of the country. I needed a Verachten signature on the affidavit of complaint-wouldn't proceed without it, as a matter of fact-and so I called old Walther and drove out to get it. The dam broke when Odile got back to Essen. She shouted at me over the telephone, 'My father should not have been disturbed! You will never serve Verachten again!' Oh, she was impossible. I told her as courteously as I could that we never would have served her in the first place had I received the initial request." Taleniekov watched the attorney's face as he spoke; the German was genuinely angry. "Why did you say that?" "Because it's true. I don't like the company-companies. There is a meanness over there." Kassel laughed at himself. "My feeling's probably a hangover from that radical young lawyer you tried to recruit twelve years ago." It is the perceptive instincts of a decent man, thought Vasili. You sense the Matarese, yet you know nothing.
"I have a last request to make of you, my old friendly enemy," said Taleniekov. "Two actually. The first is not to say anything to anyone about our meeting today, or what we found. The second is to describe the location of the Verachten house and whatever you can remember about
The comer of a brick wall loomed into view in the glare of the headlights.
Vasili pressed down on the accelerator of the rented Mercedes, his eyes glancing at the odometer, judging the distance between the start of the wall and iron gate. Five-eighths of a kilometer, nearly 1,800 feet. The tall gate was closed; it was electronically operated, electronically protected.
He came to the end of the wall; it was somewhat shorter in length than its counterpart on the other side of the gate. Beyond there was only the extension of the forest, in the middle of which had been built the Verachten compound. He depressed the pedal and looked for an opening off the road, somewhere he could conceal the Mercedes.
He found it between two trees, the shrubbery dampened down by previous snows. He angled the coupe into the natural cave of greenery, plunging in as far off the road as possible. He turned off the engine, got out, and retraced the car's path, pulling up the shrubbery until he reached the road fifteen feet away. He stood on the shoulder and examined the camouflage; in the darkness, it was sufficient. He started back toward the Verachten wall.
If he could get over it without setting off any alarms, he knew he could reach the house. There was no way to electronically scan a forest; wires and cells were too easily tripped by animals and birds. It was the wall itself that had to be negotiated. He reached it and studied the brick in the flame of his cigarette lighter. There were no devices of any sort. It was an ordinary brick wall, its very ordinariness misleading, and Vasili knew it. There was a tall oak on his right, limbs curling up above the top of the wall, but not extending over it.
He leaped, his hands clawing the bark, his knees vicing the trunk; he scaled up to the first limb, swinging his leg over it, pulling himself up into a sitting position, his back against the tree. He leaned forward and downward, his hands balancing his body on the limb until he was prone, and studied the top of the wall in the dim light. He found what he knew had to be there.
Grooved into the flat surface of the concrete was a crisscrossing network of wire-coated plastic tubing through which air and current flowed. The electricity was of sufficient voltage to inhibit animals from gnawing at the plastic, and the air pressure was calibrated to set off alarms the instant a given amount of weight fell on the tubes. The alarms were undoubtedly received in a scanning room in the compound, where instruments pinpointed the place of penetration. Taleniekov knew the system was practically fail-safe; if one strand was shorted out, there were five or six others to back it up, and the pressure of a knife across the wire coating would be enough to set off the alarm.
But practically fail-safe was not totally fail-safe. Fire. Melting the plastic and releasing the air without the pressure of a blade. The only alarm set off in this way was that of malfunction; the trace would begin where the system originated, which had to be much nearer the house.