Kickoff tugged at the Colonel’s sleeve. Kickoff gestured at his laptop. His tiny airplanes, hidden in the night sky, were sending him fresh pictures.

  A Toyota pickup truck, spanking-new and doubtless Saudi-supplied, was working its way up the gorge.

  The Colonel held up his leather-gloved fingers: two. There would be two trucks, for there always were. There would also be bandits on foot to escort them, with rifles and walkie-talkies.

  Kickoff shook his head and made a throat-cutting gesture. Kickoff didn’t care to wait for the chance of bagging both the trucks. That was not necessary to Kickoff’s technical purposes. His assignment, it seemed, was merely to field-test the equipment and the support system. Kickoff gently plugged a small video wire and jack into the side of the rifle’s scope. He blew dust from a flat plastic wafer and inserted a fresh, spotless disk from a jewellike case. Then he urged the Colonel on.

  The Colonel nodded and bent to his labors. The first .50-caliber round, a thumb-sized lozenge of spinning steel, flew through the Toyota’s hood and completely through its engine block. As the truck lurched to a stop, the Colonel put two more rounds through the exploding glass and metal of the cab. The spidery white gun kicked very gently on its bipod. There was a high-pitched hiss of escaping gas. And yet, no burst of visible fire from the long black barrel. The rifle was gentle, surgical. The rifle almost fired itself.

  A glowing human figure burst free of the shattered truck, and the Colonel missed him as he fled. The fourth round struck him true, though. The oil thief tumbled instantly into two hot glowing pieces: a ruptured carcass, and a severed, spinning arm.

  The Colonel sought the phone. “Tell him that we need to leave this cave now. There will be other bandits. They are never afraid of us, and they will want this weapon very badly.”

  Kickoff listened politely to the anxious squeak from the phone. He made an air-circling gesture.

  The Colonel leaned in toward the mouthpiece. “I don’t care how many toy airplanes he has, or what they can see. We’re in the dark, next to bandits on foot, moving under cover. They will fire rockets on us from far up the slope, above the cave. Oh, and tell him it’s a lovely gun.”

  Kickoff listened to the reply and made an extensive prepared speech.

  “Alexei, he says to thank you for the compliment. He also says he’s coming home to see me.” She was excited.

  “And he’s taking our satellite phone away, my dear?”

  “Of course he’s taking our phone. But he’s not taking that gun, Alexei. He’s not supposed to carry it inside America. He says that you should keep it. He says he knows a good soldier can use a good gun. He wants you to know that he appreciates you.”

  “He’s a generous man with a gift, your big friend here.” Kickoff was giving a soldier a fine weapon, instead of some mere sordid bribe of dollars. That was very tactful of the American. The Colonel was touched. A handsome gift like this was a clear hint that the two of them would meet again in the future. That seemed probable enough. There certainly wasn’t likely to be any shortage of oil thieves.

  “Trust me, Alexei, he didn’t pay for that gun himself.”

  “Oh, no. Of course Kickoff didn’t pay for it.” Yet others would. A fancy rifle like this was worth a great deal of money. Especially in the right set of wrong hands. The Colonel winced a little at that thought. Young Russian troopers, bewildered, conscripted, doomed, their flesh flying apart under those silent ferocious impacts . . . But only one side in Chechnya was awash in cash. That was not his own side. His side was merely a national army, not a global conspiracy. His side was always broke.

  The thought didn’t bear contemplation. And yet, and yet, Natalya. Yes, if fate demanded it, he could do a thing like that for Natalya’s sake. Because love conquered all.

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  WASHINGTON, D.C., DECEMBER 2001

  Tall yellow cranes were digging black wreckage from the Pentagon. American flags the size of basketball courts covered the walls of federal offices, Old Glory the Battle Flag as a kind of angry wallpaper. Truck bomb barriers, strangely disguised as concrete flower pots, bloomed right, left, and center. The streets around the White House had become empty asphalt malls, where jittery tourists lurked in ones and twos.

  The newly formed Coordination of Critical Information Assurance Board met in the Old Executive Building, under the sponsorship of the Vice President. The badly overcrowded conference room had leather club chairs, steel coffee urns, lots of dented mahogany, and an ancient oil painting of an elder statesman named John C. Calhoun. Mr. Calhoun didn’t look happy. Neither did the crowd.

  If Van didn’t know all the faces, he knew the institutions. Every major federal bureaucracy had some kind of stake in computer security work. The Justice Department with the FBI, the Treasury with their Secret Service. The Department of Defense had a Defense Information Systems Agency. The Air Force was high-flying and enthusiastic, while the Navy worked to keep up steam. The Commerce Department, the National Institute of Standards and Technology. NASA was there. The Computer Emergency Response Team, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. Even one lonely computer whiz from the Railroad Retirement Board.

  The National Security Council, Van’s new employer, had sent out the invitations. This was their first big dance. If this shindig worked out, then a lot of things might work out. If this didn’t work, then Van had just blown his career for a swift bureaucratic fiasco.

