Conway leaned forward in his chair and stared at the screen. This was his favorite part.
Blink and you' II miss it.
The soldier waved to the camera… And then vanished.
"Jesus," Conway mumbled under his breath. The transition was so fast, so fluid, that the first time he saw a demonstration, his mind couldn't process what had just happened had, in fact, refused to believe what it had just witnessed.
This wasn't some Hollywood special effect. The technology used to make the soldier vanish was called optical camouflage. The wrist-mounted computer took pictures of the soldier's surroundings and using real-time pixel replication "painted" the images on the suit through thousands of fiber-optic cameras. Thanks to recent advances in computer microprocessors, the cloaking happened so fast, the transition so fluid, that it looked like the soldier had vanished into thin air.
With the suit's power supply, a soldier could stay cloaked for more than eight hours.
Invisibility was now a reality.
A soldier could sneak into an enemy camp and kill everyone in their sleep, could sneak across enemy lines and plant a bomb, day or night, it didn't matter. Wearing this suit, you could walk up to a terrorist target and blow the back of his head off and no one would be able to see you.
The possible scenarios and potential applications were endless.
Which was why Angel Eyes was willing to pay cash for the working prototype.
Angel Eyes was the code name given to the man who, over a six-year period, had stolen several high-tech weapons from U.S. companies, most of them working prototypes. The stolen weapons never appeared on any black markets; they were never used to wage a battle on U.S. soil or against a foreign company. It was as if the weapons had simply vanished.
The true identity of Angel Eyes, his race and age, what he did for a living all of it was unknown. The IWAC team believed he had a group of professionals who worked for him. The team didn't know if Angel Eyes was operating out of the U.S. or, more disturbing, what the man's true agenda was. Was he going to use the weapons for some sinister purpose whose agenda would one day announce itself to the world like the Oklahoma bombing? Theories abounded.
What IWAC did know was the name of Angel Eyes's last two victims.
A sticky foam spray used as a nonlethal means of riot control had been around for several years. You sprayed the target, the foam formed and then hardened, and the person was stuck to the floor or street, immobilized. No one died. A great, nonlethal weapon.
The problem was clean-up. It was a time-consuming, pain-in-the-ass process that was very, very expensive. Massive police departments like Los Angeles and prisons, where the sticky foam would be the most useful, wanted to wait until the technology was more refined. A twenty-two-year-old brainiac chemist from Berkeley named Jonathan King stepped in and developed a foam that, when sprayed with a certain chemical compound, turned into dust.
The working prototype and design schematics for the spray gun, along with all the backup information on the chemical compounds that made the foam work, disappeared from the Berkeley-based lab. Three days later, at a junkyard in St. Paul, Minnesota, a man and his four-year-old son were looking at a part on a 1987 Buick Century when the boy heard what sounded like someone crying. The father pressed his ear against the trunk and heard a dry, tired voice just barely stronger than a whisper crying for help.
King had been beaten unconscious, and someone had poured Drano down his throat. He was airlifted to the hospital and by the time he arrived had slipped into a coma.
Six weeks passed and then on a cold March morning King woke up. The police came by for questioning, but the problem was that King had suffered severe brain damage. He couldn't talk, but he could write, and when asked the name or a description of the man who had done this to him, all King could (or would) write were the words Angel Eyes. King suffered a heart attack later that night and died.
The major break came two years ago, with thirty-four-year-old Alan Matthews, an MIT graduate who was developing for the government a portable spying device that could pick up the magnetic signals from any unshielded computer monitor or laptop screen any CRT screen. Using a specialized antenna, a person sitting inside a car could stare at the device's screen and watch as you typed your PIN number into the ATM machine to access your account; could read your e-mail or document as you were typing it; could even watch you perform business transactions that ranged from the simple credit-card order on the Internet to buying and trading stocks. Unlike its predecessors, this device had been designed to resemble a laptop, making it inconspicuous. The device's spying implications were endless.
Angel Eyes, posing as Mr. George Winston, the name of the main character from Orwell's 1984, approached Matthews with an offer of half a million dollars for the device. It was not known how Angel Eyes discovered the device or how he found out the name of the Cambridge, Massachusetts, company developing it. What was known was that Matthews accepted the offer.
Matthews was a bitter man, insecure, a brilliant loner who craved a glamorous lifestyle. On the day of the exchange, Matthews did not bring the schematics for the spy device called Tempest. He told Winston the device was worth more than half a million. The new deal required Winston to double the purchase price or the deal was off.
Mr. Winston accepted. Matthews, who had full access to the company and its lab, arranged a breakin.
A week later, on a Saturday evening, the spying device was stolen from the company's lab. A fire broke out sometime after midnight. By the time firemen arrived on the scene, the raging blaze had already decimated half the building. Matthews's charred body was found in the ashes. The device wasn't recovered.
The fire was front page news for both the Boston Globe and the Herald, but the theft of the spying device was never made public. The FBI was called in to investigate. One of the agents was a CIA liaison; the information was forwarded to Raymond Bouchard.
Matthews's condo was broken into the same night as the fire. The thief stole every item that could be easily fenced, including Matthews's computer equipment, discs, answering and fax machines, cell phone, pager and his Palm Pilot electronic organizer. What the thief didn't know about was the floor safe under the rug inside the walk-in closet.
Stored in the fireproof safe was a microcassette recorder that Matthews had used to keep a running verbal diary on his meetings with a man named George Winston. The tapes were mostly full of Matthews's ramblings about how smart he was and how he was going to retire off the money. He also boasted that if George Winston tried to double-cross him, Matthews would threaten Winston with the tapes.
