“No kidding.”

  “Indians can do all kinds of cool things with jets once they’re free of the good old FAA regulations. For those village voters in India, a jet like this is pure stage magic. They’ll paint her green, white, and saffron. Dress her up like a sacred cow on parade. They can fill the fuel tank with luminescent sparkles and outdo the Navy Blue Angels. Her best days are all ahead of her.” Tony patted the instrument panel, his face tinged with sadness in the glow of the altimeter dials.

  “Why did you sell your jet?”

  “Why else? I had to. In some other, better world I’m just a dashing tramp flyboy, Van. Maybe I do some milk runs from Bombay to Dubai. I fill this bird up with gold chains and bangles. I settle accounts with some hawala guys and then I can buy another plane. That’s how they finance Bollywood movies . . . but, you know, come on. That’s a mug’s game, it’s the smuggler’s blues, right? That kind of life doesn’t push the high-tech edge.”

  Tony leaned forward in his pilot’s seat. “There are only sixty-one of these babies in service in the whole world. And I have the only one that can be flown off a Web page.” Tony held up a clipboard. “Really. I mean, here’s tonight’s little flight plan, okay? Twenty minutes, and it’s almost all automated.”

  Van rubbed at his twitching cheek. All automated? No, not exactly. The exact situation involved Michael Hickok standing outside in the gently gathering Virginia darkness with a portable plastic gizmo frankly based on a Nintendo control joystick. Nintendo joysticks worked great, actually. They were extremely dependable interface devices.

  The engines began to roar.

  “Van, in politics, people need a damn show!” Tony shouted. “And that’s just what we’re gonna deliver. Think of the takeaway sound bite we’re giving these guys! ‘I went to Virginia and Derek Vandeveer grabbed a jet plane right out of the sky!’ ”

  Van stared at him.

  “You know what I like best about this remote-control rig of yours?” Tony bellowed over the engines. “That it’s all invisible! I mean, if we didn’t know better, we’d think we were haunted by spooks!”

  Tony sent the plane into a taxi run. The engines drank fuel and they picked up speed in a hurry.

  The jet left the tarmac. They were airborne.

  “No freight load,” said Tony as the roar of takeoff faded. “She’s light as a feather with just you and me on board. Stop looking so freaked, Van. I’m telling you, this is totally a picnic. We could go in the back and watch stag films.”

  Van found his voice. “I don’t think stag films will go over real well inside India.”

  “People are the same all over, Van. I mean, just maybe, you live in a nation of rich maharajas, influence peddlers, crooked elections, and corrupt accountants. With big software industries, and huge gaps between the superrich and the underclass. Where son follows father in political dynasties, hassled by Moslem terrorists. Is that your country? Really, pick any two.”

  The jet began to bank. Van sneaked a look out the flat black pane of the window. Maybe he was going to survive this.

  “Let me show you something really cool here,” said Tony, scrabbling under his seat. “Look, the pilot’s got his own gun.” He produced a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson revolver. “Boy, a pilot with a gun, that makes you feel a lot safer, right?”

  “Put that away, Tony.”

  “It’s never loaded,” Tony assured him. “Bullets equal zero.” He tucked the weapon back in its holster. “But they always ask me about that now. They do, I swear. I’ve got, like, fifteen Taiwanese chip executives in here for a dirty weekend in Bangkok, and it’s like: ‘Does our pilot have a pistol in the cockpit?’ Like what, you Chinese businessmen are aching to polish each other off inside the fuselage? The world has gone nuts, Van. It’s like we’re all under a curse.”

  The plane bounced twice, violently. The engines whined.

  “This must be the good part of tonight’s show,” said Tony. He took his hands from the controls. “We just got fake-hijacked in mid-air, right in front of your adoring crowd.” For the first time, Tony clicked his seat belt.

  “So,” said Tony, stretching, “tell me about your next big step, career-wise.”

  “I don’t know,” Van told him. “I think I might move out to Colorado with Dottie.”

  Tony was astonished. “What? You’re gonna waste time out there with my little telescope? Didn’t you hear those clowns yelling and cheering at that banquet? Man, you can have any post you want!”

  “I don’t know what that was even about.”

