It finally drew parallel with me, its wheels crunching into fresh snow on the side of the track as it was steered off line. Without hesitation, it kept on going.
I raised myself slowly onto my knees, keeping my right eye closed: At least that way I would save 50 percent of what night vision I had. The smell of diesel hung in the air. The driveway was about fifteen or twenty feet away from me and it was a 4x4 for sure, but I couldn't make out what type or how many were inside. All I could see was a massive ball of white light in the front, and a red one at the rear, moving slowly along the tree tunnel, followed by a cloud of diesel fumes.
I watched and listened as the light died. They must have reached the top of the track, because I heard revving and the transmission ratios change, then the noise disappeared completely.
Crawling on my hands and knees to avoid the branches, I made my way back to my impact site, stood up, put one foot forward and launched myself over the bank again. My right shin connected painfully with the central mound, and the combination of stones and hard ice did its work on me big time. I lay on my back in one of the ruts, holding my shin, rocking, taking the pain and thinking of the money.
After a minute of feeling sorry for myself, I got up and checked that the snow on the side of the track was still untouched. My dive had been Olympic, but the pain had been worth it. I was covered from head to toe in snow, like a bad skier. Brushing as much of it off me as I could, I readjusted my hat and carried on down the track, walking the tightrope with a bit of a hobble now.
After about a half a mile, my night vision fully returned. I also started to hear the low, continuous rumble of what sounded like a generator.
What had been concerning me most all along was, How many bayonets? How many were going to fight if I was compromised and couldn't run away? If there were, say, four people in the house, two of them might be Tom- type characters who'd played Quake for years but had never held a gun, but the other two could be hoods who had, and who'd go for it.
They were the bayonets, male or female. The term went back to the First World War, when it wasn't the whole of an enemy battalion of 1,200 that you had to worry about, it was the 800 fighting men. The remaining 400 cooks and bottle-washers didn't matter. I didn't know how many I'd be up against, and Liv couldn't tell me. It was quite worrying. Getting to the house to discover there was a Hoods '% Us convention going on in the front room would not make for a good day out.
The track went gently downhill and I got closer to the noise. It began to sound quite substantial; if they were running lots of machinery they would need more juice than the trickle the local substation would give them. To check if they were on the electrical supply I tried to look above me for power lines, but it was too dark to see anything.
The track began to curve. As I rounded a gentle right-hand bend the ground started to open up on either side of me. The treeline here wasn't so close to the track. I could see two dim lights directly ahead, maybe one hundred yards away.
Now that I was in line with the house the rumble of the generator was louder still, channeled toward me by the trees. Cupping my hand round my wrist, I pressed the backlight on Baby G. It was just after 4:45.
Edging forward, still in the rut, I kept looking for places to dive if the vehicle came back or there was some other kind of drama-such as coming across the Maliskia on the same sort of outing. I was a bit pissed this was the only approach route available to me, but any other would leave sign.
Every five or six paces I stopped, looked, and listened.
The trees stopped about fifteen feet from a fence that I could now clearly see in front of me, leaving an empty area running left and right of the track, about two or three feet deep in snow. A large set of double gates was directly ahead. Keeping in the rut, I moved up close. It was made of the same material as the fencing: diamond shaped latticework pressed out of quarter-inch steel sheeting; the sort you'd see in the windows of liquor stores or the protected kiosks of twenty-four-hour shops.
A large chain fed through both gates and was secured with a heavy steel high-security padlock-a pain in the ass to decode and do up again; it wasn't the type that just snapped into position.
As I lay along the rut, I could feel the hardness of the ice beneath me and knew the cold would start attacking me long before the Maliskia did. I wasn't worried about them at the moment, or the players in the house. Fuck 'em. At such short notice there was no other way to recce this place.
The fence looked about forty-five feet high, and was made up of maybe three sections of latticework, bolted together and supported by spaced steel poles about a foot in diameter. The house was beyond the fence, about forty yards away. There were no Christmas decorations in this one, just the two lights. One came from a stained- glass panel that I thought was the top half of a door, set back on a deck. The other was coming from a window further to the left.
I couldn't see that much detail, but the house seemed quite large and old. It had a chateau-style tower on the far right-hand side, with a Russian onion-shaped dome that I could just see silhouetted against the night sky. I remembered Liv on the way to Helsinki saying that the Russians controlled Finland until Lenin gave it independence in 1920.
The old clashed dramatically with the modern: To the left of the house were five satellite dishes, massive things at least ten feet across and set into the ground, looking like something an American would have had in his yard in the early eighties, the sort that picked up 500 channels telling him what the weather was like in Mongolia but still couldn't give him the local news. This was a proper little Microsoft HQ. I could clearly see their dark mesh dishes looking upward, each in a different direction or elevation, and they all looked as if the snow had been dug away from the base and scraped off the dish.
As I lay there, chin on forearms, taking in as much information about the target as I could, I saw why the bases were dug out: All of a sudden there was a high-pitched whine that drowned out the noise of the generator, and one of the dishes started to swivel. Maybe they were trying to catch the Japanese repeats of Friends. Or maybe they were up and running already?
It seemed a strange location for a setup like this. Maybe these people were as illegal as Val? I started to wonder, but soon gave myself a good mental slapping. Who cared? I was here for Kelly, to get this job done and paid for before the dollar exchange rate took another tumble.
Getting back to the real world, it seemed that concealment was their biggest weapon. The lattice fence was as high tech as they got on the security front, apart from the sterile area between it and the treeline. That not only stopped anyone climbing a tree to get in, but also meant they could look out of their windows in the morning while cleaning their teeth and see at once if people like me had been lurking about.
I lay in the rut, working out how to get in based on the little information I had. The numbing cold ate through my clothes and the snow that had found its way down my neck when I fell started to attack my back. My toes were beginning to freeze and my nose was running. I couldn't make any noise by clearing it into the snow, so had to be content with wiping it on my icy-cold glove.
There was a sound behind me. I cocked my head so my right ear was pointing back toward the track. The vehicle was returning. No time to think about it, I just got up and ran back to the nearest of my dive points. To clear the bank and the trees, which were slightly off the track, before the headlights rounded the bend, I had to throw myself about three feet up and five feet over, just to get near the treeline's branches. I went for it, not quite making the five feet and hitting rock again. It probably hurt, but I wouldn't feel it until later; adrenalin was doing its job, fighting the pain.
Plowing through the snow, trying to get under the branches once more, I listened as the wagon got closer. The vehicle noise suddenly increased as it rounded the bend.
I swiveled round on my hands and knees, slowly lifting my head, and tried to get into a position from where I could see the track. I didn't bother to wipe the snow off my face in case the movement was detected.
A moment later the 4x4 passed, its headlights sweeping across the gates, the rear lights turning the snow behind them bright red.
My face was stinging, but now wasn't the time to deal with it. I needed to take in anything from what the occupants of the 4x4 were going to do to what the front and rear lights revealed to me about the surroundings. Fuck the night vision now.
The vehicle stopped just short of the gate and the red glow brightened as the brakes engaged and the engine idled.
Pulling two branches apart with my hands, I saw the right-hand passenger door open and the interior light
