“Right, Tony.”

  “I shouldn’t tell you this because there is money in it. A lot of money. And I’ve got a lot to gain by that, so I am not an objective witness here. Bearing that in mind.”

  Van nodded silently.

  “The KH-13,” Tony said.

  A spy satellite. “I’ve heard of it,” Van said.

  “It is an overengineered, sorry-ass piece of junk.”

  “I heard that, too.”

  “Two years behind schedule. Way over budget, hundreds of millions. A launch weight over seven thousand pounds, so it won’t even fit in a standard Titan booster. They cheated DeFanti on that one. The KH-13 is the only U.S. spy satellite in orbit that doesn’t have Tom’s imaging chips. Tom got beat out in the bidding, and you know, that was a crooked deal, but that’s a long story . . . The point is, they are bureaucrats. And they tried to make a new-model spy satellite. They tried to do that and they screwed it up bad, Van. Now, DeFanti could have pulled that stunt off, because he always had this really tight crew of top people—”

  “Really quiet,” said Van. “Really quick. And always on time. Top people, but maybe ten percent of the number of technicians that anybody else would use.”

  Tony put his shot glass on the limo’s hanging board. “Yeah. I never thought of it quite that way, but yeah, that’s exactly how that worked.”

  “So what is the problem?”

  “They farmed out the new KH-13 to this bunch of crooked fat cats. So right when America really needs fresh eyes in space, we are screwed. They managed to launch exactly one KH-13, and the stupid bastard is on the blink. It is way too sophisticated and overfeatured, especially in the infrared cameras. The KH-13 is supposed to be able to spot muzzle flashes in real time from automatic weapons in terrorist training camps. That is a crazy thing to ask from a satellite. And whose fault is it that the project is so screwed up? It’s anybody’s fault! Anybody but the almighty Air Force and the NRO! They are looking for somebody to hang it on. They need a fall guy.”

  Why was Tony telling him this? “Tony, I’m in cyberspace, not outer space.”

  “There is this guy, Michael Hickok.”

  Van waited. Here came the rest of it, then.

  “Hickok is this black-bag guy who did a lot of dirty work overseas. Chechnya, Central Asia, Kazakhstan where the launch pads are . . . Hickok’s a mercenary. The guy is up for anything. He’s been hired to find some political cover. So you know what the spin is now? It’s all a ‘software problem,’ Van.”

  “Ah-ha.” Van scowled. “Blame the coders for it. Blame the geeks.”

  “Hickok is going door-to-door looking for somebody to pin that satellite’s problem on. Don’t let that be you. Okay? Because your new outfit is getting some real credibility in the code world. That means that incompetent people will try to drop all their crap problems on you. From a great, great political height.”

  “Tony, we’re not looking for any satellite problems at the CCIAB. Trust me here, we’ve got our own problems to hack and plenty of them.”

  “Van, look out the window, okay? This is Washington! You don’t get the luxury of minding your own business in this town. The KH-13 is political. It is the kind of problem that comes looking for you.”

  Van thought this statement over. It had the ugly smack of authenticity.

  “So here it comes, straight at me and my people, that’s what you’re telling me?”

  Tony had turned his face to the passing streetlights. “There’s not much I can do for him now, but Tom DeFanti was my people, and Tom DeFanti was the spy-sat business. So I know that problem’s coming for you.”

  Van considered this. “But what if I can fix it?”

  Tony was at a loss for words. “Okay,” he said at last. “If it really was just a software problem, yeah, you would probably be the guy who could fix that. But that is not the problem at all. The KH-13 is a boondoggle from start to finish. The U.S. had a huge lead in spy-sats. Nobody ever figured we would really need much better ones. The spy-sat contractors had the fix in, they had themselves a sweet racket. Now they have a flying gold-plated Cadillac with an engine that is Detroit junk. You wanna fix something? Go fix Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics.”

  “Okay, Tony. I hear you.”

  “You’re a pretty good guy, Van, but you’re not up for fixing the military-industrial complex. I’m not trying to tell you to rush out there with guns blazing and bring me some justice. I would never ask that of you, man. I’m just warning you to duck. That’s all I have to say.”