  With a thirty-year career in computer crimebusting, Jeb was a living dinosaur of computer security. Jeb had trained a lot of the people in this conference room, and most of them owed him favors. Van had a gold-star reputation as a coder, but was a personal stranger to most of these people. Most of them were strangers to one another.

  This was the cyber-version of a larger story happening all over the federal government, from Pennsylvania Avenue, to Quantico, to Fort Meade, to Pentagon City. Since 9/11, all federal security agencies had been suffering a scary process that they called “melting stovepipes.” People who had spent their whole lives inside narrow institutional channels were forced to network with other feds that they’d never met.

  Who were these strangers from distant, scary wings of the U.S. government? Were they rivals? Allies? Neutrals? No one even knew. The new Homeland Security empire was going to eat up any number of proud, independent agencies. Some said six, some said twelve, and some said twenty-two. This meant that no one’s turf was safe anymore.

  It also meant something more promising, though. It meant opportunity: the biggest federal re-org in forty years. It meant that the right bunch of computer-security geeks, in the right place with the right tools and attitude, might break out from obscurity. Bold nerds from some mainframe garage in the Commerce Department might end up giving marching orders to the Secret Service.

  Jeb was the kind of man that computer people naturally turned to in a crisis. Jeb rather resembled Jabba the Hutt, if Star Wars characters had been cops from Texas. Jeb’s mood, always dark and cynical, had ratcheted up several notches to grimly militant. Jeb had the rigid-eyed stare of a man who was summing up his life’s work and laying it right on the line. Jeb had shaved his cherished beard, revealing a nest of pale double chins. Jeb had even found somebody in Washington willing to cut him an enormous blue serge suit.

  Van had never seen Jeb answer to “Dr. Jeremijenko” before. Jeb Jeremijenko didn’t even have a real doctorate. No one ever used his unspellable last name. Jeb had learned his computer security as a street cop who had stumbled over a UNIVAC in Houston in the 1960s.

  Banging a mahogany table with the meaty flat of his hand, Jeb hushed the chaos in the room. By getting together in this very, very quiet way, Jeb bellowed, they could get some useful progress made in the stupefying mess that was federal computer-security policy. In other words, they could finally settle down and cut the crap.

  No one objected to Jeb’s frank assessment of the work at hand. American federal agencies had owned and used computers longer than anybody else in the world. That was bad news rather than good, for it meant that the federal government had the world’s oldest, creakiest, cruftiest, most messed-up systems. Everybody who knew anything about the reality behind the scenes knew that it was awful. Computer security was obscure, ultra-technical, underfunded. It was scattered and amateurish. There was nobody in charge. There were no firm policies and no accountability. And the budgets? Laughable!

  However: after September 11, a day of reckoning had finally arrived. Jeb knew it. The crowd knew it. Congress knew it. Anybody who watched the news or read the papers knew it. The old lazy, scatterbrained ways just weren’t going to cut it anymore.

  Every great crisis was also a great opportunity for people with the guts to dare and win. Now, Jeb declared, was the vital moment to level with each other, get a strong sense of the will and abilities of the computer-security community, and to really clear the air for solid, effective action.

  Van knew that this sermon of Jeb’s meant big trouble. Jeb was positioning the CCIAB to become a kamikaze high-tech outfit that played fast and loose with the old rules. Van was okay with that risk. Realistically, there wasn’t any other choice. If he, Derek R. Vandeveer, was ever going to become an effective federal security official, then Washington was going to have to ditch old rules by the bucketful.

  Some busybody think-tanker from the Competitive Enterprise Institute went trolling for Van: “Does our Stanford professor concur with Dr. Jeremijenko’s unorthodox approach?”

  “Be quiet!” Van roared back. “Be quick! And be on time.” Nobody had any idea what Van meant by this, but the startled conference room went silent for twenty-five seconds.

  Nobody else asked Van another question, which was great. Van hated meetings. He never did at all well in them. He knew that he was there as a potted plant for Jeb to exhibit: one bona fide, certified computer genius, pulled in from the best R&D lab in a top company. It made no sense for him to try to out-politic federal bureaucrats.

  Van had invented a solid program for his new career. Since he had to be a potted plant anyway, he’d be a cactus. Think tough, look tough, talk tough. Real security pros were never chatty, chummy guys.

  Van listened awhile, glaring at people at random, while caressing the keys of his laptop. Then he lost interest. They were obviously blue-skying it, these people. They weren’t making progress; they were sounding each other out and trying to cover their butts. They clearly had no idea what the hell was really going on. They were scared for themselves and their futures. They were politicking. Because this was Washington. There was nothing Van could do but put up with that.

  After two agonizing hours, Jeb confronted the subject of the CCIAB’s own hardware. The mood in the room shifted instantly. Everyone in the room, without exception, was very interested in the subject of computer hardware. Obviously, an outfit whose business was coordinating computer security for the rest of the federal government would need an internal system that was top-end, heavy-duty, and very impressive indeed.

  At this point, Van, who had been feeling sorry for himself and was badly missing his infant son, perked up a little.

  As a professional computer researcher, Van secretly hated computer security. It was boring and beneath his true talents. Making him work on security was like asking a top Olympic cyclist to make bicycle locks and bicycle chains.

