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.

HEslept 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

HADhe 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. Teenagers, he thought. Two boys and two girls. As the group drew even with his hiding place, it turned onto a smaller trail and stopped at a picnic site. A small fire crackled to life. Fisher could see the four of them sitting on fallen logs around the flickering light. Clearly they wouldn't be moving on anytime soon.

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 radio waves. Fisher zoomed in and switched to night vision, then infrared. The former showed no signs of cameras or directional microphones; they were perfect replicas of weatherworn bricks. Infrared, however, showed that each third brick was warmer than its neighbors, which suggested it was being fed electricity. So: not visual, not auditory. Pressure or tremble,Fisher thought. If something of roughly human weight climbed the wall, the faux bricks would send a signal--probably to a monitoring center in the house.

He had two options. He could make his way to the front of the property, to the chest-high wall, but that would do him little good if it were similarly monitored. He'd clear the wall more quickly, but an intrusion-detection signal would nevertheless be sent. He would make his penetration here, he decided. If nothing else, it would establish the quality of guards with which he was dealing.

Fisher backtracked, found a jumble of fallen logs about fifty feet from the wall, and crouched down. Ernsdorff's security experts had done something else right: They'd trimmed the nearby oak trees so no branch thicker than a thumb extended over the wall. There'd be no Tarzan-style penetration this time--unless he wanted to climb a hundred feet, tightrope walk thirty or more feet, then rappel back down. That, he decided, would be plan B.

At least the weather was cooperating. Shortly after he'd left his campsite the wind had begun to pick up, and now it was gusting to thirty miles per hour and driving a light rain before it. Heavy wind blew down branches, and rain made otherwise diligent guards lackadaisical.

Fisher curled himself into a kneeling firing position, braced the SC-20 on a log, laid his cheek against the stock, and zoomed in on the swaying canopy far above. He picked and rejected a number of candidate branches before finding the one he wanted. He fired. A miss. He took aim, trying to compensate for the branch's movement, looking for a pattern. . . . Pop. As he'd intended, his second shot struck the branch just off center, so it didn't part cleanly but tore free, leaving behind streamers of bark. The branch plummeted, crashing wetly through the canopy before slamming into the top of the brick wall. Fisher started the timer on his watch. Now he moved the SC-20's selector to STICKY CAM and swung the barrel around, zooming in on a bridge connecting a pair of tree houses on the other side of the wall. With a muffled thwump, the camera sailed over the wall and affixed itself to the bridge. Using the OPSAT, Fisher tested the cam, panning and zooming until satisfied it was operational. He aimed it in the direction of the main house and set it to SLOW AUTOPAN.