Projects Agency
Monday, January 4 1999, 5:50 am
The thieves moved fast—they knew exactly where they were going.
They'd picked the perfect time for the raid. Ten minutes to six. Ten minutes before the night guards were due to clock off. Ten minutes before the day guards were due to clock on.
The night guards would be tired and looking at their watches, looking forward to going home. They would be at their most vulnerable.
3701 North Fairfax Drive was an eight-storey redbrick building just across the street from the Virginia Square Metro station in Arlington, Virginia. It housed the offices of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency— DARPA—cutting-edge research and development arm of the United States Department of Defense.
The thieves ran down the white-lit corridors with their silenced MP-5SD submachine guns held high, SEAL- style— their folding stocks pressed firmly against their shoulders, their eyes looking straight down their barrels, searching for targets.
Thwat-thwat-thwat-thwat
A hailstorm of silent bullets ripped down yet another Navy guardsman, number seventeen. Without missing a beat, the thieves leapt over his body and headed for the vault room. One of them swiped the cardkey while another pushed open the huge hydraulic door.
They were on the third floor of the building, having already breached seven Grade-5 security checkpoints— checkpoints that had required four different cardkeys and six different alpha-numeric codes to open. They had entered the building via its underground loading dock, inside a van that had been expected. The underground gate guards had been the first to die. They had been followed soon after by the van's drivers.
Up on the third floor, the thieves hadn't stopped moving.
In quick succession they entered the vault room—an enormous lab chamber bounded on every side by six- inch- thick porcelain walls. Outside this porcelain cocoon was another, outer wall. It was lead-lined and at least twelve inches thick. DARPA employees called this lab 'the Vault' and for good reason. Radio waves couldn't breach it. Directional listening devices couldn't touch it. It was the most secure facility in the building.
Was the most secure facility in the building.
The thieves fanned out quickly as they came into the lab chamber.
Silence.
Like the womb.
And then, suddenly, they stopped dead in their tracks.
Their prize stood before them, occupying pride of place in the centre of the lab.
It wasn't very big, despite what it could do.
It was maybe six feet tall and it looked like a giant hour glass: two cones—the lower one pointing upwards, the upper one pointing downwards—separated by a small titanium chamber which held the core of the weapon.
A collection of coloured wires snaked out from the titanium chamber in the centre of the device, most of them disappearing into a laptop computer keyboard that was crudely attached to its front section.
For the moment, the small titanium chamber was empty.
For the moment.
The thieves didn't waste any time. They removed the entire device from its power generator and quickly placed it on a custom-made sling.
Then they were moving again. Out the door. Up the corridor. Left then right. Left then right. Through the brightly lit government maze, stepping over the bodies they had killed on their way in. In the space of ninety seconds, they arrived back at the underground garage, where they all piled back into the van, together with their prize. No sooner was the last man's feet inside than the van's wheels skidded against the concrete and the big vehicle peeled away from the loading dock and sped out into the night.
The team's leader looked at his watch.
.5:59 am.
The entire operation had taken nine minutes.
Nothing more. Nothing less.
FIRST MACHINATION
Monday, January 4, 0910 hours
William Race was late for work. Again.
He'd overslept and then the subway had been delayed and now it was ten after nine and he was late for his morning lecture. Race's office was on the third floor of the old Delaware Building at New York University. The building had an ancient wrought-iron elevator that travelled at a snail's pace. It was quicker to take the stairs.
At thirty-one, Race was one of the youngest members of staff in the Ancient Languages Department at NYU. He was of average height—about five-foot-nine and handsome in a very unassuming kind of way. He had sandy- brown hair and a lean physique. A pair of wire-rimmed glasses framed his blue eyes and an unusual facial mark—a triangular brown birthmark situated directly below his left eye.
Race hurried up the stairs, a thousand thoughts running through his mind—his morning lecture on the works of the Roman historian Livy, the parking fine from last month that he still had to pay, and the article that he'd read in the New York Times that morning saying that because 85 per cent of people based their ATM numbers on
