On his way toward the mission quadrangle, Kuhl had passed some branching roads that ran toward a gated cantonment and noticed additional barricaded checkpoints posted with signs reading FPCON LEVEL ALPHA. These indicated an elevated alert for terrorist activity that had been implemented as a rule at all military installations in the United States after the strike on New York City a few years before—a step up from FPCON Normal, but significantly below the Bravo, Charlie, and Delta force protection levels exercised whenever specific threat warnings were issued by federal authorities. Kuhl would not have chanced his trip if any of the higher stages of alert had been in current effect, but his men had determined otherwise, and the mission grounds had been a considerable lure to him—the prospect of an easy penetration spicing the venture with a provocative element of scorn.

It was also a preparatory drill of sorts. The moment approached when Kuhl would have to plunge deeper into hiding than at any previous time in his mercenary existence. Knowing he faced a manhunt of long duration and unprecedented intensity, he had wanted to test his reflexes for survival and subterfuge—smooth any hitches that may have developed over his latent period—in a climate of heightened but nonurgent scrutiny.

More than two hundred years after its founding, a small order of Franciscans still occupied the mission. While some of them chose to live in meditative solitude, others worked in its gift shop and offered guided tours of its grounds on a regular schedule. Kuhl was mostly able to avoid the organized tour groups and prowl the compound alone, stopping to see its olive gardens, its chapel, its cloistered tile-roofed archways, its centuries-old aqueducts and gristmill. Near the end of his wanderings he had found himself in a chamber with simple forms of musical notation painted on the walls. There he studied the instruments on display: a native American hand drum, a violin and cello, a baroque lute and lyre. One wall of the room was covered with a diagram of a huge upraised hand, the front of each finger marked with numbers and Spanish calligraphy. This had caught Kuhl’s attention like a barbed hook, and he had stood taking photographs of the diagram, thinking it would be a fine reference for the construction of a possible scale replica, should he ever choose to resume that pursuit.

As Kuhl stood with his eye to the lens, one of the tonsured monks had noticed him from the outer hall and paused in the entryway.

“The chart you see shows the hand signals our fraternal predecessors used to use to teach their Indian converts Western scales,” he said. “As new believers, they were taught not only to petition the Lord with their prayers, but exalt him with music.”

Kuhl had turned toward the entrance and stared coldly at him over his lowered camera.