His Camaro.

  Screaming, he dropped the milk and stumbled backward. Cow juice splattered across the floor. Grabbing a cordless phone from its wall mount, he dialed wildly as he ran. Miles, bless him, was home.

  “ ’Lo?” his friend’s voice responded unassumingly.

  “Miles, it’s me! I thought maybe it was a dream. It’s not. It’s real. It’s alive.” Looking back over his shoulder he was relieved and almost surprised to see that the den was still empty. He’d half expected to see the car trailing him, pushing and shoving furniture aside like some gigantic chrome-and-steel dog, a big red metal tongue lolling from somewhere in the vicinity of the front grille. “Miles, I bought Satan’s Camaro!”

  Giving a bath to a two-hundred-pound mastiff is a project on the best of occasions. Trying to cradle a cell phone against one shoulder and maintain a conversation while wrestling said dog, shampoo, clumps of sodden dog hair, and brush in the other hand is truly a task that verges on the impossible. An octopus would have had difficulty attempting to manipulate everything. No cephalopod he, Miles was left to struggle against the soggy reality.

  “While I have you?” he replied snappishly, “thanks for the ride home yesterday. You know how many drivers will stop to pick up a lone teenage male hitchhiker after dark? Can you count to zero?”

  “Dude, I’m sorry, but listen.” Pressed against a wall in the hall, Sam kept peering fearfully around a corner in the direction of the kitchen. “My car, it stole itself. It went for a walk and now it’s back. It’s trying to kill me! I think—it wants my soul.”

  Hands full of giant wet dog, Miles still managed to shake his head sadly without losing control of the phone. “Whatever, dude. D’you have my crickets? I don’t like the way A-Rod is starting to look at my fingers.”

  The enormous mastiff let out a proportionate fart. Caught off-guard, a recoiling Miles fought to wave it away. “Mason, no! Bad dog! What’d you eat? You’ve been digging up dead things in the creek again. I own a freakin’ dog ghoul. Oh my God, I can’t see. Got an environmental disaster here, Sam—notify the EPA!”

  Sam looked to his right. No headlights stared in at him from the vicinity of the front door. The route was clear. For how long would it remain so? He had no intention of waiting around to find out. Steeling himself for the forthcoming dash, he whispered urgently into the phone. “Miles, I’m coming over. Don’t go anywhere.” Before his friend could reply (or object), Sam pushed the phone’s off button.

  He fled from the house. Lawn to the left of him, rosebushes to the right of him. Nothing materialized to contest his flight. Only when he burst out onto the front steps did he remember that his bike was locked up back in the garage. He’d put it there himself. After all, what did a man who owned a ’75 Camaro need with a bicycle? The only transportation in immediate reach was his mom’s bike. It was pink. There could be no more unequivocal proof of his desperate state of mind than the fact that despite its damning color he did not hesitate to pick it up, jump onto the saddle, and pedal madly away.

  The house was not very big and its location beneath one of the capital’s main bridges left a good deal to be desired, but at least it was a house and not a cookiecutter cubbyhole apartment or town house adrift in one of the city’s sprawling complexes. The yard could have used some weeding, and a paint job was a couple of years overdue, but otherwise it was well maintained. Better than some of the buildings in the same neighborhood. The taxi that pulled up in front of the modest out-of-the-way structure disgorged a single passenger before driving off.

  The fence was unlocked. Maggie could hear the TV braying loudly inside as she hurried up the steps. CNN’s coiffure-of-the-month was declaiming sonorously from the deck of an aircraft carrier. She was old enough to remember when it had been a news channel instead of just another commercial-focused entertainment spin-off. Still, it was the best of a bad assortment.

