Fallout

shoulder was pressed against the jamb of the hatchway in which he’d seen the smoker. He crouched down, then undogged the hatch a half inch and inserted the flexicam. The lens revealed a red-lit passageway, ten feet long, and ending in a split ladder way, one going up and one going down.

According to Grimsdottir, the Gosselin’s crew numbered eight: captain, first mate, helmsman, three cargo handlers, and two engineers. It was four twenty. Most of the crew would be asleep, with the first mate and helmsman on the bridge and one engineer on duty in the engine spaces. The big question mark was, who, if anyone, was guarding Calvin Stewart? Had Legard sent a bodyguard or two to mind the prisoner? He would soon find out.

Fisher withdrew the flexicam, then drew his pistol, opened the hatch halfway, stepped through, and pulled it shut behind him. He crouched for a full minute, listening and watching, until he was sure he was alone, then holstered the pistol.

He tapped the OPSAT’s touch screen and called up the Gosselin’s blueprint. Drawn in green wireframe on the black screen, the schematic was fully three dimensional, and the OPSAT’s stylus let him pan, rotate, and zoom the image. He played with it until he found what he wanted: crew’s quarters, second level, forward, just below the pilothouse.

He crept to the ladder and peered down, belowdecks, and saw nothing, so he mounted the ladder and climbed upward until his head was even with the deck above. Another passageway. This one, which had no direct access to the weather decks and therefore had no chance of emitting light other ships might mistake for navigation lights, was lit not by red lamps but by wall sconces, which cast pools of dim light on the overhead and deck.

On cat’s feet Fisher climbed the remaining few steps, then started down the passage. He counted doors as he went. There were ten, one for each crew member and two spares. The doors were evenly split down the port and starboard bulkheads, five to each side, with an eleventh door — a janitor’s closet — in the middle of the port bulkhead. As Fisher had feared, there were no name placards on the bulkhead, so finding which room held Stewart would take more time than he had. It was time to test his ruse.

He walked to the end of the passage and stopped before the last door, where he crouched. From a pouch on his calf he withdrew a thumb-size cylinder of compressed air topped with an articulated and long-stemmed nozzle like those found on cans of WD-40.

Inside, suspended within the compressed air, were thousands of RFID (radio frequency identification) chips, each the size of a grain of sand — essentially RFID powder. Miracles of miniaturization, RFID chips had initially been designed for loss prevention in U.S. retail stores. Each product gets an adhesive tag into which RFID powder has been embedded and each chip, or grain, is equipped with 128-bit ROM, or read-only memory, onto which a unique identification number has been engraved by an electron beam. When a chip, or a sprinkling of chips, comes within range of a detector, the ID number is read and verified as purchased or not yet purchased.

For Fisher’s purposes, the good folks at DARPA had taken the RFID powder concept one step further, first by coating each chip’s surface with a silicate that acted much like a cocklebur that attached itself to anything and everything, and second by affixing to each grain an external antenna — a tiny ribbon of wire half an inch long and barely the width of a human hair — that extended the chip’s transmission range to twenty feet.

As usual, of course, Fisher hadn’t liked DARPA’s official name for the RFID powder, which contained so many letters and numbers it looked like a calculus equation gone wrong, and had renamed it Voodoo Dust.

He pointed the canister at the deck before the door and pressed the nozzle. He heard a faint pfft. He backed down the passage, pausing at each door to coat the deck with the powder until he reached the janitor’s closet, where he turned around, walked to the opposite end of the passage, and then repeated the process, back-stepping until he’d covered each doorway and returned to the closet. He opened the door, slipped inside, and shut it behind him. On the OPSAT, he zoomed and rotated the Gosselin’s blueprint until the passageway filled the screen; there, in the black deck space between two notional bulkheads, were several dozen tiny blue dots, each one pulsing ever so slightly. Each dot, he knew, represented roughly one hundred RFID chips. The dots were spread down the passageway, three or four of them per door.

Into the SVT, he said, “Paint job done. Shake the tree.”

“Roger,” Sandy replied from the Osprey. “On your button four. Ten seconds.”

Fisher tapped the OPSAT’s screen, calling up the communications panel, then switched his earpiece to the indicated channel. For five seconds there was nothing but static, and then Sandy’s voice: “Cargo vessel Gosselin, this is the Canadian Coast Guard patrol ship Louisbourg, over.”

Silence.

“I say again, cargo vessel Gosselin, this is the Canadian Coast Guard patrol ship Louisbourg, do you read, over?”

“Yes, Louisbourg, this is Gosselin, we read you.”

“Gosselin, I am on your zero-five-one, four nautical miles. Confirm radar contact.”

Ten seconds passed and then, “Roger, Louisbourg, we see you. How can we be of service?”

There was in fact a Canadian Coast Guard patrol ship named Louisbourg, and it was in fact stationed in Gaspe, Quebec, but unbeknownst to the Gosselin’s captain, Louisbourg was hundreds of miles south, patrolling the coast of New Brunswick. The ship ten miles off the Gosselin’s starboard bow was in truth a Japanese cargo ship carrying DVD players and plasma televisions to Montreal.

“Gosselin, you are in Canadian territorial waters. You are ordered to heave to and stand by for inspection.”

“Uh… Louisbourg, we are a cargo vessel home ported in Montreal and bound for Halifax. May I ask the reason for the inspection?”

“Gosselin, you are ordered to heave to and stand by for random spot inspection,” Sandy repeated, an edge to her voice now. “Confirm compliance, over.”

“Understood, Louisbourg. Heaving to. Gosselin out.”

Well played, Sandy, Fisher thought. Now, with the tree-shaking done, it was time to see what, if anything, would fall out. If Stewart were aboard and not already tucked away into one of the ship’s nooks and crannies, Sandy’s threat of a boarding party would likely scare his keepers into moving him.

Fisher snaked the flexicam out the louvered panel at the bottom of the door and switched to a fish-eye view so he could see both ends of the corridor.

Two minutes passed without any activity. Then he heard it: a pair of feet pounding down a ladder somewhere forward of him and above. The pounding got louder until the footsteps entered the passage outside Fisher’s door. A man appeared at the forward end of the passage. Fisher tapped RECORD on the OPSAT’s screen, then switched the flexicam’s lens to regular view and swiveled it to focus on the man, who was now striding down the passage. The man stopped at the fourth door on the starboard side, slipped a key into the lock, then pushed through the door. Fisher heard muffled voices, then a shout, some scuffling. The figure reappeared, now with a gun in his right hand and the bunched collar of Calvin Stewart in the other. Stewart’s hands were duct-taped before him. His captor half dragged, half marched Stewart down the passageway, and then they disappeared from view down the ladder.

Fisher withdrew the flexicam and studied the OPSAT’s screen. Most of the blue RFID dots remained in the passageway, but four of them — about four hundred chips — had done their job and clung to the shoes of Stewart’s captor. The dots were moving aft and down. All hail the Voodoo Dust, Fisher thought.

He rewound the flexicam’s video feed to where Stewart’s captor entered the passageway, then manipulated the timeline bar, forwarding and rewinding until he had a clear, well-lighted view of the man’s face.

“Well, this is unexpected,” Fisher whispered.

The face on his screen was Asian — Korean, if he wasn’t mistaken.

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