  The plane went into a terrifying sideways slide. Van clutched at his armrests, heart hammering.

  “Do I have to spell it out to you in words of one syllable?” Tony said, unperturbed. “I guess I do, huh? Van, you are their hero.”

  “Huh?”

  “You’re their man, Van. You’re their ball-breaker, you’re their kick-ass guy. What cyberwar people want more than anything in the world is a geek who is genuinely tough. Did you see any ‘Cyberspace Force’ people in there at that meeting? Did you wonder why not?”

  The plane leveled out. Then, sickeningly, it began to climb.

  Tony glanced at his clipboard. “I’m loving these AFOXAR kids. They’ve got brio. No, Van, the unlikely attempt of Colorado Springs to become the computer-security capital of the visible universe, whoa, that has come to sudden grief. Word got around. When I found out my pal was in a damn hospital, I made some words move around. To the President’s political adviser, specifically. He’s a busy guy, but he didn’t mind when I gave him just a few words: ‘illegal bug,’ ‘National Security Council,’ ‘rogue operation inside Washington,’ some words like that. Major General Wessler has got himself a brand-new field assignment. General Wessler is going to be sucking brown dust in Mesopotamia.”

  The plane dipped violently. Tony whooped in glee. “And that Cyberspace Force, who had such nice brochures . . . They are not even an idea now. They are not even the idea of an idea. They are buried like Pompeii under eighteen solid meters of volcanic ash. What happened there, huh? Dr. Vandeveer happened, that’s what.”

  “Look,” Van protested, “I know that you told me to stay away from that satellite . . .”

  “I know, I know, Jeb was real ambitious. You guys just couldn’t stay out of the loop on the KH-13. But let me tell you how all that plays to the people at this event, Van. How it looks is, the Cyberspace Force went down and dirty on you, and the CCIAB went down and dirty right back. And there was some kind of encounter. And you came back from that, and your boss kisses you in public. And they don’t come back, and their boss gets broken like a breadstick. So everyone claps real loud for you. They clap till their hands get sore. Because they are terrified of you, man. You are their stud cyberwar general. You are the geek who killed and ate some real military. You rock.”

  “That’s not at all how it really was.”

  Tony sighed. “Who even cares? You’re never going to tell them the truth about beating up some wacky little soldier inside your apartment. And neither am I, or anybody else, ever. The point is that a cyberwar needs heroes. There aren’t a lot of cyber-heroes around. In fact, you’re pretty much the only one in the world.”

  The ground was coming up outside the window. “Michael Hickok wasn’t like you said he was, either, Tony. What you said about Hickok was all hype. I hired that guy.”

  “Van, that was okay, too. I still think that guy is evil, but if Hickok chose to jump ship and join your side, then he’s smarter than I thought. Hickok is a goon, but if he’s your goon, that’s terrific. I can trust your judgment there. When it comes to cyberwar, you’re the best around. Really. You just are.”

  Van wiped sweat from his forehead. “Tony, why are you angling this?”

  “Because your scene is where the action is, brother. This event of yours has been very good to me. The Internet boom is history, but there’s still money in security, and there will be a lot more once people knuckle down and shape up. Thanks to you, a ten-billion-dollar boondoggle is finally on the ropes. That KH-13 is facing cancellation. And that is great news. It’s a new day now. We’re gonna put that kind of bureaucratic bloat behind us, and move right on. Nobody cares about gold-plated Cadillac satellites in a real shooting war. It’s all about rapid point-and-shoot now, that’s the new trend. It’s all about Predators. And, Van, you and I just proved to everybody watching us that we can turn Boeing’s biggest private business jet into a giant remote-control Predator. I’m a very proud and happy guy to know you, Dr. Vandeveer. This is working out brilliantly.”

  The jet touched down. It jounced violently and became airborne again. Luggage compartments flapped open and there was a distant crashing from the galley. Then the wheels hit with a screech.

  The end of the runway rushed upon them. Straps bit into Van’s chest and gut.

  The jet stopped. The engines died. Hot metal cooled and ticked.

  “Yahoo,” Tony murmured. “Yahoo-dot-com.”

  Floodlights flicked over the runway. Van saw to his horror that an enthusiastic crowd was surging toward the plane. Tony laughed aloud. “Van, look at ’em! You are a movie star!”

