He glanced up and to his left.
Crane fired a single round through the clear plastic enclosure and into the forehead of the security guard at a range of five feet. Blood and brain matter splattered inside the enclosure, and the young man slumped forward. A mobile phone slid out of his fingertips, and it fell between his feet.
Crane unzipped the plastic, felt around in the pockets of the dead security guard, and retrieved a set of keys.
The three men then continued around the side of the building. It was dark back here, except for the single orange glow of a cigarette.
“Hey,” came an uncertain voice from behind the glow.
Crane raised his Five-seveN and fired three suppressed rounds into the darkness there. From the flashes of the muzzle blast he saw a young man tumbling back through an open doorway that led to a small kitchen.
Crane’s two hooded assets ran forward and pulled the dead man back outside, and then they closed the door.
Crane pulled a walkie-talkie from his coat. He clicked the push-to-talk button three times.
Together the three men waited at the side door for thirty seconds. Then a black Ford Explorer appeared in the parking lot, racing forward with its lights off. It slowed and parked, and five more assets, all dressed the same as those already at the door but also wearing large backpacks, poured out of the Explorer.
The unit members had designated call signs, each man named after a different type of bird — Crane, Grouse, Quail, Stint, Snipe, Gull, Wigeon, and Duck. Crane was trained to lead, and the others were trained to follow, but each and every man in the team was trained to kill.
They had memorized the layout of the property from the building’s blueprints, and one of them had with him a schematic for the server farm in the basement, and together they entered through the kitchen door, moving silently in the darkness. They left the kitchen, headed up a hallway, and entered the front lobby. Here they split into two forces. Four men went to the stairwell; four more headed straight back, past the elevators, and toward the main lab.
Lance Boulder had pulled a flashlight from a toolbox in a closet near the kitchen, and he used this to head up the hall toward the stairwell to check the UPS system, the uninterruptable power supply battery unit that would be keeping his servers running. He hoped like hell that the breaker was, in fact, the culprit. He decided to check to see if power was out at the entire office park, so he took his BlackBerry from his belt and began typing a text message to Randy, the night security guard on the premises.
When he looked up from the BlackBerry he stopped dead in his tracks. There, just a few feet in front of him, his flashlight shone on a man dressed head to toe in black. Behind him were more men.
And then he saw the long handgun in the hand of the man in front.
Only a slight gasp passed his lips before Crane shot him twice in the chest. The silenced rounds barked in the hall. Lance’s body slammed into the wall on his right and he spun to his left, then pitched over facedown.
His flashlight fell to the floor and illuminated the way ahead for the four killers, and they advanced toward the lab.
Ken Farmer was taking advantage of the power outage in his building. He had not left his desk or his computer for more than six hours, so now he was just finishing up in the bathroom. The emergency lights did not reach the hallway by the bathroom so, as he opened the door to return to his office, he literally had to feel his way for a few feet.
He saw the silhouettes of the men ahead, and he immediately knew they were not his colleagues.
“Who are you?” he asked. He was too shocked to be scared.
The first man in the group walked up to him quickly, then placed the hot tip of a pistol’s silencer on his forehead.
Ken raised his hands slowly. “We don’t have any money.”
The silencer pushed him back, and he walked backward into the dark lab. As soon as he entered he saw black forms move around him, past him, and he heard the shouts of Rajesh and Tim, and then he heard the loud thumps of suppressed gunfire and the tinkling sounds of spent casings bouncing on the tile floor.
Farmer was led back to his desk, turned around, and placed in his chair by rough gloved hands, and from the light of the monitors in the room he saw Tim and Raj both lying on the floor.
His mind could not process the fact they had just been shot dead.
“Whatever you want… it’s yours. Just please don’t—”
Crane moved the silencer of his Five-seveN to Ken Farmer’s right temple and then, at contact distance, he fired a single round. Bone and tissue sprayed the carpet, and the body fell onto the red mess.
Within seconds Stint called on the radio. In Mandarin he said, “Building secure.”
Crane did not respond on the walkie-talkie, but instead he took a satellite phone out of his jacket. He pressed a single button, waited a few seconds, and then, speaking Mandarin himself, said, “Power on.”
Within fifteen seconds the electricity returned to the building. While four of Crane’s assets stood guard at the entrances to ADSC, three more assets went downstairs to the basement.
Crane sat at Ken’s desk and opened Ken’s personal e-mail. He began a new message, then added everyone on Ken’s contact list to the address line, which ensured more than one thousand different addresses would receive the note. Crane then reached inside his jacket and pulled a small notepad, upon which a letter had been written in English. He transcribed this into the e-mail, his gloved fingertips slowing his typing speed to a crawl.
Family, Friends, and Colleagues,
I love you all, but I cannot go on. My life is a failure. Our company has been a lie. I am destroying everything. I am killing everyone. I have no other options.
I am sorry.
Peace, Ken
Crane did not hit send; instead he spoke into his walkie-talkie. Still in Mandarin, he said, “Ten minutes.” He stood and stepped over Farmer’s body and headed to the basement, where the three others there had already begun the process of attaching a dozen homemade explosives in and around all of the servers. Each device was carefully placed near the hard drives and memory boards of the servers, ensuring that no digital records would remain.
Wiping the drives clean would have taken hours, and Crane did not have hours, so he had been ordered to take a more kinetic approach to his task.
In seven minutes they were finished. Crane and Gull returned to the lab, Crane passed his pistol to Gull, and then he leaned back to Farmer’s keyboard and clicked send with the mouse, distributing the disturbing mass e-mail to 1,130 recipients.
Crane pocketed the notebook with the original letter, and he looked at Ken Farmer’s body. Gull had placed his Five-seveN pistol in the dead man’s right hand.
A few extra pistol magazines went into Farmer’s pocket, and within a minute the four men were out of the lab. One of the team lit the fuses in the basement, and they headed back out the kitchen door and climbed into the waiting Explorer.
The four-man security team was already in the vehicle.
They drove out of the parking lot calmly and slowly, just thirteen minutes after entering the property. Four minutes after they turned off Ravenswood onto the highway, a massive explosion lit the early-morning sky behind them.
SIXTEEN
Jack Ryan, Jr., drove his black BMW 335i into D.C. for a morning run around the National Mall. Melanie was with him; she’d spent the night at his place. They were dressed in running clothes and running shoes, and Melanie wore a fanny pack on her hip that contained a water bottle, her keys and wallet, and a few other small odds and ends. They passed a thermos back and forth, sipping the coffee for a little more energy before their run.
