Fisher spent two hours exploring the lake, using his watch’s timer function, his camera, and the Vespa’s odometer to stake out angles and distances he would use that night. Aside from a chest-high, rough-hewn brick wall running along the perimeter of the grounds and a wrought-iron driveway gate set on motorized rollers, he saw no physical security measures. The trees were thick enough, however, that his Canon’s zoom lens could penetrate only a few hundred yards into the grounds; if there were guards, dogs, or more fencing, they were closer to the house itself. These were bridges he would cross when or if they arose.
Shortly before 11:00 A.M. Fisher saw a white panel van come down the driveway through the trees and stop at the gate, which rolled back to let the van pass. As it turned south, heading back toward Vianden, Fisher zoomed in and snapped a dozen pictures. He called them up on the LCD screen.
On the van’s side in red letters were the words DATA GUARDIANS INC.
He returned to town and, after having lunch at the restaurant next door to the scooter shop, Fisher followed Vima’s directions to Scheuerof, a neighboring village a mile to the north, where he found a family-owned KOA-style campground. It was empty save for a mid-twenties blond couple in red, green, and yellow Rastafarian knit caps, swinging from a pair of canvas chairs suspended from a tree beside their tent. They gave him a wave; he waved back, the brim of his baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. He found a suitable site at the campground’s northernmost boundary. Hemmed in on all sides by thick trees, and accessible by only two footpaths, it lay within a half mile of the bridge Fisher had spotted earlier on Google Earth.
He set up camp — a tent, lawn chair, cooler, and a clothesline from which he hung a few items of clothing — then called Vesa Hytonen’s apartment, got the machine, demanded that “Heinrich” pick up immediately, then cursed, and hung up. Next he used his iPhone to log into the Lycos e-mail account, typed up his query, and saved it as a draft.
While waiting for a response, he went for a hike, using his handheld Garmin 6 °Cx GPS unit to time himself and mark waypoints. From his campsite to the lake it was 1.32 miles — forty minutes at a leisurely pace. He added 30 percent to that figure to account for darkness and another 30 percent to account for potential pursuers. So, roughly two hours and fifteen minutes round trip. He saw only three other hikers, none of them equipped with anything more robust than a lumbar pack. Day travelers. In all likelihood he’d have no company on the trail later.
He checked his watch. Eight hours until nightfall.
He spent the remainder of the afternoon at his campsite, sitting by the fire, eating hot dogs, drinking beer (non-alcoholic to keep a clear head), whittling, and generally behaving like a normal camper until six o’ clock, when he climbed into his tent and closed his eyes. He was awoken ten minutes later by his iPhone’s incoming e-mail chime. It was Vesa:
Data Guardians Inc. (DGI) a privately owned Luxembourg company. Specializes in home networking, information security, and storage. Our mutual friend investigated. According to internal company records, DGI installed IBM System x3350 server two months ago; routinely scheduled maintenance call logged this date. Service- fee schedule suggests special-needs installation. Details, countermeasures, penetration software available no later than 2100 local time via uplink. Remote penetration problematic; physical link required.
Fisher mentally translated Vesa’s message: DGI designed and installed a beefed-up file-storage server for Yannick Ernsdorff. Fisher’s OPSAT would be updated with everything he needed to do the hack, but he had to be plugged into Ernsdorff’s server first.
He slept for five hours, waking shortly after eleven. He strolled to the bathroom/shower shelter at the center of the grounds, then walked back. No one else had checked in during the day. His neighbors, the blond couple, had retired to their tent for the night, and he could see their silhouettes in the yellow glow of a lantern.
Back at the Range Rover, he carried the Pelican case into the tent. He powered up the OPSAT, waited for it to run through its self-diagnostics, then called up the COMMS screen and initiated the uplink. As promised, the update was waiting. He watched the progress bar crawl across the screen until it reached 100 percent, then waited as the OPSAT recycled. He took a moment to review the package, which included a spec sheet and schematic of the IBM System x3350, then read through the hack instructions. Next he called up the map of the area and punched in the latitudes and longitudes he’d recorded throughout the day; they appeared on the OPSAT’s screen as pulsing red pushpins. He tapped the one representing his campsite and the screen zoomed and recentered: WAYPOINT 1 RECORDED. He set the OPSAT to STANDBY. He donned his tac-suit and gear, then returned the case to the Range Rover and locked up. Finally, he scanned the campgrounds with NV and IR and found it still empty, save for his Rastafarian friends, who appeared to be asleep, their prostrate forms coming through in infrared shades of blue, yellow, and red.
Fisher ducked onto the trail and headed out.
10
Had he been operating on a strict schedule, it would have been derailed in the first ten minutes. A hundred yards over the bridge he heard faint voices down the trail. He slipped into the undergrowth and scanned ahead. The NV showed little, so dense were the trees; the IR wasn’t much better, but patience paid off, after thirty seconds of watching, as he caught glimpses of four ghostly rainbow shapes moving through the trees. They were approaching. Fisher switched the IR to standby and huddled down to wait. As the group approached he smelled cigarette smoke and heard giggling.
Moving on flat feet, Fisher backed away from the trail. When he’d put enough distance between himself and the teenagers, he turned back to the east and began picking his way through the trees until he’d looped back to the main trail. Forty minutes later he heard a double beep in his subdermal, indicating he’d reached his final waypoint. He was now within a couple of hundred yards of the western edge of Ernsdorff’s estate. He stopped and did an IR/NV scan and was about to move on when something caught his eye to the right: a too-straight vertical line among the trees. His first thought was a sensor or camera. Keeping his eye on the object, Fisher picked his way closer until he could identify what he was seeing: a diamond-shaped sign atop a fence post. In what he assumed was red lettering on a white background, it stated in Luxembourgish, German, and English: PRIVATE PROPERTY — KEEP OUT.
Either Ernsdorff had claimed a bit more land than he owned or the survey maps and records were mistaken; from what few glimpses Fisher got from Google Earth, the brick wall surrounding the grounds lay three hundred yards ahead. Either way, the sign told him something he’d already suspected: Ernsdorff and/or his security consultants had decided he wasn’t a high-value target, at least for murder or kidnapping. People who are truly concerned about their personal safety don’t try to warn off attackers, but rather they let their security measures handle intruders. Fisher would, of course, be thorough, but it was unlikely Ernsdorff had guards roving the property. If there was security here, it would likely be found inside and in close proximity to the house itself.
Fisher spent the next twenty minutes mapping sign placements, adding digital pushpins to his OPSAT, until he had the western edge identified. Near each sign he had stopped to scan the ground ahead with night vision, infrared, and electromagnetic, and each time he saw nothing bothersome. He continued forward, taking his time, sidestepping twigs and fallen branches, occasionally cycling through the Tridents’ settings until at last the outer wall came into view. Unlike the wall he’d photographed on the lakeside of the property, this one was higher, perhaps six feet, and topped with shards of jagged ceramic embedded in mortar. This was of little concern to Fisher; the shards would barely scratch his RhinoPlate. What concerned him was what he saw when he studied the wall with the Tridents’ EM mode: Every third brick in the row just below the shards was pulsing with energy. The Tridents’ EM wasn’t sophisticated enough to tell him the precise nature of the energy, but experience told him
