series of squibs. Just as the grapnel disappeared over the wall trailing the kite’s tail of pencil-thin wire, Fisher saw the grapnel’s arms spring out and lock into position. He heard the muffled crackling of branches, then silence. He backed into the undergrowth and waited for two minutes to see if the noise had drawn any attention. Nothing happened.
Now he would find out if he’d been spending enough time in the gym. The grapnel’s wire, knotted at intervals of two feet, was too light by itself to set off the sensor cable. He gathered up the slack in a loose loop, then carefully lifted the wire free of the wall and gave it a tug. It held firm. Next he braced his right foot flat against the wall, the left behind him for leverage, then, with the cable clutched in both fists, he raised his arms directly above his head and leaned backward. With the cable drawn taut, he lifted his left foot off the ground and placed it against the wall beside his right so he was hanging from the wall at a forty-five-degree angle. Immediately his shoulders began to tremble with the tension. The wire, quivering under Fisher’s weight, hung suspended a few inches above the wall’s shards.
Arms held vertically above him, elbows locked tight, Fisher lifted his right foot ever so slightly and slid it upward a few inches, then did the same with his left. One step at a time, his arms burning with the strain, he climbed upward until the tips of his boots were even with the top of the wall and resting against the shards. Now he began reeling himself in, hand over hand, until his body was nearly vertical, his toes balanced on the edge of the wall.
He took a breath, slid his right hand as far forward on the cable as he could, and tightened his grip. He flexed his ankles and bunched his calf muscles. In one explosive move, he jerked on the wire and pushed off with his toes. His body vaulted forward. He tucked his head to his chest, curled into a ball, and glanced through his armpit in time to see the ground rushing toward him. He turned his body, rolling his shoulder just as the impact came. He somersaulted once, came up in a crouch, and crab-walked into the undergrowth.
He sat still for half a minute to catch his breath, then keyed his SVT and said, “I’m in.”
Grimsdottir replied, “In one piece?”
“Oh, Grim, that hurts.”
“Status?”
“Clean.”
As did all special operations troops, Splinter Cells used a mixture of standardized radio protocol and a language all their own to communicate. In this case,
“I’ve updated your OPSAT,” Grimsdottir said. “Got some tighter terrain imagery of your next waypoint. Exactly how much money does this guy have?”
Fisher didn’t know, and he didn’t care. If Aldric Legard wanted his own private indoor/outdoor white-water kayak course, so be it. Fisher was only too happy to use the indulgence to his own advantage.
“Heading to waypoint two,” Fisher said.
10
With no 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.
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.
After an 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:
He waited for the next dog to make his orbit near Fisher’s tree, then climbed down and started moving.
In Grimsdottir’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