  “Thanks for the heads-up, Tony. I don’t forget stuff like this.”

  “I really shouldn’t have told you that, Van. You are not properly cleared. We could go to jail for that.”

  Van sighed. “Tony, we’re not going to jail. We are going bowling.”

  “Right.”

  “We went bowling together. That is all we did.”

  “Absolutely, man. Totally. Swear it in court.”

  “And you told me all about your hot date with this Indian actress.”

  “Oh, yeah, she’s an actress,” Tony agreed. Tony was much improved now. “But you know, Van, the actress part is kind of the least of her.”

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION, JANUARY 2002

  Jeb’s effort to assemble a federal security consensus had its thornier side. Washington’s political establishment cared little for computers. They were completely obsessed with aircraft flight safety. To Van, this strategy made no sense. It was typical of panicky amateurs who couldn’t think through security issues from a sensible engineering perspective.

  Obviously, al Qaeda was not going to repeat their September 11 airplane attack. Terrorists never did that. The element of surprise was vital to them. No crew or passengers on earth would ever again surrender an airplane to attackers armed with razor blades. Not when it was obvious that everyone inside the airplane was going to die.

  Logically, it was both useless and impossibly expensive to try to protect airlines from razor blades. The airlines would go broke trying that stunt. It was also beside the point. Airports everywhere were still selling liquor bottles. Any hijacker with a liquor bottle had a big glass club full of flammable liquid that could be turned into a deadly glass dagger with one good whack on a bulkhead. A fifth of Jack Daniel’s made a much worse weapon than a tiny boxcutter. Where were the priorities here? Why hadn’t someone thought that through?

  Still, Van could understand why politicians obsessed about plummeting airplanes. A falling airplane was one of the few weapons that could kill a large crowd of politicians inside Washington.

  So the CCIAB was willing to swallow that foolishness, for the sake of political need—but it got worse. If terrorists really did want to use airplanes to assault a center of government, then civilian passenger airliners were a lousy choice for that kind of attack. Civilian airliners were way too slow, too well policed, and had too many witnesses and busybodies on board. The ideal flying assassination weapon for kamikaze terrorists would be a private business jet. Their crews were small, and such jets were easy to steal from a hangar. Then the stolen jet could be packed with explosives, Oklahoma City style. It was a matter of simple physics, obvious once you worked it all out on paper. Stolen business jets were sure to hit much harder, faster, and more effectively than the September 11 passenger planes.

  But while Joe and Jane Consumer were having their shoes x-rayed at the airport, nobody in federal security was doing anything useful about the stark threat posed by private jets. Private jet owners were America’s richest people. Nobody in Congress dared to offend them.

  American rich people were too rich to get treated like terrorists. Even though Osama bin Laden was plenty rich, and probably the world’s best terrorist ever. Shoko Asahara, the nerve-gas yoga mastermind, was so rich he could afford private helicopters. If anybody was a serious terrorist security problem, it was rogue rich people.

  However, this huge gap in America’s air defenses hadn’t escaped the attention of the Air Force Office of Experimental Avionic Research in Colorado Springs. These guys, who had the sexy military-style acronym AFOXAR, had been working on the problem with some quiet help from NASA and DARPA. Their first conversion target was the BBJ, Boeing Business Jet, the largest and therefore most dangerous aircraft of the American private jet fleet. Their scheme was to come up with a small, secret autopilot that could be quietly installed inside jets and then triggered remotely during emergencies. Then the autopilot would guide the plane and its baffled terrorists right back to earth, and the waiting arms of fully informed police.

  This scheme sounded simple enough, but the devil was in the details. Remote control of flying jets posed many daunting challenges, but one of the worst was the software. Because, if some clever hacker ever took over the control system itself, then all of America’s private jets could be turned instantly into remote-control flying bombs.

  The AFOXAR guys had done a lot of career work on remote-controlled surveillance drones. They truly got it about air control and avionics problems, but serious network security was beyond their reach. Jeb had taken on the software problem for AFOXAR, because it was politically useful for the CCIAB to have a hand-in with homeland aircraft security. Though it made little sense from a technical perspective, it would get the attention of congressmen.

