LITMIR.BIZ

       TWO

       National Cryptologic Museum, Fort Meade, Maryland

       3rd January – 2.26 a.m.

      It was a little game he played; something to pass the time on his rounds. As he came upon each exhibit he would test himself against the display’s information cards to see how much he could remember. After twenty years he was pretty much word perfect.

      First there was the Myer flag system, a line-of-sight communication tool devised in the Civil War by an army doctor who went on to form the Signal Corps. The glass cases held the original flags, battle-torn and stained with age.

      Satisfied, he walked on, his rubber soles squeaking rhythmically on the floor like a metronome marking time, the polished toecaps of his boots glowing with a white sheen from the dimmed overhead lights.

      Al Travis had been a guard at the National Cryptologic Museum since it had first opened. He liked it there. He’d finally found a place where he felt he was part of something special, something important. After all, technically he worked for the NSA, the agency responsible for protecting Uncle Sam’s information systems and breaking the bad guys’ codes. Hell, the NSA was right in the thick of things with this whole War on Terror.

      He came upon the next exhibit – the Cipher Wheel. A series of rotating wooden discs, the wheel had been used by European governments for hundreds of years to encrypt sensitive communications. According to the card, it was designed to be used with French, the international language of diplomacy until the end of the First World War.

      The Cipher Wheel’s cylindrical shape nestled snugly in its display case, the wood polished by generations of anxious fingers. He paused, looked at it, and checked with the information card that he was right in believing this to be the oldest such device in the world.

      And then of course there was his favourite exhibit – the big one, as he liked to say – the Enigma machine. The museum had several versions on display in two large glass-fronted cases and Travis never failed to pause when he walked past, running his eyes appreciatively over them. He found it incredible that, in ‘breaking’ the code generated by this oversized typewriter, Polish and then British mathematicians had helped win the war for the Allies in Europe. But that’s what the card said, and who was he to argue?

      A sudden noise made Travis stop. He checked over his shoulder and then peered into the semi-darkness ahead of him.

      ‘Anyone there?’ he called out, wondering if someone had come to relieve him early. As he paused, waiting for an answer, a steel wire shaped into a noose was lowered from above him until it was hovering just over his head, glinting in the lights like a silver halo. Then, just as Travis was about to move on again, it snapped past his face, the wire tightening around his neck and pulling him three feet off the ground.

      Travis’s hands leapt to his throat as he scrabbled at the wire, his legs thrashing beneath him, his throat making an inhuman gurgling noise. Two dark shapes materialised out of the shadows as he struggled and a third man dropped down noiselessly from where he had hidden himself in the roof space above the ceiling tiles.

      One of the men pulled a chair over from the wall and positioned it under Travis’s flailing legs. Travis located the top of the chair with his feet and, wavering unsteadily, found that he was just about able to perch on tiptoe and relieve the choking pressure on his throat, his lungs gasping for air, blood on his collar where the noose had bitten into the soft folds of his neck.

      Teetering, his mouth dry with fear, he watched as the three figures, each masked and dressed in black, approached the left-hand display cabinet. Working with well-drilled efficiency, they unscrewed the frame, levered the glass out and leant it against the wall. Then the man in the middle reached in, took out one of the Enigma machines, and placed it in his accomplice’s backpack.

      Travis tried to speak, tried to ask them what the hell they thought they were doing, to point out that there was no way they were ever going to make it off the base, but all that came was a series of choked grunts and whispered moans.

      The noise, though, made the men turn. One broke away from the others and approached Travis.

      ‘Did you say something, nigger?’

      The voice was thin and mocking, the last word said slowly and deliberately. Travis shook his head, knowing that these were not people to be reasoned with, although his eyes burned with anger at the insult.

      The man didn’t seem to be expecting an answer. Instead he kicked out and knocked the chair from under Travis, who plunged towards the floor, the steel wire twanging under tension and snapping his neck.

      For a few seconds Travis’s feet drummed furiously, then twitched a few times, then were still.