Rules of Vengeance

One Park’s imposing front doors are made from double-paned bulletproof glass, protected by a steel grate and secured by magnetic lock. The doors’ German manufacturer, Siegfried & Stein, guaranteed the lock against a direct hit from a rocket-propelled grenade. The front doors might be blown clear off their hinges and across the spacious marble lobby, but by God and Bismarck, they will remain locked. Visitors are granted entry only after their faces have been scrutinized via closed-circuit television and their identity confirmed by a resident.

For all intents and purposes, One Park is impregnable.

Getting in was the easy part.

The trespasser, operational designation “Alpha,” stood inside the master bedroom closet of residence 5A of 1 Park Lane. Alpha was familiar with the apartment’s security system. Prior reco

The intruder crossed to the door and flipped the light switch. The closet was palatial. A shoe rack stood against the far wall, and next to it a rolled-up flag of St. George and two Holland & Holland shotguns. The owner’s clothing hung along one wall. There was no women’s clothing to be seen. The residence belonged to a bachelor.

To the left were stacks of yellowing periodicals, bound newspapers, and manila files, the meticulously accumulated bric-a-brac of a dedicated scholar. To the right stood a mahogany dresser with several photographs in sterling frames. One showed a fit, sandy-haired man in hunting attire, shotgun under one arm, in conversation with a similarly sporty Queen Elizabeth II. The trespasser recognized the owner of the apartment. He was Lord Robert Russell, only son of the duke of Suffolk, England ’s richest peer, with a fortune estimated at five billion pounds.

Alpha had not come to steal Russell’s money, but for something infinitely more valuable.

Kneeling, the intruder removed a slim packet from a work bag. A thumbnail punctured its plastic wrapping. Alpha deftly unfolded a foil-colored jumpsuit and stepped into it. Care was taken to ensure that the suit covered every square inch of exposed skin. A hood descended low over the brow and rose over the jaw to mask the nose and mouth. The jumpsuit was made from Mylar, a material often used for survival blankets. The suit had been designed for one purpose and one purpose only: to prevent the escape of the body’s ambient heat.

Satisfied that the Mylar suit was in place, the intruder removed a pair of telescopic night-vision goggles and affixed them comfortably, again working to cover as much skin as possible. A pair of gloves came last.

Alpha cracked open the closet door. The master bedroom was cloaked in darkness. A scan of the area revealed a motion detector attached to the ceiling near the door. The size of a pack of cigarettes, the motion detector emitted passive infrared beams capable of detecting minute oscillations in room temperature caused by the passage of human bodies through a protected space. The alarm’s sensitivity could be calibrated to allow a cat or a small dog free rein of the premises without triggering the alarm, but Robert Russell did not own a house pet. Moreover, he was cautious by nature and paranoid by dint of his profession. He knew full well that his recent work had made him unpopular in certain circles. He also knew that if the past were to be taken as an indication, his life was in danger. The sensors would be set to detect the faintest sign of an intruder.

Even with the thermal suit, it was not yet safe to enter the room. Robert Russell had equipped his flat with a double-redundant security system. The motion detector constituted one measure. The other was a microwave transmitter that relied on the concept of Doppler radar to bounce sound waves off the walls. Any disturbance in the sound waves’ pattern would activate the alarm.

A survey of the bedroom failed to locate the transmitter.

Just then a voice sounded in Alpha’s earpiece. “He’s leaving the target. You have eight minutes.”

“Check.”

Stepping out of the closet, Alpha moved swiftly to the bedroom door. No alarm sounded. No air horn. No bell. There was no microwave transmitter in the room. The bedroom door stood ajar, granting a clear view down a hallway and into the living area. Gloved fingers increased the night-vision goggles’ magnification fourfold. It required fifteen seconds to locate the ruby-red diode high on the foyer wall that signaled the location of the transmitter. There was no way to disable the diode. The solution lay in tricking it into thinking it was operating normally.

Drawing a miniature target pistol from the jumpsuit, Alpha took careful aim at the diode and fired. The pistol did not shoot a bullet-at least, not in the conventional sense of the word. Instead it launched a subsonic projectile containing a crystalline epoxy compound. Designed to flatten on impact, the epoxy would effectively block the sound waves and reflect them back to the transmitter. Still, for less than a second, the sound waves would be disturbed. The alarm would be triggered.

But there it would end.

The beauty and the arrogance of the double-blind alarm lay in the necessity to trigger both mechanisms at the same time in order to activate the alarm. If the thermal sensor detected a rise in temperature, it would cross-check with the motion detector for a corresponding disruption in the Doppler waves. Similarly, if the Doppler-based motion sensor was disturbed, it would verify with the thermal sensor that there had been an increase in room temperature. If in either case the response was negative, the alarm would not be activated. The redundancy was not installed to make the room safer, but to guard against the possibility of a false alarm. No one had ever considered it possible to defeat both systems at the same time.

The projectile hit its target dead on. The ruby-red diode vanished. The room was clear.

Alpha checked the time. Six minutes, thirty seconds.

Inside the living room, it was necessary to fold back the carpet from the walls. The pressure pads were located as noted on the schematics. One was placed in front of each of the floor-to-ceiling windows looking over Hyde Park, and the third in front of the sliding glass door that led to the balcony. Each required one minute to disable. There was another near the front door, but Alpha didn’t bother with it. The entry and escape routes were the same.

Four minutes.

Free to roam the apartment, the intruder made a beeline for Russell’s study. Alpha had been inside the apartment before and had made a point of memorizing its layout. A sleek stainless steel desk occupied the center of the room. On it were three LCD monitors arrayed side by side. A far larger screen, some ninety-six inches across, hung from the wall directly opposite him.

Alpha directed a halogen beam beneath the desk. The computer’s central processing unit sat on the floor at the rear of the foot well. There was no time to copy its contents, only to destroy it. Alpha slipped a handheld electronic device from the work bag and swiped it several times over Russell’s CPU. The device delivered an immensely powerful electromagnetic pulse, obliterating all data.

Unfortunately, the information was also stored in a more permanent location: Robert Russell’s estimable brain.

“He’s pulling into the garage,” a

The time was 2:18 a.m. “Everything’s a go,” said Alpha. “Get lost.”

“See you back at the fort.”

On the desk was a web tablet, an all-in-one touch screen that controlled the apartment’s automatic functions. With a touch Russell could turn on the television, open or close the curtains, or adjust the temperature. There was another, more interesting feature. If one hit the security button, the screen divided itself into quarters, each showing the view from one of the building’s closed-circuit cameras. The top left quadrant showed Robert Russell leaving his car, an Aston Martin DB12. Russell appeared entering the basement foyer a moment later. A few seconds passed and he entered the bottom left quadrant, this time inside the elevator. At thirty, he was tall and lean, with a full head of tousled whiteblond hair that drew looks wherever he went. He wore jeans, an open shirt, and a blazer. Somewhere in the past, he’d earned a black belt in Brazilian jujitsu. He was a dangerous man in every respect.