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 Gaspé, 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.
15
“I agree,” Lambert said in Fisher’s ear. “This is unexpected.”
Fisher had already compressed the flexicam’s video feed and sent it to Third Echelon via encrypted burst transmission. Grimsdottir had quickly isolated the Korean’s face, pulled a still frame from the video, and was now running it through the NSA’s database — whose reach encompassed the CIA, the FBI, Homeland Security, and Immigration — looking for a match.
“You’re tracking them?” Lambert asked.
Fisher checked his OPSAT. “Yeah, hold on… They just stopped.” As he watched, the cluster of blue dots that represented Stewart and the Korean split in half, one staying in place while the other headed forward, in the direction of the bridge. “Okay, I think they parked him somewhere. Gotta move. Sandy’s going to give me twelve minutes before she hails them again. Don’t know if they’ll move him again, but I’d better assume so.”
“Agreed,” Lambert said. “Go.”
Zooming and panning the Gosselin’s blueprint as he went, Fisher followed Stewart’s RFID cluster down three decks, deeper into the bowels of the ship, then finally into the aft cargo area. He found himself at the mouth of a long, dark alleyway bordered on both sides by winch-lifted cargo bins, each the size of a mobile home and fronted by a padlocked ten-foot-by-ten-foot door.