Chapter 22

The man went over his plans and notes again.  The organization provided him with plans for the house and yard.  It wasn’t a house and yard.  It looked like a mansion on an estate.  It was mostly a fortress. He felt sick thinking about how hard it was going to be to get into the place.  He thought about following the man and taking him down in a mugging.  There were too many chances for people with iPhones to take video.

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The man walked from one end of his room to the other and back.  He walked four paces and turned and back four paces and turned.  He did not bother to hide his limp, relaxing for a minute.  If he got lazy and limped outside the apartment it might be remembered.  Nothing about him could be remembered.  He sat back down and compared the plans the organization had given him to the plans he obtained from the city.  The plans matched.

The women’s apartment in the City had relied on a great alarm system, security cameras, and great locks.  The estate relied on an electrified fence as its first line of defense. No, that wasn’t right. The first line of defense was the community of Woodside itself, with its gates, walls, and security patrols. Security cameras and motion detectors covered the grounds.  He glanced down at the two sets of identical plans.  Wait! There was a note on the plans from the city.  It was something about a drainage problem.  There was a permit for a culvert with a French drain to help the run-off percolate into the rocky soil.  When they installed the drain they had to move the wall.

The man picked up a day labor job with a landscape contractor. He also worked as a waiter at a catered outdoor party. He had taken as many pictures of the walls and trees as he could.  He flipped quickly through the pictures.  Yes!  He would drive by and double-check, but it looked like a small chance to get in.  Praise the Lord.

His shoulders slumped.  Running around the left, right, and back of the house was a dog run.  Inside the dog run was a pair of cattle dogs.  His longest stretch on the outside had been as a shepherd.  The cattle dogs he worked with were smarter than a lot of men he’d worked alongside who earned good wages.  Those dogs treated him better than any people he had ever known.  The man thought the dogs might be an alien race.  They had good enough night vision to see the coyotes and were badass enough to run off a pack of them.

The dogs were brave. They would die before they let anything hurt the herd.  These people needed to be stopped, but he knew he couldn’t kill the dogs.  The Church said dogs had no souls.  He would never question the Church on important matters.  On this he was not so sure.  He would find a way in without killing the dogs.  He decided he would not tell his handler of his decision about the dogs.  The man needed at least one secret.  But, how would he get around the dogs?

The dogs had a great sense of smell to go with their hearing and vision.  The man would have to go in early in the morning.  There was no way to affect their hearing without hurting or killing the dogs.  It was the same with their vision or sense of smell. A thought crawled quickly across his mind like one of the cockroaches he kept as a pet while he was in solitary at Q.  When he tried to catch it, it ran away.

The man was so tired.  The cocktail of drugs was not keeping the virus away.  Most of the drugs were experimental, not available anywhere except to him and, he guessed, a few others like him.  He had to stay alive and strong a little while longer.  These people were evil and needed to be stopped and the Church would help him do it.  The thought crawled quickly back across his mind.  He would have to visit a veterinarian.