The truly magical part was the camouflage system. The outer Kevlar layer was impregnated with a substance code-named Cygnus, after the first officially identified black hole. The liquid polymer fiber was matte-black and micro-roughened so as to trap and diffuse--if only for a fraction of a second--light particles. It wasn't invisibility per se, but Fisher had found that shadows seemed much deeper while he was wearing the tac suit. Completing the camouflage was the use of disruptive patterning through the odd placement of his pouches and pockets, all of which were of different sizes and shapes. In low-light conditions, the human eye was drawn to movement, color difference, and geometric form. Of the three, form was the most challenging problem, but by rearranging and resizing the pouches, the outline of the body becomes fuzzy.

He reached up and touched a button on his face mask. Two halogen lights, one built into each side of his mask, came to life, emitting a pair of pencil-thin red beams. As designed, they converged directly ahead of him, at arm's reach. He lifted the OPSAT to his face and studied the screen. His course to the opposite shore, marked as a green parabolic line, took into account the river's current and would, barring any miscalculation, bring him to the surface within ten feet of the outer stone wall of Legard's estate.

He slipped on his webbed swimming gloves and started swimming.

9

WHENthe parabolic course line on the OPSAT screen shortened to a few millimeters, Fisher turned off his mask lamp, stopped stroking, and let his momentum carry him forward. He let his arms hang down until he felt his fingertips scraping the soft mud bottom. He jammed his fingertips into the muck until he had purchase, pulled himself down until his belly touched the mud, then began easing himself forward, inch by inch, until the upper rim of his face mask broke the surface. He waited a moment for the water to drain away from the glass, then removed the rebreather and looked around.

He froze.

Standing on the bank, not five feet before him, was a figure, silhouetted by moonlight. Fisher's breath caught in his throat. Slowly the man raised his arm up across his body, then stopped. The orange tip of a cigarette glowed to life, then went dark. Fisher scanned the man's outline until he found what he was looking for: Jutting from shadows at the man's right hip was the stubbed nose and raised triangular sight of a compact submachine gun--a Heckler & Koch SL8-6, by the looks of it. The SL8-6 was the civilian version of the German army's G36 assault rifle.

The guard's presence here answered one of Fisher's questions; Grim's research into Legard's home had turned up the presence of twelve to fifteen full-time, live-in guards, but what she couldn't tell was how far their patrols went. Now Fisher knew their patrols extended beyond the walls to the rest of Legard's estate.

Fisher remained still, barely breathing, until the guard finally finished his smoke break. He tossed the cigarette butt into the water, where it hissed out, then turned and started back up the tree-lined embankment toward the wall.

Fisher counted another sixty seconds in his head and then, with exaggerated slowness, dipped his face back beneath the surface, removed his mask, and clipped it to his harness. From a pouch on his chest, he withdrew his op goggles and settled them over his head. He pressed a button, and goggles powered up, emitting a barely perceptible whirring hum followed by a soft click that told him they were fully operational. He flipped to NV, or night vision, and the darkness turned to a field of gray green before his eyes. Instead of simply clumps of indistinguishable foliage, he could make out individual shrubs, could even count leaves on the end of a nearby branch.

Gotta love technology,Fisher thought. But only to a point.He was and always would be, old-school. Gizmos and gadgets were useful, but without trained hands and experienced brains to apply them, they were worthless. There was no substitute for eyeballs and boots on the ground.

He flipped the goggles through the other two available modes: infrared, or IR, for thermal; and EM, or electromagnetic, for electrical signals that could range from a radio beacon to invisible electrical barriers. He paused in each mode, scanning the ground before and around him, then up the embankment to the wall. He saw nothing.

He looked left, downstream, then right, upstream. About a hundred yards up the shore, he could see Legard's private dock, a canopy-covered structure that jutted thirty feet into the river. Tied to slips on either side of the dock were four blue-on-white Baja 26 Outlaw speedboats with what looked like MerCruiser engines--600 horsepower, Fisher guessed. Each boat also came with its own radar antenna jutting from the stern air foil.

He belly-crawled from the mud and into the tall grass along the shore until he reached heavier foliage, where he rose to his knees. Weapons check. His loadout for this mission was standard: a 5.72mm/anesthetic dart pistol with a twenty-round magazine and muzzle noise/flash suppressor; fragmentation and disruption grenades; a genuine Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife; and finally the 5.56mm SC-20K AR assault rifle, another gift from DARPA.

The SC-20, chambered for a 5.56mm bullpup round, was a marvel of versatility and compactness. Equipped with a flash/sound suppresser with a 97 percent effective acoustic dampener, when fired, the SC-20 emitted a sound no louder than a tennis ball being thrown into a down pillow. What truly made the SC-20 special, however, was its modular design. With its subbarrel-mounted launcher, Fisher had access to a variety of weapons and sensors including ring air foil projectiles, adhesive cameras and microphones, and shock projectiles--each appropriately nicknamed the Sticky Cam, the Sticky Ear, and the Sticky Shocker--and gas grenades of varying potency.

All told, Fisher's gear, which weighed over forty pounds, allowed him to see, hear, move, kill, and incapacitate better than any covert soldier on the planet.

Now he went through each item, checking its operation, securing pouches, and tightening harness points until satisfied all was in order. He took one more scan of the surrounding forest, then rose to a crouch and sprinted toward the wall.

He stopped and dropped to a crouch beneath the drooping boughs of a hemlock tree. Ten feet ahead lay the wall, a patchwork of mortared black, gray, and brown fieldstone. The top of the wall, ten feet from the ground, was rounded and topped with jagged triangles of clear glass, like staggered rows of sharks' teeth glinting in the moonlight. It was well-designed, Fisher had to admit. There were neither jutting edges for handholds nor crevices for grapnel points.

Would a man like Legard, having the enemies he'd made to reach the top, be satisfied with just a ten-foot, shard-topped wall? Fisher doubted it. As an old SEAL buddy used to say, "Better safe than sorry anddead."

Fisher sidestepped behind the trunk, then grabbed the lowermost limb above his head, swung his left leg up, hooked his heel on the limb, and pulled his body up. In a crouch, he sidestepped down the limb until he could see the top of the wall through the leaves. He switched his goggles to EM mode. The image before his eyes was a swirling mass of barely perceptible dark blue amoeba-like shapes and wispy gray lines. Fisher scanned the top of the wall.

Reading EM was more an art than a science, much like a doctor deciphering an X-ray or ultrasound image. The modern world was a sea of electromagnetic pulses: power lines, telephone and television cables, satellite Internet transmissions, and cell phone signals. Over time, Fisher had mastered the art, but still it took him a full thirty seconds to spot what he was looking for.