Matthew Reilly - Area 7

the benchtop and loosed a couple of shots, he saw a very

strange thing happen: he saw all three of the shadowy 7th

Squadron shooters get yanked clean off their feet from behind.

Their guns went silent, and Book II found himself staring

at an empty area of the battlefield.

"What the ...?"

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Matthew Reilly

from his own position near the stairwell door, alpha

Unit's leader, Kurt Logan, saw what was happening.

"Fuck! There's someone else in here!" he yelled angrily

into his microphone. "Somebody's picking us off!"

Suddenly the trooper beside Logan took a hit to the side

of the head and half his skull exploded, spraying blood and

brains everywhere.

"Fuck!" Logan had expected to lose maybe two of his

men in the Shootout--but now he had lost six. "Alpha Unit,

pull out! Everybody back to the stairwell now! Take emergency

evac measures!"

He threw open the stairwell door, just as a line of bullets

punctured the wall all around it, almost taking his head off.

His remaining men dashed past him, out through the door,

into the shelter of the eastern stairwell--but not before they

had brutally fired down at their fallen comrades' bodies,

peppering the corpses and the floor all around them with

bullets.

Logan himself mercilessly strafed the body of a dead

7th Squadron man on the ground beside him. Then, when he

was done, he disappeared through the doorway after the others

and abruptly there was silence.

BOOK II WAS STILL CROUCHED BEHIND HIS LAB BENCH WITH

Elvis and Love Machine, acrid gunsmoke rising into the air

all around them.

Silence.

Deafening silence.

Juliet Janson and the President lay on the floor five feet

away from Book and the others, shielded by another bench,

covered in dust and broken bits of plastic. Juliet still had her

gun raised--

Whump!

A pair of boots landed with a loud thud on the benchtop

above them.

They all snapped to look up--and found themselves

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staring at Captain Shane M. Schofield, USMC, dressed in

full dress uniform, with two nickel-plated Berettas gripped

in his hands.

He smiled at them. "Hey there."

meanwhile, in bars and offices and homes around

America and the world, people sat glued to their television

sets.

Because there was so little footage, CNN and the overseas

news networks just kept broadcasting the existing few

minutes' worth of tape over and over again. Experts were

brought in to give their opinions.

Government people sprang into action, although no one

could really do anything substantive, since the exact location

of the nightmarish affair was known only to a select few.

In any case, in a few minutes it would be eight o'clock

Mountain Daylight Time and the people of the world tensely

awaited the next hourly update.

THIRD CONFRONTATION

3 July/ 0800 Hours

UNITED STATES AIR FORCE

SPECIAL AREA (RESTRICTED) NO.7

0800 HOURS

GROUND LEVEL: Main Hangar

LEVEL 1: Hangar Bay

LEVEL 2: Hangar Bay

LEVEL 3: Living Quarters

LEVEL 4: Laboratories

Level 5: Animal Confinement Quarters

LEVEL 6: X-rail platform

space division, that part of the defense intelligence

Agency which deals with foreign powers' space capabilities,

is located on the second-to-bottom floor of the Pentagon,

three stories directly below the famous Pentagon Situation

Room.

And although its title may sound exotic and exciting, as

David Fairfax knew, such a perception couldn't have been

further from the truth.

In short, you got sent to Space Division as punishment,

because nothing ever happened in Space Division.

It was nearly 10.00 a.m. on the East Coast as Fairfax ... oblivious to any commotion going on in the outside world ... tapped away on his computer keyboard, trying to decipher a collection of phone taps that the DIA had picked up over the past few months. Whoever had been using the phones in question had fitted them with sophisticated encoders, masking their content. It was up to Fairfax to crack that code.

It's funny how times change, he thought.

David Theodore Fairfax was a cryptanalyst, a code

breaker. Of medium height, lean, with floppy brown hair and

thin wire-frame glasses, he didn't look like a genius. In fact,

in his Mooks T-shirt, jeans and sneakers, he looked more

like a gawky university student than a government analyst.

It was, however, his brilliant undergraduate thesis on

theoretical nonlinear computing that had brought him to the

attention of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Department

of Defense's chief intelligence-gathering organization.

The DIA worked in close consultation with the NSA, America's

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Matthew Reilly

chief signals gatherer and code breaker. But that didn't

prevent it from running its own team of code crackers--who

often spied on the US A--of which Dave Fairfax was a part.

Fairfax had taken to cryptanalysis immediately. He

loved the challenge of it, the battle between two minds: one

which hopes to conceal, the other which hopes to reveal. He

lived by the maxim: No code is unbreakable.

It didn't take him long to get noticed.

In the early 1990's, U.S. authorities were confounded by

a man named Phil Zimmerman and his unbreakable encryption

software, "PGP." In 1991, Zimmerman had posted

PGP on the Internet, to the great consternation of the U.S.

government--principally because the government couldn't

crack it.

PGP employed a cryptographic system known as the

"public key system," which involved the multiplication of

very large prime numbers to obtain the code's all-important

"key." In this case "very large prime numbers" meant numbers

with over 130 digits.

It was unbreakable.

It was claimed that it would take all the supercomputers

in the world twelve times the age of the universe to check all

the possible values for a single message.

The government was annoyed. It became known that

certain terrorist groups and foreign governments had started

using PGP to encrypt their messages. In 1993, a grand jury

investigation into Zimmerman was initiated on the basis that

by uploading PGP onto the Internet, he had exported a weapon out of the United States, since encryption software

came under the government's definition of a "munition."

And then strangely, in 1996, after hounding Zimmerman

for three years, the U.S. Attorney General's office

dropped the case.

Just like that.

They claimed that the horse had bolted and the case was

no longer worth pursuing, so they closed the file.

What the Attorney General never mentioned was the

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call she had received from the Director of the DIA on the

morning she dropped the case, saying that PGP had been

cracked.

And as anyone in cryptography knows, once you crack

your enemy's code, you don't let them know you've

cracked it.

And the man who cracked PGP: an unknown twenty-five-year-old DIA mathematician by the name of David

Fairfax.

It turned out that Fairfax's theoretical nonlinear computer

was no longer theoretical. A prototype version of it

was built for the express purpose of breaking PGP, and as it

turned out, the computer, with its unimaginable calculative

abilities, could factor extremely large numbers with considerable

ease.

No code is unbreakable.

History, however, is tough on cryptanalysts--for the