obscured her figure.
After a while I saw her climb into her bed and heard it creak. There were no more noises. I turned off the goggles and laid them on my desk.
Who was Elizabeth Conner?
Finally I stowed the toys in the backpack and got dressed for the evening.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The night was cold, almost freezing. I was sitting in a car with Willie the Wire examining Rodet’s chateau through the night vision goggles. I couldn’t see any people on either the ambient light or infrared setting.
“It’s three o’clock,” Willie said. “How long you gonna wait?”
“I don’t know. I wish I had a few more nights to scope out this place.”
The night vision goggles were amazing. Even though evergreens and branches obscured much of the lawn, I could see a dog wandering along, stopping, moving at random, then lifting a leg on something. Actually I could see his thermal image, which is almost the same thing.
As we sat there Willie had been regaling me with his romantic adventures. “Fella I know gave me some of those four-hour peter pills,” he informed me now. “I took one last night.”
“Four hours?”
“You know, the ones they advertise on TV. You get a hard-on that lasts more than four hours, you gotta go see a doctor.”
“Talk about a great advertising campaign!”
“I don’t know how the doc gets it down. Don’t want to find out, neither.”
“Gives you a different perspective on technical progress, doesn’t it?”
“We’re marchin’ on to the happy ever after.”
The dog was probably going to spend the night outside. No sense waiting. I just hoped he was alone. “Okay, give me the backpack.”
Willie dug it out from behind the passenger seat. I took off the goggles and looked it over. I had packed it, but I wanted to check where everything was one more time. I was going to have to locate most of this stuff by feel.
Inside the pack were two small two-way radios, each built into a headset that contained an earpiece for the wearer’s right ear and a small boom mike that stuck out a couple of inches. I turned them both on, then handed one to Willie. As we put them on, I heard him say, “You get caught in there, I’ll send you a card every year on your birthday.”
“You don’t even know when my birthday is,” I replied, and heard my own voice in my ear.
“The Fourth of July, then.”
“You have the grenade?”
“The gonad cooker? Yeah, but I’m thinking about throwing it.”
“Put it in position, right at the base of the pole, then drive off. There’s a sixty-second delay — that’ll be plenty.”
“Why me?” Willie whined. “How come I got elected for this?”
“I knew you could do it. But with fried gonads and a petrified dick, you’re going to be in a hell of a shape when you get home.”
I had put tape over the switch that activated the car’s interior dome light when the passenger door was opened, so the light stayed off when I opened it.
I checked my watch. Eight minutes after three. “One hour from now. Right here.”
“I’ll be here.”
I closed the door and walked away. Willie got the car under way. It was about a mile to the pole with the transformer on it.
The lane along the fence was deserted. There hadn’t been a car in two hours. The temperature was in the midthirties, and there was a breeze blowing. My black jacket, pullover wool cap, and gloves felt good. As I walked I got a Snickers bar out of my jacket pocket and stripped off the wrapper. The wrapper I put back in my pocket. I swung my arms to get the blood circulating.
The dog had scented or heard me. He was behind the brush, but with the goggles, I could see his thermal image, which appeared as a shape, with the hotter spots more intense. His tail was almost a shadow, yet his tongue was quite prominent. He was silent, paralleling the fence.
I came to the spot I wanted, where a tree limb had come down on the barbed wire that topped the chain-link fence. This was where I would cross.
The dog was over there, pointed right at me, waiting, not even growling. He was big, at least fifty pounds. And oh, yes, this one was well trained, waiting silently there in the darkness in the hope I would cross that fence and he could have the pleasure of tearing my throat out.
I toggled the goggles from the thermal to the night vision setting. It took a few seconds for an image to appear. Now the yard and trees and shrubs glowed with a greenish light. I could see everything except the dog, which was behind a clump of bushes. I moved along another ten feet or so to a gap in the dark limbs. The lights of the house glowed like headlights in the goggles. I found myself squinting. I tossed the candy bar over the fence. I saw and heard it hit a tree branch, then drop in the fallen leaves that coated the ground.
Here came the dog. Now he was in view. I watched him sniffing that candy bar. I was pretty sure he would eat it. No doubt he was trained to avoid raw meat, the logical bait. Never saw a dog yet that didn’t like Snickers bars.
He looked like he was eating. His head was down.
I was waiting for him to lie down when I heard a distant pop, like a backfire, and all the lights in the chateau went out. The place became instantly dark, lit only by outside ambient light. Willie had popped the electromagnetic grenade, which emitted one short, intense pulse of energy. That pulse tripped the circuit breaker in the transformer.
The dog moved a little, walking slowly, then stumbled, tried to rise, and lay still.
The drug should keep him down for an hour or so, if he ate the whole bar. I could only hope he did.
I switched the goggles to infrared, scanned carefully, then went up the fence with my hands, grabbed the limb and scrambled across. I checked the dog, which hadn’t moved. Then I dropped to the ground.
Silence.
After one last scan on infrared, I switched the goggles back to night vision. The dog lay under a tree. I pulled him over under a bush, just in case someone came looking. Then I jogged across the lawn for the house.
Approaching the house, I found a tree and got behind it. Now I shifted the goggles back to infrared. The walls of the house were cool. I played with the control knobs, adjusting the setting. I wanted to see people inside, if there were any to see. The insulation of a building’s exterior walls would interfere with infrared transmissions, a fact the user had to understand and work with.
Still, the goggles were magic. The insulated interior hot-water pipes became visible as fixed lines. I saw the glow of the kitchen: The stove still retained a detectable amount of heat even though it had probably been off for hours.
Someone was moving around inside on the first floor. I could see the human figure walking … going down a set of stairs — to the basement, probably, to check the circuit breakers or fuses.
There was another figure, faint, apparently in a room on the far side of the house. It was sitting. I stared and reached for the goggle controls. Oh, he or she was putting on shoes. Or boots. There was no time to waste.
The porch had a roof. I trotted over, found the balcony, leaped to the rail and pulled myself to the roof. Almost lost the goggles. I paused to readjust them and tighten the straps.
Once I reached the side of the house above the porch I realized that the house was built of cut stone. There was probably little or no insulation in the walls. This shack was a couple of hundred years old, at least.
There was a window overlooking the roof, and a peek through it revealed no heat sources in the room. Which was good. I didn’t want someone wrapped in a comforter to start screaming when I made my entrance.