  “I’ll have to give them some kind of speech,” Van realized.

  “Van, a great tech demo can save any situation. And you just gave them one. This is a victory speech. I’ll jot you down a couple talking points.”

  Van was awake inside the Lake Cottage. He felt too elevated to sleep.

  Dottie was sleeping in the featherbed. A tendril of brown hair was glued to her forehead with sweat. The woman should never take Dramamine and also drink white wine, thought Van kindly. It really made her manic.

  So funny that Tony Carew somehow imagined that his actress girlfriend was his wild angel. That woman was playing a phony role, that was obvious. While Dottie, who had been married to him for ten years, had found her inner tigress.

  Van had never imagined Dottie for a gossip, but it seemed that her work in public relations had turned her head around. In just one evening mingling with the Joint Summit crowd, Dottie had wormed out a host of inside stories that Van had never heard or even dreamed of. This stuff was all cocktail blather, obviously, but it was about himself.

  People from outside the CCIAB had notions about him that were wildly divorced from reality. They knew that he lived in a slum, but they thought he had chosen to live there because he liked to beat up crooks. People thought he had a black belt in Tae Kwon Do. They knew for a fact that he carried a high-tech gun. He was supposed to be hacking into foreign computers every week. He was recruiting Special Forces people, breaking into terrorist facilities and installing Trojan Horses and fatal viruses. Also, supposedly, he was having an affair with Fawn.

  This bizarre tittle-tattle might have upset Van, except that Jeb was catching it even worse. Jeb had a whole set of legends attached to him, like a shark followed by remora fish. Jeb had heart arrhythmias. He had advanced diabetes. He’d had a fistfight with Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice had had to break it up (this was the best story, actually). Jeb got anxious phone calls three times a day from Larry Ellison. Jeb had a Republican Party slush fund. Jeb had hired Cuban exiles to wiretap the French Embassy. Jeb was addicted to Halcion pills. Jeb was secretly gay.

  He, Derek R. Vandeveer, had become the toughest, scariest cyberwarrior in Washington. It made Van wonder if he had ever understood anything about any other human being in his life. Was he delusional? Maybe, when it came to computers, everyone in the world was delusional.

  On a number of occasions, Van had met the President of the United States. This poor guy even had his own military acronym: POTUS. In real life, Van had met an affable Texan baseball fan in his fifties who liked nothing better than eating pretzels and watching a few innings on the ol’ boob tube. He had twin teenage daughters who gave him a lot of grief. This was the President of the United States. Somehow this was the very same guy as the remorseless military war chief who was relentlessly crushing the world’s most feared and respected mountain bandits.

  And now he had even met James Cobb. Van opened his laptop bag and retrieved Cobb’s business card. For Van, this had been the true highlight of the Virginia Summit. It had moved him deeply that a man he had once idolized had recognized him as a colleague.

  Up popped Cobb’s Web site. It wasn’t a site at all, just a series of retrievable files, like in the good old days when the ARPANET had been the info highway for engineers. No spam then. No porn. No commerce. No viruses. The watering hole for tech wizards. ARPA, Stanford, MIT. Bolt Beranek and Newman. UCLA, Xerox PARC, IBM, and RAND. Those were just labels really. Labels for the same few dozen tech guys, little teams of ten and twenty scientists, nice and quiet, really quick, supplying what was needed whenever the need came up . . .

  All those Cobb papers from the seventies and eighties . . . In his heyday, the guy was publishing like crazy. He was throwing off ideas like a blowtorch spat out sparks. Conference proceedings on three different continents. James Cobb was literally all over the map. Not just in one discipline, either. Cobb was making connections that no one before him had ever thought to make. He was using systems analysis and information theory to slice through the rest of human knowledge like a layer cake. It was like he had three brains inside one head.

  Van could still remember the mind-blown tingle he and Tony Carew had felt in their MIT dorm as they looked through Cobb’s work. They would sit up together at night, getting steadily drunker on the new intellectual frontiers this guy was violently forcing open . . .

  And in looking at the papers, Van realized with an adult shock that most of them had gone nowhere at all. Cobb had had a whole lot of really sexy notions that just did not play out in the real world. Van himself was older now. He could recognize the work of Cobb’s youth as a young man’s fancies.

