“Do you see a large mahogany secretary?” Barton asked.
“Sorry, no.”
Holly tugged at his sleeve and demanded the binoculars back. “He wasn’t lying about the painters,” she said. “I can see a corner of a van behind the stone wall, and a man in white coveralls just came and took a bucket out of it and went back into the house.”
“There’s got to be a caretaker,” Stone said.
“There is,” Barton replied. “I know the fellow. He would probably live in the little house you can see a part of behind the barn.”
“So when the painters leave, there’ll still be somebody there.”
“Of course. You don’t just drive away and leave a house like this, containing an important collection, all by itself.”
“What kind of security is there likely to be, Holly?” Stone asked.
“Oh, every door and window in the house will be wired, and there’ll be motion detectors galore, sensors under the rugs. Like that.”
“Will there be battery backup?”
“Of course, and maybe a generator, too.”
“So, if we could cut the power, the generator would come on automatically?”
“Yes.”
“So we could fix the generator so it wouldn’t come on, then cut the power?”
“But there’d be a battery backup. It would be crazy not to have that.”
“Where would the batteries likely be?”
“Inside the house, probably. But the generator would be outside, since it’s noisy when it comes on.”
“How noisy?”
“Probably like a big truck idling. They’d have a big one for a place like this, at least twenty kilowatts, I’d imagine.”
“Right,” Stone said. “When you’ve got that much money, you don’t tolerate the slightest inconvenience. The power goes off in the middle of your favorite TV program, you want it back on instantly.”
Holly panned the scene with the binoculars. “I see a power transformer on a pole about a hundred yards from the house,” she said. “We’d have to knock that out in such a way that it would appear to be a normal failure. Short it out. Could take them a while to reset it.”
“Then what?” Barton asked.
“I want to watch the painters leave for the day,” she said, “and then I want to go to the hardware store before it closes.”
“Impossible to do both,” Stone said. “Give me a list, and I’ll go now. I can be back in an hour.”
Holly took a notebook from her pocket and began scribbling. She handed it to Stone. “No shortcuts, no substitutions.”
“Right.”
“Stone,” Barton said, “there’s a gate where you can drop us along the way. It’s closer to the house.”
“All right.”
Stone dropped them a mile back down the dirt road.
“We’ll leave the gate open,” Barton said. “You can drive closer to the house with your lights off, but don’t slam any car doors.”