While the tapes didn't contain an actual recording of Angel Eyes's voice or any in-depth descriptions of the man, they did contain one gem, the golden key the IWAC team needed to possibly infiltrate Angel Eyes's covert group: the name of Matthews's friend who was working on a highly advanced military combat suit that used a technology called optical camouflage.
Winston was very interested in this cloaking technology and offered Matthews an additional $200,000 for the information. Matthews refused, saying that he wouldn't accept an offer less than two million. Winston agreed and deposited the money in a Cayman Islands account that could be accessed only by Matthews, and only after the business was completed. Matthews handed over the name of his friend, Major Dixon that was actually the guy's God-given name and the name of the company developing the technology: Praxis, based in Austin, Texas. The money in the Cayman account was withdrawn just two hours before Matthews was killed. Had Matthews checked his account, he might have known that Angel Eyes had a change of heart.
By the time Angel Eyes, still posing as Mr. Winston, contacted Dixon, Conway and the IWAC team were already in place. Conway worked as the company's network security administrator, a position that granted him access to all the company's servers, including the one that stored all the information on the project code-named ROM ULAN It took the better part of a year for Conway to form a bond with the slightly aloof Dixon. During that time, Dix opened up and told Conway that a man named George Winston had contacted him via e-mail and then by phone and offered half a million dollars for detailed information, preferably testing footage, of the military suit and its applications.
An additional 4.5 million would be paid to Dixon in cash should he decide to sell the prototype.
It took Conway only a few months to convince Dix to sell the information to Angel Eyes. Conway was in the perfect position to help Dixon. As the company's network security administrator, he could doctor the audit logs to show that Dixon had never accessed or downloaded the highly protected schematics or the more prized video footage showing the stunning cloaking technology in action.
Dix agreed to sell the video.
Today, after skydiving, at one o'clock, Major Dixon would walk through the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport to Terminal D, where he would wait for Winston and then hand over a compact disc containing video footage of the stunning optical camouflage technology. Dixon would walk away with half a mil in cash, the advance for the compact disc. Angel Eyes would walk away with video footage that contained a computer virus that would infect all of his system and registry files, decrypt his e-mail, and send all of the information, along with his location, to Delburn Systems. A microscopic transmitter inserted in the CD would allow the IWAC team to track the disc's location within a two-mile radius.
The door to the conference room opened. Conway turned around expecting to see Pasha. Instead he saw Raymond Bouchard, the team leader of the IWAC group, walk into the room.
"Stephen." Raymond Bouchard reached across the table with an extended hand. Conway shook it, feeling the power in Bouchard's long fingers as they wrapped his own.
"Nice to see you."
"You too. You look good." The guy always did. With his deeply tanned face, his thick gray hair cut short, and his sharp, modern dark-blue suit with matching shirt and tie, Raymond Bouchard had the commanding, confident look of a powerful Hollywood agent about to ink the kind of deal that made national headlines. As always, his eyes were bright and clear, and he looked well-rested, as if just moments ago he had returned from a long and satisfying Caribbean vacation.
Bouchard pulled out the chair, eased back into the soft black leather and then crossed his legs, the cool air scented with coffee and a whiff of the man's cologne and shampoo. He scratched his chin a sure sign he was about to deliver an unpleasant piece of news.
Conway sat back down.
"What's up?" he asked, reaching for his coffee cup.
"Last night Echelon picked up a transmission."
Echelon was the name given to the U.S.-owned global surveillance network whose existence had, until recently, been kept secret.
Monitoring stations placed around the world used computer-programmed dictionaries and voice-recognition systems to covertly intercept telephone calls, mobile phones, faxes, and e-mails. It was rumored that the U.S. had used the system for economic spying on other countries. With the Cold War over, the name of the game now was obtaining information on new and upcoming technologies to gain a competitive and economic edge.
"As you know, Echelon has the ability to lock on to key words or phrases," Bouchard said.
"The male caller used the words optical camouflage, so Echelon recorded the conversation. The caller said, "I can't wait to see this optical camouflage stuff in action. Everything's in place. Don't worry. It's all going to go down according to plan." Then the call ended."
"You run the voice through the computers?"
"Same voice that called Dixon months ago, that's it. We traced the call to a pay phone about a block away from Dixon's condo."
Conway's mind jumped into overdrive, his imagination conjuring possible scenarios, none of them new. These scenarios and how he would respond to them had visited him in his sleep in one form or another over the past two years.
"You thinking Angel Eyes is going to make a run on the suit?" Conway said.
"Today, in broad daylight?" Bouchard shook his head.
"Too risky. Besides, the Praxis lab employs some of the latest advances in biometric security voice and fingerprint authentication, microchip-encoded badges. If he or anyone else tried to set foot in there without a properly encoded badge, the lab's alarm would sound and he'd be locked inside the lab."
"Not unless he uses Dixon. He's the only one who can gain access to the lab and the suit without tripping the alarm system. If he kidnapped Dixon and, say, arranged a bomb scare or a fire something to get everyone out of the company then Dix could walk inside the lab and take the suit."
"That's an interesting scenario."
"We need to be prepared for the possibility."
"We are prepared. Pasha's at the Austin airport right now with a surveillance team and two Hazard Teams. Two other teams will follow you and Dixon to the skydiving school, and we've got Randy Scott inside Praxis. And Dixon's wired. Everything the man says or does, no matter where he goes, the surveillance teams will have a lock on him and we'll be ready. For the scenario that you just described to happen, Angel Eyes would have to kill off every member of the IWAC group."
"Maybe that's the plan the caller was referring to."
Bouchard was about to say something when he saw the look on Conway's face.
"You're serious," Bouchard said.
"This guy… it's like he's made of vapor. He walks into an army base and somehow manages to disappear with a Blackhawk helicopter with the optical camouflage technology. We still don't know how the hell he pulled that off unless there's something I don't know."