  Van’s Grendel project had stabilized for the time being, so Van found himself tasked with retrofitting secure spy-satellite controls for use within private jets. Van doubted that this project was likely to thrive—it would only stay sexy as long as there were headlines about hijackers—but Van was not his own boss. Besides, once he looked at the technical details, it turned out to be very interesting technical work with broad applications.

  After all, spy satellites were remote-controlled flying objects. They also had some very well-tested crypto communications protocols.

  Van had never expected outer space to be so rich in supersecret high technology, but in point of fact, it was fascinating.

  For some forty years an incredible variety of adversaries had tried to “spoof” American satellites. To hack and “own” a supersecret American KH-11 Keyhole or Aquacade in orbit—that would be a huge accomplishment in espionage, a much bigger deal than Falcon, or Snowman, or Jonathan Pollard. Huge enemy effort had been wasted in this. Nobody—not the Chinese, not the Russians, not even the French or the British—had ever touched America’s supreme technical command of telemetry, systems acquisition, phase-locked carrier tracking loops, phase-coherent tracking, and stochastic integro-differential hybrid multichannel carriers.

  Van was truly in his element with this part of his new assignment, and he really enjoyed his briefings. Van was way beyond a mere “Top Secret” clearance now—he had achieved ratings like “Executive Gamma” and “NKR,” where his briefing material was brought to him by the hands of couriers, on flimsy, easy-burning sheets of typewritten onionskin.

  The grumpy, reluctant NSA and NRO techs hated telling Van anything. Their stovepipe was melting awfully. They were dropping their pants and revealing their family jewels. The NSA satellite geeks came from some strange parallel world of computation where everything important had been invented in the 1960s by forty thousand mathematicians under a big hill in Maryland. Van felt a strange respect for them—not for the modern NSA guys, who were sort of lost and snooty and owlish, but for the amazing Cold War rocket state of his grandfather’s generation. A lost empire of truly macho engineering, where America’s best tech guys just sort of rolled up their sleeves, lit an unfiltered Camel, and detonated hydrogen bombs.

  Van had lost a personal fortune while working for the CCIAB, but there was no question that he was learning incredible stuff. The NSA was a mystery even to the people who worked inside it. Their secret spy feats were the stuff of distant, mist-shrouded legends.

  Before their first spy satellites were ever launchable, American spies had used eavesdropping balloons. They’d sprayed toxic metal clouds into the sky that reflected Soviet radio signals from far over the horizon. Fewer and fewer government veterans still remembered any of this stuff. Huge bursts of top-secret ingenuity had just plain been forgotten. It had been nailed into wooden crates and lost inside some warehouse, like the Ark of the Covenant in Indiana Jones.

  The remote-control code that Van was now examining was a direct descendant of that mythical era. It wasn’t native computer code, it was space-machine code. His own grandfather had probably had something to do with developing this stuff, as he worked on that lost 1960s cruise missile. It was a living space-age fossil. It was code built entirely for electronic spying, electronic spacecraft, and electronic Cold Warfare. It had crept into the modern cyber-world like a digital trilobite.

  Still, nobody had ever broken it, because the math behind it was rock-solid. So, Van and his clients in AFOXAR now faced the serious technical challenge of repurposing this satellite control code for use in aircraft. And not normal, everyday aircraft, either. Very fast, low-flying aircraft, stolen or hijacked, skimming the hilltops to stay off Air Force radar, as they zoomed toward the White House or Capitol with a bellyfull of terrorist explosives.

  The likeliest engineering solution looked like a geosynchronous aircraft-control super-satellite somehow hooked into the satellite GPS system. This was a typically bloated Pentagon-style solution that would pull down sixty billion and take a generation to design, build, and implement. Van was hoping for something much quicker and quieter that might be delivered before he died of old age.

  He figured the CCIAB’s best approach was to repeat a Grendel-style success. Make one working model as a proof-of-concept, and just install it somewhere in somebody’s jet. The AFOXAR guys were pressuring NASA and Boeing to get them a nice handy jet they could wreck. AFOXAR guys were a small gang of young engineers that nobody had heard of, but they didn’t brag much, they worked fast, and they were very can-do.

