more barren and open, expanses of rock or prairie, where a house or a car or even a man could be seen for miles. That made it harder to be an unnoticed observer than in a city, where somebody seated in one car among a thousand parked vehicles would never attract attention.

So Parker did it the other way. He got a clipboard and a yellow hard hat and dark blue coveralls and a plastic- and-tube folding chair and sat beside the gravel county road and read the Havre Daily News. The muddy green Taurus was parked just to his left, the turnoff from the county road up