This was the first time Gideon could remember hearing anything approaching enthusiasm in Glinn’s voice. He leaned closer, so close his breath fogged the glass.
“Excuse me, but there are people waiting,” came an impatient voice from behind him.
As a little test, Gideon reached out and put his hand on the glass.
Instantly a low beeping sounded and a guard called out: “Hands off the glass, please! You, sir — hands off!”
This stimulated the impatient crowd. “Come on, friend, give someone else a chance!” came another voice. Others murmured their agreement.
With a long sigh of regret, Glinn touched his withered finger to the joystick and the wheelchair moved aside with a hum, Gideon following. A few moments later they were back out on Madison Avenue, the traffic streaming past, cabs blaring. Gideon blinked in the bright light.
“Let me get this straight. You want me to steal that book?”
He felt Glinn’s hand touch his arm reassuringly. “No, not the entire book. Just that one little folio page we were looking at, number 34r.”
“Why?”
A silence. “Have you ever known me to answer a question like that?” Glinn asked pleasantly as their limousine came gliding up to take them back to Little West 12th Street.
3
Three days later, Gideon Crew, fresh from a swim in the rooftop pool of the ultra-hip Gansevoort Hotel, stood stark naked in his suite high above the Meatpacking District of New York, staring down at a king-size bed overspread with diagrams and schematics — which mapped out, in minute detail, the security system of the East Room of the Morgan Library.
The loan of the Book of Kells by the Irish government to the Morgan Library had taken eight years to arrange. It had been fraught with difficulty. The main reason was that in the year 2000, one of the book’s folios had been sent to Canberra, Australia, for exhibition. Several pages were damaged by rubbing and a loss of pigment — the vibration of the plane’s engines was blamed — and the Irish government was now loath to risk another loan.
James Watermain, the billionaire Irish American founder of the Watermain Group, had made it a personal mission to bring the book to the United States. A man known for his charisma and charm, he managed to persuade the Irish prime minister, and finally the government, to release it — under stringent conditions. One of those conditions was a total overhaul of the security system of the East Room of the Morgan Library, which Watermain paid for himself.
Watermain had initially tried to put the manuscript on display at the Smithsonian. Museum security, however, had proven unwilling to provide the necessary high-tech face-lift, and the effort had fallen through. Secretly, Gideon was pleased to hear this. Although he had dreadful memories of Washington, DC, as a child — after all, that was where his father had been killed — in later years he had gone back occasionally to visit and found the town to be a somewhat boring, even sleepy, collection of handsome monuments and timeless documents. But just weeks before, he’d been summoned to Washington to receive a medal for his recent accomplishments at Fort Detrick. And to his dismay — perhaps because of 9/11, perhaps simply as a result of red tape and the inevitable bureaucratic accretion — what had once been a pleasant and relaxed capital was now more like an armed camp. The Metropolitan Police, Capitol Police, Park Police, State Department Police, US Mint Police, Secret Service Police, “Special” Police (achtung!) — in fact, something like two dozen different police forces, he’d learned — now choked downtown with their presence: all armed, and all seemingly with the power to pull over and arrest any luckless driver or visitor. (This according to one of Gideon’s cabdrivers, himself formerly on the Job.) Looking around at all the redundant cops, with their overlapping fiefdoms, Gideon could practically smell his tax dollars burning away.
The final straw came when he later received a robot traffic ticket in the maiclass="underline" some pole-mounted camera-radar had observed him driving up New York Avenue at a few miles over the thirty-five-miles-an-hour speed limit, and — snagging an image of his license plate — had mailed him a ticket for $125. Now there seemed no easy way to protest the ticket short of traveling back to Washington to defend himself. And, of course, the actual event was so vague in his memory there was no way to reconstruct it: had there been a 35 MPH sign posted anywhere nearby? Had he truly been speeding? Where the hell, exactly, was New York Avenue? Many days had passed — how was an honest citizen to recall? So Gideon had done two things: first, paid the fine; and second, vowed not to return to DC for a long, long time. What had, in his opinion, always been a beautiful and abiding symbol of the country’s greatness was now apparently obsessed with balancing its swollen budget.
Or maybe, fresh from his trout stream, Gideon was just feeling the pain of reentry into urban existence. But either way, there wasn’t a chance in hell he was going back to the Smithsonian.
Now — as his thoughts returned to the present and he circled the bed — Gideon began wondering how Glinn had managed to get hold of the complete engineering, wiring, and electrical diagrams of that security system. Here was every circuit, every sensor, every spec, spelled out in minute detail. Lot of good it was going to do him. He had never in his life seen a security system like this — he had never even imagined a security system like this. There were the usual multiple layers, redundant and hardened systems, backup power supplies, and everything a burglar might expect. But that was just the beginning.
The East Room itself was now, essentially, a vault. It had originally been constructed of double-laid walls of Vermont limestone block almost three feet thick. The single entry into the room came equipped with a divided steel pocket door that would drop down from the ceiling and rise up from the floor the instant an alarm was triggered, sealing the room. There were no windows anywhere, light being incompatible with the preservation of books. The vaulted ceiling was of poured reinforced concrete, incredibly thick. The floor was a massive slab of reinforced concrete, covered with marble. To all this original reinforcement had been retrofitted, at the Irish government’s request, an outer layer of steel plating and sensors.
At night, the room was completely sealed up. Inside, it was secured by crisscrossing laser beams, motion detectors, and infrared sensors of several wavelengths, including one that would pick up even the smallest hint of body heat. Quite literally, not even a mouse (and probably not even a cockroach) could move inside the room without being detected. There were cameras running day and night, the monitors staffed by highly trained, handpicked security guards of the highest caliber.
During the day, when the exhibition was open to the public, people had to leave behind all their bags and cameras and pass through a metal detector. There were guards inside and outside the hall, and more cameras than a Las Vegas casino. The cube in which the book sat contained an atmosphere of pure argon. Inside the cube were sensors that would immediately go off if they detected a whiff of any other atmospheric gas, even in levels as low as one part per million. If the book was disturbed, the steel doors would seal the room so quickly that not even an Olympic runner could carry it from the case to the exit before it shut.
For days, Gideon had looked for weaknesses in the system. All systems had vulnerabilities, and almost always those vulnerabilities were related either to human fallibility, to programming glitches, or to a system too complex to be completely understood. But the designers of this system had taken those limitations into account. While this system was indeed complex, it was modular, in the sense that each component was fairly simple and independent of the others. The programs were simple, and some layers of security were entirely mechanical, with no computerized controls at all. The redundancy was such that multiple systems could fail or be compromised without affecting the ultimate security of the book.