  Van was in his tiny Vault office, deeply engrossed in this problem, when Fawn came swooning past his tangerine-colored cubicle divider. “Ohmigod, it’s him! He’s here. Elvis is here. Elvis is asking for you!”

  “Who?” said Van. He was no longer even a little startled when Fawn said something apparently insane. Fawn Glickleister was not crazy. She was just so intensely bright that she cut into reality at a sharp angle.

  “It’s that tall dark handsome dude with that secure briefcase strapped to his arm. He’s waiting out in the corridor, Van. He needs to consult with us!”

  Van came to full alert. “That guy doesn’t look much like Elvis.”

  “Well he’s Southern,” Fawn gushed. “He feels like Elvis. He’s just like Bill Clinton that way. Ohmigod, he is such a dreamboat, Van. He’s the hottest guy in the Vault.”

  “What is it with you, Fawn? Get a grip.”

  “Let’s investigate him!”

  “Show him in here.” Van nodded. His code-wearied brain could use the break.

  Elvis shouldered his way into Van’s tight cement warren. He was wearing a black blazer and a white polo shirt and gray pants and black shoes. Elvis had changed out of his gym clothes, Van thought. This clearly implied that he could unlatch himself from that briefcase somehow.

  Van offered Elvis the Leap Chair and sat on the ripply edge of his plastic computer desk. The Vault cells were so small that it was like meeting a guy inside a photography booth. “I’m Dr. Vandeveer,” Van offered. “What can we do you for?”

  Elvis crushed Van’s hand with a Right Stuff handshake. “I’m Michael Hickok.”

  Van’s crushed hand flew straight to his beard. He stroked it thoughtfully. Hickok didn’t seem to notice his shock. After a moment, Van had steadied himself. So here he was at last then, Michael Hickok, that hustler, that ruthless mercenary, showing up at the office like a bad penny. Jeez, no wonder Hickok never took that briefcase off—he was wandering around just like that lost atomic lunatic in Repo Man. A cynical operator with a thirteen-billion-dollar political liability that he was trying to dump on the first available sucker. And he’d already successfully put the charm on Van’s naive young secretary. If Tony Carew hadn’t bent the rules to warn him . . .

  “Nice to meet you,” Van lied.

  “Doc, I’m told you’ve been cleared Executive Gamma,” said Hickok.

  “That’s true. We do some satellite work here at the CCIAB. Communications software and protocols.”

  “I can’t understand that sort of thing myself,” drawled Hickok. “But my employers are real, real anxious to have some experts doctor their sick bird.”

  “I see.” Van was fully prepared to lower the boom on the guy. Close up and in person, though, Hickok gave off the spooky vibe of a Delta Force karate master. It looked like he could break every object in the room with his bare feet.

  Why rush anything? Van thought. Surely it would be much cagier to study Hickok’s technique. Politely lure him in with a pretense of innocent cooperation. “So tell me about it.”

  Hickok reached into his pocket and removed a lethal-looking folding knife with a dangling set of keys. “I’ll have to open this secure briefcase now.”

  Van glanced up. “Scram, Fawn.”

  Fawn’s eager face fell. Fawn was not cleared Executive Gamma. “But . . .”

  “Shut the door, and shut the outer door. Stand in the hall. If you see anybody strange, let me know right away.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Fawn, who never called him “sir.” She left.

  Hickok opened the briefcase with a small gray key. The case held a set of common-looking Pentagon-style folders, the sort used for weapons procurement programs. Van had seen more than his share of these Pentagon folders lately. Through fifty years of military bureaucratic ritual, the Pentagon had created its own unique paperwork style, with everything initialized through chains of superior officers, and documented in quintuplicate.

  Van recognized the folders he was confronting as a classic “Pearl Harbor file.” Whenever a big-ticket project went sour, paperwork escalated as the guilty parties tried to cover their asses from the investigation that they knew was coming. The folders began to bulge, dent, and rip. There was wear and tear as the evidence got tossed from hand to hand like a hot potato.