possible, placed inconspicuously against backdrops of rocks or plants, snug
against the trunks of a few trees, at the corners of the house, and beside an
old rotting pine stump at the edge of the driveway. He had bought the components
on the open market, from an electronics dealer in San Francisco. It was dated
stuff, not at all state-of-the-art security technology, but he chose it because
he was familiar with it from his days in Delta Force, and it was good enough for
his purposes. Lines from the sensors ran underground, to an alarm box in one of
the kitchen cupboards. When the system was switched on at night, nothing larger
than a raccoon could come within thirty feet of the house—or enter the barn at
the back of the property—without tripping the alarm. No bells would ring, and no
sirens would blare because that would alert The Outsider and might run it off.
They didn’t want to chase it away; they wanted to kill it. Therefore, when the
system was tripped, it turned on clock radios in every room of the house, all of
which were set at low volume so as not to frighten off an intruder but high
enough to warn Travis and Nora.
Today, all the sensors were in place, as usual. All he had to do was wipe off
the light film of dust that had coated the lenses.
“The palace moat is in good repair, m’lord,” Travis said.
Einstein woofed approval.
In the rust-red barn, Travis and Einstein examined the equipment that, they
hoped, would provide a nasty surprise for The Outsider.
In the northwest corner of the shadowy interior, to the left of the big rolling
door, a pressurized steel tank was clamped in a wall rack. In the diagonally
opposite southeast corner at the back of the building, beyond the pickup and
car, an identical vessel was bolted to an identical rack. They resembled large
propane tanks of the sort people used at summer cabins for gas cooking, but they
did not hold propane. They were filled with nitrous oxide, which was sometimes
inaccurately called “laughing gas.” The first whiff did exhilarate you and make
you want to laugh, but the second whiff knocked you out before the laugh could
escape your lips. Dentists and surgeons frequently used nitrous oxide as an
anesthetic. Travis had purchased it from a medical-supply house in San
Francisco.
After switching on the barn lights, Travis checked the gauges on both tanks.
Full pressure.
In addition to the large rolling door at the front of the barn, there was a
smaller, man-size door at the rear. These were the only two entrances. Travis
had boarded over a pair of windows in the loft. At night, when the alarm system
was engaged, the smaller rear door was left unlocked in the hope that The
Outsider, intending to scout the house from the cover of the barn, would let
itself into the trap. When it opened the door and crept into the barn, it would
trigger a mechanism that would slam and lock the door behind it. The front door,
already locked from outside, would prevent an exit in that direction.
Simultaneous with the springing of the trap, the large tanks of nitrous oxide
Would release their entire contents in less than one minute because Travis
had fitted them with high-pressure emergency-release valves tied in with the
alarm system. He had caulked all of the draft-admitting cracks in the barn and
had insulated the place as thoroughly as possible in order to insure that the
nitrous oxide would be contained within the structure until one of the doors was
unlocked from outside and opened to vent the gas.
The Outsider could not take refuge in the pickup or the Toyota, for they would
be locked. No corner in the barn would be free of the gas. Within less than a
minute, the creature would collapse. Travis had considered using poisonous gas
of some kind, which he probably could have obtained on the underground market,
but he had decided against going to that extreme because, if something went
wrong, the danger to him and Nora and Einstein would be too great.