Tom looked at the photos of the wall. “How tall is the warehouse?”
“The wall is thirty-five feet high but it ends in a parapet. If you look closely, the actual roof is three feet below that,” Jack said.
“If we could get a forty-foot extension ladder, we wouldn’t need to climb at all,” Harry pointed out.
“That’d be great,” Tom said, “We can try to find one, but I’ve got doubts we can. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure I know where we can get a thirty-two footer.”
“Well, that’s only three feet you need to climb up beyond that,” Jack said.
Magenta laughed. “You haven’t climbed a lot of ladders.” She started scribbling on a piece of paper. “You want a roughly seventy-five degree angle. That means the base of the ladder needs to be eight feet away from the wall and the reach of the ladder is going to actually be a little under thirty-one feet. That’s if you climb to the very top rung which is not recommended.” She laughed again. “Of course we do a lot of things that aren’t recommended.”
“Hold on,” Jack said. “What do you mean the base of the ladder needs to be eight feet away? There’s a chain link wire fence four feet behind the building. It’s twelve feet tall with a foot of barbed wire on top.”
Harry shook his head, “That’s going to be a problem. I was just thinking it’d be great if we could drive a truck up behind the building. We could use it to mount the ladder and bring our equipment in.”
“Barb wire and chain link can be cut,” Martha said. “You must know someone who’s good at that.”
“Damn,” Jack said. “I should have thought of Jake. I just don’t know where he is. But I’ll bet I can find him.”
While Jack was trying to locate Jake, and the Denali Collective was trying to figure out better ways to scale the wall, Sam and Gus were attending the New New Harmony Commune’s weekly meeting.
“We think we can get inside,” Sam said, “but we’re going to have to immobilize the two guards on the dock. We’ve figured out how we can do it, but we’ll need a distraction and it can’t be one of us since we’re immediately identifiable with the visual recognition system I’m sure all the guards carry now.”
“Well, I’m not in their system,” Magenta said. “Not yet at any rate.”
“You can’t go up to the guards alone,” Rabbit said.
Magenta smiled. “Of course not. I’ll have Gosling with me.”
It took Tara almost three minutes to bring anything resembling order back to the meeting. Gus looked amused. Sam looked terrified.
“Okay,” Tara said, when there had been nearly thirty seconds of silence. “Selene. You haven’t spoken yet. Go ahead.”
“I won’t have you endangering one of our children. Bad enough that we agreed to this crazy scheme of yours but using our kids is out of the question.”
“Again, if the alternative is to have them starve along with us,” Magenta said as calmly as she could, “I think that it’s worth the risk.”
“But why use Gosling?” Pooka asked.
“Because babies are the most powerful distraction I know of. Gosling will bewitch them, believe me.”
The meeting ran an hour overtime and Selene was crying at the end of it (and not the only one) but eventually everyone agreed that Magenta and Gosling could be the distraction.
Jake had escaped from four different prisons and was currently on the state’s most wanted list. Fortunately, he no longer looked anything like the picture that they were distributing of him.
Jack came with him to another meeting with the Denali Collective.
“That fence doesn’t look like much of a problem,” Jake said. “It’s not even electrified. If we get some good bolt cutters and a couple of you help me, we can make it through that in under twenty minutes.”
“Good to know,” Martha said. “You want to join us in climbing the back of the building?”
“Are you kidding?” Jake said. “Joining you on the climb was one of my conditions for getting you past the fence.”
Tom looked around the room at the whole collective, before looking back at Jack and Jake. “I think we’ve got the climb figured out. If we can get through the fence in under twenty, I think we’re set on this end.”