He had turned himself into an expert on all relevant aspects of the forensic engineering of underground excavations in rock and soil, including the probabilistic modelling of bomb damage to tunnel linings, and the technical prediction and assessment of property damage caused by vibration.
People in the real world—engineers and insurance companies—did this for a living but for Jax it was a mission. If he had wanted to apply himself commercially, there would have been firms all over the world who would have snapped him up, despite his eccentricities. He knew who they were, since he’d hacked into them all.
To complete the picture, according to his blog, Jax had scoped out the entire subway network taking countless trips himself—his charged-up Metrocard had bought him trips up and down every line, at least twice, and he personally visited every station, taking as many photographs and videos as he could without arousing uneasy eyes. After Najibullah Zazi was arrested for trying to blow up the subway himself, Jax assumed as low a profile as he could while still needing to collect data, and took to using his mobile phone to take his shots, simultaneously pretending to be talking on it.
The kind ladies in the New York Transit Museum had even made him coffee while they helped locate old dusty drawings for him. Jax had been thorough.
Even on Jax’s short-lived trip to London, all expenses paid, he’d completed the entire circuit of the Underground, but this time took no photos; Londoners were even more suspicious than New Yorkers—for good reason; terrorists had targeted their subway repeatedly. But they had been amateurs, Jax had heartlessly thought, so engrossed was he in his own plans to subvert them.
He’d spent hours in the London Transport Museum, located in the former Flower Market in Covent Garden, perusing relevant photographs and drawings and further updating his London computer model.
What a mine of information for terrorists Jax had found there, Isis marvelled: 80,000 historic engineering drawings including the original signed plans for several of the stations and tunnels. How crazy was the free world?
Jax hadn’t yet done his step-through scouting of Washington DC’s Metro. He’d temporarily put it on hold after public sensitivity and security were heightened in October 2010 when an FBI sting operation uncovered a ham-fisted terror plot to blow it up with wheelie bags, and he hadn’t got around to finishing it.
According to Jax’s logs, said Isis, the part Jax got the most thrill out of was sitting on a bench in Central Park and hacking into the municipal archives in London, Washington DC and New York to steal the actual detailed blueprints of their subway systems, including pinpoint precision data. That way he could overlay them onto his computer model. With New York, Jax couldn’t believe his luck. The City’s Office of Emergency had set up the Public Safety Geographic Information System (GIS) Data Development Centre to collect and organise geospatial data, and they’d already GIS-converted the architectural drawings for all 468 subway stations. The revised data sets displayed the precise locations and sizes of all tunnels, exits, including emergency exits for evacuations, and information on hidden spaces like storage and equipment rooms, corridors, and other sealed-off areas. Hacking into that had been a dream come true.
Incredibly, in just five months working alone—excluding his time at Princeton—Jax had developed workable, shockwave simulations for both New York and London, simulations that Isis described as chillingly accurate, and he had been partway with Washington DC when he was cut short.
The part Jax laboured over for the longest time was the most trivial, as it usually is: showing how clever he was by creating the glitzy, almost movie-quality computer graphics and animated video drama, which Isis was now playing to the team. “He made it to present his case as powerfully as possible,” said Isis, “to convince sceptics not just with cold facts and threats but, according to one of his blogs, to ‘scare them shitless’. But as we know, he had spent so much time on his simulation, he had only just started contacting those in authority and, fortunately for us, his letters, emails and videoclips had only got to minor officials who’d all dismissed him as a crackpot.”