As a man of action, I leave something to be desired. This had been a long and eventful day, but I hadn’t yet blown up anything or busted anyone in the chops. If I had been James Bond, I would have killed at least two by now and blown up at least one thing, and if I had been Jack Reacher, I would have left a trail of blood and mayhem more than three hundred miles long. At least I was alive, so there remained a chance that I could find something to blow up before the night was done.
Twenty-four
BECAUSE THE RANCH-STYLE GATE DIDN’T CONNECT TO a fence, its only purpose was to prevent unauthorized vehicles from entering the lane. A call box atop a steel post provided communication with the house, but it was strictly an audio link, with no camera attached.
The simple nature of the barrier and the lack of a posted guard might mean that whoever lived here didn’t feel the need for more than minimal security. That would seem to argue that this wasn’t a place where seventeen kidnapped children were being held to be killed for sport or art, or whatever.
On the other hand, the lack of security might be only apparent, not real. At this entry point, these people could have chosen not to draw attention to themselves with more security than their neighbors thought necessary, but could have prepared some unpleasant surprises for any intruder who dared to venture deeper into the property on foot.
As I stepped around the gate and entered the lane, I plucked a small canister from one of the Mace holders on my utility belt. Mrs. Fischer had specified not chemical Mace but instead a pressure-stream sedative, which was a highly classified military item supposedly not available to civilians—but which in fact was evidently as available as a can of Coca-Cola. In the limo, she had told me that the stream had a range of fifteen to twenty feet. If the stream splattered the mouth and nose and eyes of the target, he would drop before reaching me. Generally, he would remain unconscious for between one and two hours, depending on the amount of the drug absorbed, which was even a more effective sedative than watching a congressional debate on C-SPAN. Each of my two canisters contained ten shots of a two-second duration, but Mrs. Fischer suggested that I not trust it to provide more than eight.
Every once in a while, not often enough, you see a story on the TV news about some young mugger or home invader having drawn down on an eighty-year-old lady only to discover that she was trained in martial arts and armed with a concealed pistol, whereupon she whupped his butt and taught him something about Jesus, in the tradition of Tyler Perry in drag as Madea. I figured that it would be a mistake for an entire crew of young muggers to draw down on Mrs. Fischer, and I felt comfortable leaving her alone in the limousine.
Tall pines crowded along both sides of the lane. Their boughs, which began about twelve feet up their trunks, overhung the pavement. This tunnel, green in daylight but black now, could have harbored a score of assassins crouched and watchful, but animal instinct told me Not here, not yet.
As the sole alternative to a direct approach, I could have made my way through the woods, parallel to the lane. Under that canopy of branches, during the day, too little sunlight penetrated to grow much brush, and at this altitude the air was at the moment too cold for even the most motivated, fry-cook-hating snakes to be licking their fangs in anticipation of a bite. But a little brush could make a lot of noise if I blundered blindly through it, and in the dark a low-hanging branch might knock me flat or put out an eye.
After about fifty yards, the driveway arced gradually to the left, and as I fully rounded the bend, I saw light ahead, maybe a hundred yards farther. This section of the pine passageway reminded me of the tunnel reported by people who go through a near-death experience, the long dark tunnel with the welcoming light at the end, except that the radiance ahead of me looked about as welcoming as the glow of a crematorium.
There seemed to be a big house out there, a football field away, with lights in a number of its windows. But there were also points of flame, like great torches, that for some reason gave me the peculiar feeling that what lay ahead of me was less a modern residence than a medieval village.
Nearing the end of the driveway, I finally eased into the woods on the right. I cautiously proceeded the final twenty feet to the point at which the trees gave way to mown grass. Sheltering under an immense pine, I surveyed all that lay before me.
The most surprising element of the scene was the lake. On this moonless and starless night, I might not have recognized it for what it was if the dancing flames of the torches had not been reflected in the water near the shore. Otherwise the placid surface lay ink-black, not even vaguely mirroring the faint blush of distant Vegas neon that colored the low cloud cover. The painted sky provided barely enough contrast to silhouette the rising land and trees that embraced the water, but I could see enough to estimate that the lake must have been between seven and twelve acres, not vast but larger than a pond. Not a single point of light glimmered along the farther reaches of its shoreline, which I took to mean that the lake and all the land immediately surrounding it were part of this property.