  “Jeffrey Abrams reporting, a hundred miles from the Yellow Sea,” the reporter was saying. As she approached the front door she decided that he spoke almost as if the news he was reporting was nearly as important as he was. Almost. “Though the North Korean government continues to deny any involvement in the unprovoked attack on a U.S. base in Qatar, they insist that continued aggressive American posturing in what they regard as their immediate theater of interest could lead to war. Meanwhile the Chinese military high command …”

  An irritated Glen Whitmann did his best to ignore the persistent ringing of the doorbell. He was deep into Warcraft and heavily engaged online with both allies and enemies. The wish-power he had accumulated, however, had no effect on the front door. The bell refused to shut up. Angrily he froze his positions, pushed aside a pile of empty burger wrappers, and headed for the front of the house, determined to see off whatever solicitor or lost soul was so insistent on interrupting his daily recreation.

  As soon as the door was halfway open Maggie pushed past him. Though she ignored the fact that he was dressed only in T-shirt and boxers that did not keep him from blushing.

  “Maggie, what …?”

  “Can I come in?” she asked, halfway to the kitchen.

  He whirled away from her, put his hands over his privates, decided that only served to draw further attention to his current state of dishabille, raised his palms, tried casually lowering one to the vicinity of his groin while offhandedly holding the other indifferently upright, and finally gave up and followed her, his escalating indignation outweighing his misplaced sense of modesty.

  “No—what? No.” He tried to intercept her, failed. “This is my private area back here.”

  A voice boomed in no-nonsense tones from the rear of the house. “GLEN, WHO IS IT?”

  He responded in kind—or at least as near to in kind as his less-well-developed vocal cords could manage. “HOLD ON, GRANDMA! IT’S NOTHING!” Apprehensively, his gaze returned to Maggie. “What’re you doing here?”

  She pivoted a quick circle, her expression reflecting her instant assessment of her present surroundings. It was not favorable. “You gotta help me with something.”

  His initial annoyance immediately gave way to a look of fear. He took a step back, his tone wary. “No, uh-uh. Been there, done that. I’m not getting fired for you.”

  “GLENNNN! GLENNY!” a voice for the ages (or at least for the TV age) thundered from somewhere off to the east.

  He looked worriedly toward the kitchen. “Leave, you’re giving the poor old woman a heart attack!”

  Clad in a bathrobe of Turkish cotton that only looked as if it dated from the time of the Ottoman Empire, curlers in her hair, face cream adorning her cheeks and forehead, the object of his concern strode into the front room. The woman favored the green-haired visitor with a brusque up and down before inquiring curtly, “Who’s she?”

  “No one, Grandma,” he replied soothingly. “Just a friend.”

  The old woman sniffed succinctly, snapped “Use a condom,” and turned to leave.

  He did not quite whine. “You’re like a scary, old public service announcement. Can’t you just go?”

  She disappeared into the next room—and just as abruptly popped her head back out. Her expression was dark, like a winter front rolling in off the Chesapeake.

  “Are you playing those video games again? You’re a grown man! Waste of time.”

  “It’s research,” he argued unconvincingly. “For my job!”

  Ignoring his shabby protestations, she nodded sharply in the direction of the TV. “Turn that off, I’ll make you a grilled cheese sandwich.” Her gaze swung sideways and came to rest on Maggie. “Does your girlfriend want one?”

  Glen spun a half circle, helplessly throwing his arms wide. “She’s not my—”

  “A grilled cheese sandwich would be awesome, Ms. Whitmann,” Maggie replied agreeably.

  Lowering both his head and his arms, utterly defeated, Glen made a last feeble attempt to assert at least a tiny bit of control. “And, uh, be sure to cut off the crusts.”

  Maggie smiled at him. “Compulsive-obsessive.”

  He shrugged weakly. “Maybe so—but it gets me grilled cheese sandwiches.”

  Behind them his grandmother coughed for attention, nodded in the direction of Maggie’s feet, and disappeared into the kitchen. Glen turned to face his guest.

  “Take off your shoes and stay on the plastic runners. Grandma’s weird about feet touching carpet.”

  She nodded as she reached down to remove first one shoe, then the other. “Mud?”

  He shook his head. “Microbes. Bugs. Anthrax spores.” He nodded in the direction of the kitchen. “She listens to too much news. Not good for a woman her age. Too unsettling.”

