He was too close!

Or was he? It was impossible to be sure, and the sheer uncertainty was the most nerve-racking thing of all.

A cold sweat formed on his skin almost instantly as he rolled out of the zone. Any moment now he would know if he had triggered the pressure sensors. The floodlights would blaze; the camera would pivot. And then, as his visage came into focus, a team of heavily armed guards would rush to the site. The barricades and alarm systems to every side would make his chance for escape essentially nil.

With bated breath, he waited, feeling relief budding with each passing second. Nothing. He had cleared it. All three perimeter security systems were now behind him.

Now he stood and looked up at the mansion that loomed before him. Up close, it was breathtaking in its grandeur. To either side of the main house were vast conical turrets; the exterior of the mansion was fashioned from Briar Hill sandstone. The roof was trimmed with an intricate balustrade and topped with a smaller one. The place was an eclectic display of architectural bombast. Yet did it count as ostentation if nobody could see it?

The windows were dark except for a dim glow of what might be standard nighttime illumination; were its inhabitants in the back rooms? It seemed too early for anyone to be asleep. Something about the setup bothered Janson, but he could not say why, and it was no time for turning around.

Now he crept to the left side of the building and over to a narrow side entrance.

Mounted in the stone near the dark, ornately incised door was a discreet electrostatic touch screen, of the kind used by ATMs. If the right numbers were pressed, the entrance alarm would be deactivated. Janson withdrew the small compressed-air atomizer from his knapsack and directed a jet of finely powdered charcoal at the pad. If everything went well, it would alight on fingerprints, and by the pattern he would be able to tell which digits the alarm code used; depending on how light or heavy the oils were, he could make a good guess as to their relative frequency.

A dead end. No pattern was revealed at all. As he had feared, the alarm pad employed a scrambled video display: the numerals were displayed in a random order, never in the same sequence twice.

He cleared his head. So close and yet so … No, he was not down for the count. Deactivating the alarm would have been enormously helpful, but he had not exhausted his backup plans. The door was alarmed. Accept it. If the alarm system did not detect that it had been opened, however, it would not go off. With the help of a penlight, Janson scanned the dark-stained door until he saw the tiny screws on the topmost section: evidence of the contact switch. Within the door frame, the contacts of a ferrous-metal switch were kept together—the circuit was kept closed—by a magnet recessed in the top of the door. As long as the door was shut, the magnet would keep a plunger within the door frame depressed, completing the electric circuit within the switch unit. Janson withdrew a powerful magnet from his knapsack and, using a fast-drying cyanoacrylate adhesive, fastened it to the lower part of the door frame.