a twenty-minute 360-degree reconnaissance of the property, exhausting himself as he did so. Then he’d settled into this hide to scan the home on the hill from the rear.
This hide was some hundred feet below the building, but he was able to make out a portion of the large, wraparound, tile-floored veranda on the second level, and the big windows there, and he realized there were a lot of good ways to access the interior of the property undetected.
But he wouldn’t be using any of them, because he was worried that climbing the foliage-covered gradient would be too much for him in his weakened state, especially because he needed to be ready for anything once inside the building.
He wiped a heavy sheen of sweat from his brow. San Antonio de Los Altos sat at a mile in elevation, so the air was cool, but Court’s forehead poured perspiration and his hairline ejected thick steam.
The evening might have been mild, but his infection raged inside him.
Court wasn’t in the mood for this shit. He was no fool, he knew he was sick, and his shoulder wound felt like he’d had surgery that morning instead of the previous week. He could function, he could move quickly in short bursts if he absolutely had to, but it was like he was operating underwater.
After another minute in his hide evaluating his options, Court decided his best course of action would be to walk around to the front of the residence, head up the steep winding driveway, and enter through the front door.
Not his regular modus operandi; in fact, it was roughly the opposite of how he liked to do business. Stealth was his specialty. Forgoing stealth today was a necessity; it was not a preference.
He rose and moved through thick brush, almost tripping over tufted vines, and then made his way back out onto the winding street. He walked around towards the driveway to Drummond’s house, his eyes peering at the scene ahead through a small night vision monocular because there were no streetlights to light the way.
Drummond was thought to have security, and Court certainly wasn’t looking to get into anything hand-to-hand tonight. This meant that, if it came down to it, he’d be reaching for a gun. He had two choices on him: a .22 caliber suppressed Walther pistol snapped into a shoulder holster under his left armpit, and a larger Glock 19 that he carried on his hip, which, while also suppressed, was still a hell of a lot louder than the .22.
Hanley had ordered Court to make certain his operation went off quietly and cleanly. Well, Court said to himself, I might be able to give him quiet. But this wasn’t going to be clean, at all.
Clean was too much effort.
At the foot of the drive, he lowered himself to his kneepads and put his eye back in the thermal monocular. Scanning the scene ahead, he registered a lone man, obviously part of the protection force, sitting on a chair with his feet on a small table on the whitewashed stone front porch.
A continued scan showed no one else around, although Court was certain he’d run into others before long.
One dude asleep at the front? That can’t be it, can it?
Court waited a minute more, searching for any heat signatures and listening through his hearing enhancers for any threat. He heard nothing alarming other than a few bats racing by in the sky, and he saw nothing through his glass save the thermal register of the guard and a single, small monkey, high in an araguaney tree near the home.
He rose and began climbing the steep driveway.
Court had spent two decades learning how to walk silently as if his life depended on it, because his life had actually depended on it. He made his way into the grasses to the side of the drive, avoiding the gravel, moving slowly with no light to guide him, measuring his footfalls as he neared the Colonial mansion.
Looking through his thermal as he climbed, he saw that the man at the front door hadn’t moved at all. Court pocketed the device because it did give off a small amount of light, and then he crept forward, slowly and carefully.
When he was just twenty yards from the sentry in the chair, he thought he detected the faint sounds of classical music coming from the open second-story windows of the house ahead. This surprised him—it was past two a.m., after all—but he told himself he’d use