  “She doesn’t strike me as particularly unsettled.” Maggie took a seat on the couch. “Glen, we have to talk. No one’s better at signal decryption than you. You’re the only one genius enough to understand what I’m talking about.”

  His brows drew together as he stared back at her. “Did you just flatter me by flattering yourself? Woman manipulator! Out! Get out!”

  The neon-colored mini flash drive she pulled from her bag all but twinkled in the light from outside. Rising and coming toward him, she held it between thumb and forefinger as she waved it slowly back and forth, taunting him.

  “C’mon now, Glenny. ’Fess up. Don’t you wanna see something classified?”

  Hands held defensively in front of him, he backed away from her. “No. Yes. No.” He couldn’t take his eyes off the drive’s bright color. He was clearly struggling with his inner self—and he lost. Halting, he tried to analyze the drive with only his eyes. “Like how classified?” he inquired hungrily.

  She grinned broadly, waving it in his face. “Like I-could-go-to-jail-forever-if-I-show-you classified.” Withdrawing temptation, she slipped it back into her bag and gave a disarming shrug. “But that’s cool, whatever. I’ll show it to somebody else, get their opinion—”

  “Nonono, wait!” he pleaded, hating himself as badly as any addict reduced to imploring his dealer for a fix. “Maybe just a quick look at the file headings—”

  “Great,” she responded briskly, “let’s do it.” Batting aside his questing fingers she hurried over to his outsized computer complex and plugged the drive into the nearest USB slot. Eyes bugging, he started toward her, his tone verging on the hysterical.

  “DON’T TOUCH THAT!”

  Before he could reach her she had moved the mouse and the screensaver had appeared. He stopped dead, she stared. The image filling the screen was her, modeling for a calendar several years before, posing in a bathing suit while cuddling a pug dog. Leaning forward to block his view of the monitor, she turned to glare at him.

  “What is that doing on there?”

  He swallowed hard, forced a grin. “What? What’s your problem? I love pugs! Always have, always will—the cute little fellas. ’Course, Grandma won’t let me keep one in the house. Dirt, bugs—you know.”

  The concentrated bolts of destruction that leaped from her eyes might not have been detectable by ordinary means, but he felt their impact nonetheless. “Get it off before I tell your grandmother!”

  Easing her away from his keyboard he hastened to comply, wondering whether a quick death would be preferable at her hands or those belonging to his mother’s mother.

  Many years had passed since anyone knew exactly how many corridors there were in the Pentagon. It all depended on how you defined corridor versus accessway or chamber. At the moment, Keller was interested only in the one he was traversing, and in his intended destination. Though much younger than the secretary of defense, the aide who was accompanying him had to break into an occasional jog to keep up with his boss.

  “One of the special op’rs got a thermal snapshot of whatever it was that hit the base, but the imager was damaged in the subsequent firefight. We’re working on trying to recover the content now.” Before Keller could comment, they were intercepted by a breathless security agent.

  “Sir, we have a serious internal security issue. Severity has not been determined. But circle logs indicate that one of the analysts on site made a copy of the initial network intrusion signal.”

  Keller looked resigned. “Let me guess. Maggie Madsen?”

  The agent was suitably surprised. “Yessir. How’d you know?”

  A wan smile. “I’m psychic. It’s a secretary-of-defense thing. I suppose you’ve initiated an appropriate follow-up?”

  “Yessir. Standard procedure. As is letting you know.”

  Keller nodded. “Keep me informed. And please try not to shoot anybody until I’ve had a chance to talk to them.”

  Any other time, Maggie’s physical proximity as the two of them leaned close together to study the monitor would have jangled Glen Whitmann’s nervous system from head to foot. It was difficult to say whether it was to his credit or his detriment that he hardly noticed her nearness as he worked to decipher the information that was coming up on screen.

  He was duly impressed. “Never saw anything like this anywhere, ever. Signal strength’s through the roof. Through the roof and through the ionosphere.” He glanced sharply over at her. “Where’d you say you got it?”

  Somehow, her reply managed to be simultaneously informative and evasive. “This hacked the Military Air National Guard frequency in less than sixty seconds.”

