Sam Fisher- Voodoo Dust

  He walked to the end of the passage and stopped before the last door, where he crouched. From a pouch on his calf he withdrew a thumb-size cylinder of compressed air topped with an articulated and long-stemmed nozzle like those found on cans of WD-40.

  Inside, suspended within the compressed air, were thousands of RFID (radio frequency identification) chips, each the size of a grain of sand—essentially RFID powder. Miracles of miniaturization, RFID chips had initially been designed for loss prevention in U.S. retail stores. Each product gets an adhesive tag into which RFID powder has been embedded and each chip, or grain, is equipped with 128-bit ROM, or read-only memory, onto which a unique identification number has been engraved by an electron beam. When a chip, or a sprinkling of chips, comes within range of a detector, the ID number is read and verified as purchased or not yet purchased.

  For Fisher’s purposes, the good folks at DARPA had taken the RFID powder concept one step further, first by coating each chip’s surface with a silicate that acted much like a cocklebur that attached itself to anything and everything, and second by affixing to each grain an external antenna—a tiny ribbon of wire half an inch long and barely the width of a human hair—that extended the chip’s transmission range to twenty feet.

  As usual, of course, Fisher hadn’t liked DARPA’s official name for the RFID powder, which contained so many letters and numbers it looked like a calculus equation gone wrong, and had renamed it Voodoo Dust.

  He pointed the canister at the deck before the door and pressed the nozzle. He heard a faint pfft. He backed down the passage, pausing at each door to coat the deck with the powder until he reached the janitor’s closet, where he turned around, walked to the opposite end of the passage, and then repeated the process, back-stepping until he’d covered each doorway and returned to the closet. He opened the door, slipped inside, and shut it behind him. On the OPSAT, he zoomed and rotated the Gosselin’s blueprint until the passageway filled the screen; there, in the black deck space between two notional bulkheads, were several dozen tiny blue dots, each one pulsing ever so slightly. Each dot, he knew, represented roughly one hundred RFID chips. The dots were spread down the passageway, three or four of them per door.

  Into the SVT, he said, “Paint job done. Shake the tree.”
...

  Fisher withdrew the flexicam and studied the OPSAT’s screen. Most of the blue RFID dots remained in the passageway, but four of them—about four hundred chips—had done their job and clung to the shoes of Stewart’s captor. The dots were moving aft and down. All hail the Voodoo Dust, Fisher thought.

- Fallout, Chapter 14