  Van had a further insight. It crept up on him like a kind of dread. For the first time, he recognized a kind of emotional distress in what Cobb had done. These ideas were not just freely pouring out of Jim Cobb. They had been squeezed out of him. There was something primal and animalistic about Cobb’s huge burst of creativity. Maybe it had satisfied him, maybe he took pride in it, but his act of mastery had hurt him, it had cost him. James Cobb had paid a human price for his science. He had paid some pitiful, heavy dues, like a master of the blues guitar.

  Van looked at his watch. It was almost 2:00 A.M. Suddenly he wanted to drop everything. He wanted to seek out Jim Cobb as he slept in his Erlette House room. He wanted to wake Cobb up, to tell him that he had achieved enlightenment. He was no longer a student. He truly understood. He wanted to become the man’s friend.

  Van looked at the computer screen, his heart thudding with inspiration. Of course he could not find Cobb’s peaceful room, pound the door in, and wake him up, shouting frantically. No, that would be senseless. He would send Cobb a professional e-mail. Nothing frantic, nothing weird and geeky. The master addresses his fellow master. Very cool. Very considerate.

  A technical note. That would do it. Something that he and Cobb could share together. Co-authoring a new paper, maybe. Wow. A great idea, that would be fantastic. After all, the guy had practically invited Van to help him. He could breathe fresh life into something that Cobb had left on the side of the road. It would be like a Festschrift tribute. That should be easy. There was so much there to choose from.

  Van’s fingers hovered over his keyboard.

  Cobb, James A. (1981) ADAPTIVELY PULSED LOW-POWER EMISSIONS IN MASSIVELY PARALLEL COLLIMATION. Prospectives in Tunable Bandgaps, Conference of the Max Planck Society, Ringberg Castle, Germany.

  He clicked on it. What was this paper, again? Doing something weird and off the wall by tuning laser bandgaps. It seemed to him that maybe Tony had spoken of it once, ages ago. Tony had always had a fondness for Cobb’s wildest, most out-there notions.

  Very weak photonic clusters. Digitally packetized. Reflectively collimated in real time into massively parallel beams . . .

  Half an hour later, Van left Dottie sleeping in the suite and walked out under the quiet Virginia stars. He opened his cell phone.

  Hickok answered at once. It was almost 3:00 A.M., but there was massive party racket in the background, and Hickok was drunk. “Hey, Van! Come on down and join us by the pool! These AFOXAR guys love you!”

  “Mike, I know it’s late, but I need you. Right away.”

  Hickok was crestfallen. His voice had sobered. “So, what, you didn’t like my piloting today?”

  “Mike, this is spacewar.”

  CHAPTER

  THIRTEEN

  THE ALFRED A. GRIFFITH INTERNATIONAL ASTRONOMICAL FACILITY, COLORADO, APRIL 2002

  Look, it’s simple,” said Hickok. “Van is the strategic leader. I am the tactical leader.”

  “Dr. Vandeveer’s a civilian,” Gonzales objected.

  “Cyberwar is our brand-new kind of war, dude. I’m a civilian. You’re a civilian. He’s a civilian. The enemy are civilians. We’re all civilians.”

  “I didn’t even want to be a civilian,” said Wimberley. “I got a dishonorable discharge. You know what that did to my job prospects?”

  The four of them were sitting at midnight, in the mountains of Colorado, in the back of a rented camper-truck. The camper was parked off-road and hidden under a camouflage net. Van wore a black silk shirt, black cargo pants, a black leather jacket. He had a black shoulder bag, black socks, and black Rockport walking shoes. Van didn’t normally dress like a New York humanities professor, but it would do. If he was caught breaking into the premises of the Alfred A. Griffith International Astronomical Facility, he had a good cover story.

  After all, he was Mr. Dottie Vandeveer. He was an old college buddy of the guy who ran the place. There was nothing in Van’s shoulder bag that couldn’t pass close inspection. Black gloves, black woven hat—well, it got cold up here. Earpiece and mike—that was just a cell phone. Digital recorder, videocam, big deal. Laptop, he always had a laptop with him. He was a computer scientist.