  “No way,” he shot back.

  “Yeah, I know, been there already. No way, but there it is. You’re not the only one who’s never encountered anything like it. It’s driving everybody in cryptanalysis nuts trying to unravel just the core algorithms. Where could it have originated?”

  He shook his head in wonderment. “Artoo-Detoo?”

  “Seriously,” she chided him. “This is serious stuff, Glen.”

  “Artoo damn Detoo,” he reiterated, more forcefully this time. “How should I know?” He waved a hand at the impossibility being served up on the monitor. “I mean, it stinks visually of some kind of assembly code, but there’s an elegance to it no programmer could compile. It’s like—poetry.”

  She pursed her lips and considered a moment. When she spoke again her voice was devoid of sarcasm. “Just so one of us finally says it out loud, because it has to be said out loud—are we seriously talking about, like, a kind of alien machine communication here?”

  He didn’t miss a beat. “Who says life on other planets has to evolve with the carbon atom as its nexus? Why not silicon? Or a synthesis of both? Or something we can’t imagine because it’s—alien. Wait a minute.” Turning back to the monitor, he pushed his face as close as he dared to the continuously cycling recording. “Looks like—there’s something embedded in the signal. Chocolate chip in the middle of the cookie.”

  She joined him in staring. “Maybe it’s the file they hacked, locked in sequence. I know you can’t do anything with the rest of the noise—yet. But if that’s an identifiable human-sourced file, can you maybe open it?”

  He was already typing furiously, his fingers machine-gunning the keyboard as deftly as any concert pianist performing Rachmaninoff. He worked without looking up at her. “How’d you get into computers, anyway?”

  She shrugged. “Had a stutter when I was a kid. I was afraid to talk out loud. Keyboard did the talking for me. Didn’t make fun of me, didn’t point fingers, just did as I asked.” One cheek was starting to twitch: another memory from childhood. “Whatever, I don’t wanna talk about it.”

  “Too late,” he told her. “You shared.”

  She turned away from him, unhappy with herself. “Well, I take it back.”

  “You can’t.” He tried not to sound triumphant. “That’s why it’s called sharing. Hey …” He indicated the screen. Decoded, a file name appeared.

  PROJECT ICE MAN—TOP SECRET SCI—SECTOR SEVEN ACCESS ONLY

  They gazed at it together. The file title was simple and straightforward, and made not a whit of sense to either of them.

  “Project—Ice Man?” Maggie mumbled. It sounded like a title for a new Saturday-morning kids’ cartoon series, not something fit to draw the attention of National Security and hypothetical alien machines.

  Glen had moved on. “What’s Sector Seven? Sounds innocuous enough.” Skillfully, he worked the mouse. More information unscrolled on screen. Included among it was, insofar as they could tell from a quick overview, a complete history of Arctic exploration, including foreign sources as well as those in American English. He frowned. He knew all about Peary and Amundsen and Scott and especially Matthew Henson, but he’d never heard of the man who seemed to be repeatedly featured: a slightly addled-looking elder seaman.

  Peering over his shoulder, Maggie was equally puzzled. “I recognize the names of some of these other dead guys, but who’s Captain Archibald Witwicky?”

  Before they could discuss further the apparent importance of the unfamiliar sea captain, the front door flew open behind them and what seemed like an entire division of FBI agents burst into the house. Maggie and Glen found themselves thrown to the floor before they could voice so much as a hello. One agent efficiently secured her wrists behind her back with soft handcuffs as his partner stood over her and recited methodically.

  “Maggie Madsen, you have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.”

  Seeing Glen being treated even more roughly off to her right started her screaming. “He’s not a part of this! It’s me, all me!”

  “What is this?” Glen tried to protest. “Do you have a warrant? What’s going on?” A higher voice, stemming from a higher power, reached him where he lay on the floor. It emanated from the vicinity of the kitchen. “Grandma, it’s okay, calm down!” Try though he might, however, there was no moderating the agitation in that rising bellow.