The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,223

as he could. With his other foot, he pressed the toe of his boot into one of the links, and grabbed onto the fence with both hands. Moving hands and feet in tandem, he swiftly propelled himself toward the top of the fence, which bristled with sharp, pointed spikes. The way to get over, Janson knew, was to overshoot it, keeping his center of gravity above the fence top before he climbed over: to achieve this, he imagined that the fence was a foot or so taller than it actually was, and flung himself over that imaginary point. Maneuvering upside down, briefly, he placed all his fingers into one of the diamonds of the chain links. Then he torqued his body over the fence, pivoting on his clawlike grip. With a flip-twist, Janson righted himself and tumbled to the grass.

There was something soft beneath him as he landed. The rag doll. Janson tossed it back over the fence; the dog gently picked it up with his mouth and crept away somewhere behind the tree line.

A few moments later, he heard the motorized sound of the camera hood repositioning itself, and once again the halogen floodlights blazed.

Was the camera aimed at him? Had he unwittingly tripped some other alarm system?

Janson knew that no buried-cable pressure sensor could be used within fifteen feet of a chain-link fence; the ordinary wind sway of such a large metallic object would produce too great a perturbation in the electromagnetic detection field.

He flattened himself on the ground, his heart thudding slowly. In the dark, his black clothing was protective. Against the powerful beams of light, however, it might help pick him out from the pale gravel and bright green grass. As his eyes began to adjust to the spill of light, he realized that he was not its target. From the play of shadows, it seemed clear that it was aimed, once more, at the segment of fence he had already surmounted. The guards were double-checking the integrity of the barricade before reactivating the segment. Four seconds later, the blazing light was extinguished, and the darkness returned, along with a sense of relief. Faintly blinking blue diodes indicated that the vibration sensors were back online.

Now Janson made his way toward the stanchions. He looked at their configuration once more and felt disheartened. He recognized the model, and knew it was a state-of-the-art microwave protection system. Mounted on each sturdy pole beneath an aluminum hood was a dielectric transmitter and a receiver; a 15 GHz signal was set to one of several selectable AM signal patterns. The system could analyze the signature of any interference - inferring size, density, and speed - and feed it into the multiplex communications modules of the system's central net.

The bistatic sensors were staggered, as he had noticed earlier, so that the beams doubled over each other. You could not make use of one of the stanchions to climb over the flux, because the flux was doubled where the stanchions stood: climbing over one field, you would merely land in the middle of the second field.

Janson looked back to the barricade fence. If he triggered the microwave barrier - and there was an excellent chance that he would - he would have to scramble over the fence before the guards appeared and shooting began. And he would be moving in the glare of the quadruple halogen flood, a device that not only illuminated an intruder sharply for the camera but also, by its very brightness, would tend to blind and so immobilize him. If retreat were necessary, he would retreat: but it would be only a little less risky than proceeding.

Janson unzipped his knapsack and removed the police radar detector. It was a Phantom II, a high-end model meant for motorists who liked to speed and didn't like speeding tickets. What made it so effective was that it was both a detector and a jammer, aiming to make a motorist's car "invisible" to speed-detecting equipment. It worked by detecting the signal and bouncing it back toward the radar gun. Janson had removed its plastic casing, shortened the nub of its antenna, and installed an additional capacitor, thus shifting its radio-frequency spectrum to the microwave bandwidth. Now he used duct tape to fasten the device near the end of the long telescoping steel rod. If it worked as he hoped, he would be able to exploit an inherent design feature of all outdoor security systems: the necessary tolerance for wildlife and weather. A