The Face

slate. The roof was not steeply pitched, and he descended it with ease.
        At the front of the building, which was as large as an upscale suburban house, a loggia was covered by a sturdy redwood trellis entwined for decades by a trumpet vine. He jumped from the roof onto the trellis.
        [542] From the trellis, he leaped to the lawn, allowed his knees to buckle as would a parachutist, fell, rolled, and sprang to his feet.
        He felt like Vin Diesel.
        After shrugging out of his backpack, he withdrew from it a gas mask. He tossed the pack aside and put on the mask.
        The central entrance to the groundskeeper’s building was not locked. He stepped into a service foyer.
        Just like the blueprints.
        To his right: a door into a gardening-supplies storeroom large enough also to garage the three riding lawnmowers as well as the two electric carts with which Yorn and his day crew moved fertilizer and other materials around the immense grounds.
        To his left: a door to Yorn’s spacious office, another door to the bathroom used by gardeners.
        Directly ahead were stairs to the second floor.
        Upstairs, Corky found the two evening-shift guards unconscious in the main monitoring room. One sprawled on the floor, and the other slumped in a chair in front of a bank of video monitors.
        They would be profoundly unconscious for between sixty to eighty minutes. That was plenty of time for Corky to do his job and be gone.
        He pulled up a chair in front of a computer. Neither the power supply nor the estate-specific networking arrangements had been affected by the careful severance of outgoing and incoming phone service.
        In his gas mask, his breathing sounded like that of Darth Vader.
        At the start of the shift, as always, one of the guards had earlier accessed the security system with a personal password. To Corky, the elaborate status display on the screen revealed, among many other things, that the house-perimeter alarm had been activated, making it impossible to enter Palazzo Rospo by window or door without triggering sirens.
        According to Ned Hokenberry, the three-eyed freak-now the [543] two-eyed freak, now the dead two-eyed freak-the perimeter alarm usually wasn’t engaged until eleven o’clock or even midnight. This evening they had closed up early.
        Corky wondered why.
        Perhaps they had been spooked by certain black boxes and the contents thereof.
        Delighted to have made them uneasy and yet still have slipped this far past their defenses, Corky began to sing the Grinch’s theme from The Grinch Who Stole Christmas . The gas mask lent the tune a wonderfully spooky, even savage quality.
        Mick Sachatone, poor dead Mick in his Bart Simpson pajamas, had hacked the Manheim security system by linking to it via the computer of the off-site armed-response company that maintained a 24/7 line to this room. He’d given Corky some rudimentary instruction in its operation.
        First, Corky checked the status of the two panic rooms in the mansion. Neither was in use.
        Using the computer, he put the two panic rooms in siege mode, engaging their locks by remote. They could no longer be opened using their hidden on-site lock releases. No one could take refuge in them.
        The house-perimeter alarm could be armed or disarmed simply by selecting from a YES-NO option. Currently the YES was lit on the screen. Corky used the mouse to click the NO.
        Now, with a door key, he could enter Palazzo Rospo as though it were his own sweet home. Keys dangled from the belt of each sleeping guard. He unclipped one set, jingled them, and smiled.
        When he picked up a phone, he heard no dial tone. He tried one of the guard’s cell phones. It didn’t function. Reliable Mick.
        Leaving the guards to their dreams, Corky descended the stairs and returned to the loggia under the trellis and the trumpet vine. He stripped off the gas mask and threw it away.
        Through a screen of trees and darkling rain, the great house could be seen perhaps two hundred yards to the north. With only Ethan [544] Truman and the boy in residence, not many windows were lighted, yet the mansion nonetheless reminded Corky of an enormous luxury liner making way on a night sea. And he was the iceberg.
        He unzipped the deepest pocket on his storm suit and withdrew the Glock that previously he had fitted with