Snakehead

enemy turned the system against itself. The man took a miniaturized oxyacetylene torch out of his toolbox and used it to burn out the screws. This allowed him to unfasten a metal panel, revealing a complicated tangle of pipes and wires. From somewhere inside his anorak, he produced a gas mask, which he strapped over his face. He reached back into his toolbox and took out a metal vial, a few inches long, with a nozzle and a spike. The man knew exactly what he was doing. Using the heel of his hand, he jammed the spike into one of the pipes. Finally, he turned the nozzle.
    The hiss was almost inaudible as a stream of potassium cyanide mixed with the air circulating inside the building. Meanwhile, four men dressed as paramedics but all wearing gas masks had approached the front door. One of them pressed a magnetized box, no bigger than a cigarette pack, against the lock. He stepped back. There was an explosion. The door swung open.
    It was early evening, and only half a dozen people had still been working inside the facility. Most of them were technicians. One was an armed security guard. He had been trying to make a telephone call when the gas had hit him. He was lying on the floor, a look of surprise on his face. The receiver was still in his hand.
    Through the entrance hall, down a corridor, and through a door marked RESTRICTED AREA…the four paramedics knew exactly where they were going. The bomb was in front of them. It looked remarkably old-fashioned, like something out of World War II—a huge metal cylinder, silver in color, flat at one end, pointed at the other. Only a data screen, built into the side, and a series of digital controls brought it back into the twenty-first century. It was strapped down to a power-assisted cart, and the whole thing would fit inside the ambulance with just inches to spare. But that, of course, was why the ambulance had been chosen.
    They guided it back down the corridor and out through the front door. The ambulance was equipped with a ramp, and it rolled smoothly into the back, allowing room for the driver and one passenger in the front. The other three men and the woman climbed into the car. The dummies of the children were left behind. The entire operation had taken eight and a half minutes. Thirty seconds less than planned.
    An hour later, by the time the alarm had been raised in London and other parts of the country, everyone involved had disappeared. They had discarded the wigs, contact lenses, and facial padding that had completely changed their appearance. The two vehicles had been incinerated.
    And the weapon known as Royal Blue had already begun its journey east.

3
    VISA PROBLEMS
    “A LEX R IDER .”
    The blind man spoke the two words as if they had only just occurred to him. He let them roll over his tongue, tasting them like a fine wine. He was sitting in a soft leather armchair, the sort of furniture that would have been normal in an executive office but that was surprising in a plane, twenty-five thousand feet above Adelaide. The plane was a Gulfstream V executive jet that had been specially adapted for its current use, equipped with a kitchen and bathroom, a satellite link for worldwide communications, a forty-inch plasma TV connected to three twenty-four-hour news services, and a bank of computers. There was even a basket for Garth, the blind man’s guide dog.
    The man’s name was Ethan Brooke, and he was the chief executive of the Covert Action Division of ASIS—the Australian Secret Intelligence Service. His department was inevitably known as CAD, but only by the people who worked in it. Very few other people even knew it existed.
    Brooke was a large man, in his mid-fifties, with sand-colored hair and ruddy, weather-beaten cheeks that suggested years spent outdoors. He had indeed been a soldier, a lieutenant colonel with the commandos, until a land mine in East Timor had sent him first into the hospital for three months and then into a new career in intelligence. He wore Armani sunglasses, tinted silver, rather than the traditional black glasses of a blind man, and his clothes were casual: jeans, a jacket, and an open-neck shirt. A senior minister in the Australian defense department had once complained about the way he dressed. That same minister was now carrying luggage in a three-star Sydney hotel.
    He was not alone. Sitting opposite him was a second man, almost half his age, slim, with short, fair hair. He was wearing a suit. Marc Damon had applied to