The driveway passed the gatekeeper’s house, which meant that it wasn’t the most advantageous entry point for a home invasion. Far better to avoid that obstacle and come in from other directions. The cliff was an obstacle, but had advantages for the attacker, height and observational view. If it were me, I’d put someone up there to spot and snipe. Then two clean attack vectors. One corridor from the garden gate, where the path to the river began. Second over the stone wall from the road. Just across from the big house. Then I visualized, played it out like a video game in my mind.

I may have fallen asleep, or maybe not. One moment I was sitting there thinking, and in the next moment something had changed. It was the night creatures. They had stopped again, but it wasn’t me who had stopped them. There was something else out there. I stayed like that, leaned up against the tree, until I heard a faint noise from down below, toward the driveway. Then I stood up nice and slow, careful not to move my feet.

I shifted between trees, aware and heedful to keep an obstacle between myself and the source of the noise. Which was coming more often. Crunching and scraping. Someone was moving out there. For all I knew there was a team, dressed in black, equipped with night vision gear and noise suppressed weapons, keeping radio silence and creeping through the trees.

I could hear movement, so I figured they didn’t know I was there yet. I had the Beretta out and in hand.

I crept between trees, one stride at a time. Hug the tree, wait and listen. I heard two distinct footsteps coming from down near the gatekeeper’s house. Couldn’t have been anything else. I listened hard, another step. I heard no more than one or two people, maybe coming up from the driveway. I decided to flank them and come in from the rear. I waited to hear another step, then I got low and moved laterally and slightly downhill. Five paces, each pace measured to land with a tree between myself and the intruders.

I was slightly behind them and it was time to look. I moved my head laterally around a thick trunk. Daniel the gardener was urinating on a tree fifteen feet from my position. I pushed the gun back into my waistband.

And then the phone in my pocket started vibrating.

Which would have been okay on a city street. Nobody would have heard it. But out there in the woods at night the vibration was loud as a ship’s horn. I pressed a button on the side of the phone, through my pants. The vibrating stopped.

I stepped around the tree and into the moonlight. Daniel the gardener was standing still, zipping up his fly.

I said, “Evening.”

“Evening.”

“Fresh air’s good.”

Daniel nodded. “Sometimes I can’t sleep.”

“Same.”