  Nevertheless, this was now his duty. Plus, Van kind of liked the idea of building a genuinely advanced, secure system, from the ground up, from sound theory and practice rather than implementation hacks, and without any absurd interference by stupid market vendors. If he got to do that job by himself, that would be pretty okay. Van knew he could do it, it was honest work if dull, and at least he could set a good example.

  Now he had to tell a room full of people how this was going to work. Van struggled with his stage fright. Stage fright was a very old demon for Van. He knew how to beat it, though: he beat his demon with confidence tricks.

  Like pretending that they were just another Stanford undergraduate class. But they sure as hell weren’t. Or pretending they were all wearing red underwear. Beltway bandits in expensive suits were not exactly a red underwear crowd.

  He could reach into his shoulder bag, and stick ’em up with his grandfather’s ray gun. A titanium ray gun! Leveled right at their heads! The very last thing in the world they would ever expect!

  That thought did it for Van. He was just fine now. Van opened his laptop. “Well,” he told them, “Jeb says we should be frank.”

  He threw up a colorful PowerPoint screen to keep them happy. Then he read aloud from his script. “As this shows you, today’s security industry will tell you certain very predictable things. They will tell you that a federal agency needs to buy their products. Secure servers, secure routers, firewalls, crypto, authentication, all brand-new out of the box . . . That is the conventional wisdom.”

  Van switched PowerPoint screens, to a nicer one with a lot of colored bars and arrows. “But even for us, a small coordinating bureau, those purchases would set us back sixteen million dollars. We don’t have that money.”

  Another screen. “In the CCIAB, we can’t wait the standard eight months to install conventional secure equipment. We need to be up and running, effective yesterday. We can’t afford the time and money for security products. But we do have to meet a very serious security need. You reconcile those two vectors, and that means only one thing.”

  Van switched screens. This new screen took a while to refresh. To his vast relief, PowerPoint did not crash. “We have to create a brand-new breakthrough system. Thinking way outside the box. Really quickly, really quietly, using about one-tenth the number of normal staffers. With radically innovative hardware and code.”

  The room had a holy hush over it. They were totally with him. Jeb was beaming in the PowerPoint screen glow.

  “In the CCIAB, we do have one great advantage. We don’t need to rely on anybody’s lame industry vendors, because, in the CCIAB, we actually understand code. So we can build, and we will build, our own Grendel supercluster. Grendels are made from obsolete PCs, but clustered in parallel without any von Neumann bottlenecks.”

  Another nice screen.

  “For about a hundred grand, we will own a new federal system with more raw computational power than the entire Commerce Department. And, in the short term, that system will be very, very secure. Because no hacker anywhere has invented or found any security holes for Grendel distributed supercomputation code. There are maybe ten guys in the whole world who understand that code. They are all loyal American computer-science academics, and they are all real, real busy.”

  A hand went up. It was a late arrival, a skinny younger guy with a battered laptop on his knees. “May I ask a question, sir?”

  “What?”

  “You, Dr. Derek Vandeveer, you’re one of those ten guys?”

  “Yeah. And I know the other nine. Who are you?”

  “Well, I’m a Web journalist, and—”

  “Meeting adjourned!” Jeb bellowed, lurching to his feet.

  Van was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, and thinking hard about streams. Van had always wanted to do something useful and important with streams, because streams were inherently superior to the conventional structure of files. Van was planning to implement distributed streams within the Grendel. That was overkill, really. There wasn’t a kode-kid, cracker, hacktivist, or even intelligence agency in the whole world that could break into a Grendel. But a Grendel running streams—man, that would be beyond all coolness.

  Blinking occasionally, Van thought about streams. He thought about streams seriously, and then, very, very seriously. Eventually, Van became aware that someone was pounding on his apartment door.

  Surprised, he sat up and pulled on his pants.

  Van had rented his Washington apartment point-and-click off a real-estate Web site. Van had been in a big hurry to find a place in Washington, and the street was close enough to a telecom central station to get himself an ADSL line. The rooms had looked okay in the GIF file. In real life, the apartment was tiny and reeked of insecticide. Van’s apartment had ugly walls of exposed yellow brick, a lot of peeling Formica, and a foul layer of oily grime on the kitchen walls and ceiling. The toilet wobbled in the bathroom.

  The Web site hadn’t talked at all about the neighborhood, either. Van’s neighborhood was sinister. Van now kept his grandfather’s ray gun handy beside the door. The people who knocked on Van’s door usually wanted to sell him crack cocaine, or themselves.

  Van removed his glasses and placed his right eye to the peephole. Out in the dim, ratty hallway stood a skinny girl with a big nose, dark eyes too close together, and black, frizzy hair. She wore a strange little frock of greenish-looking, all-organic, undyed cotton, and carried a shapeless fabric purse. She looked like a Girl Scout who’d sold all her cookies and taken up panhandling.

  Van undid three large brass locks and opened the door on a length of steel chain.

  “Dr. Vandeveer?”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m your new secretary. Can I come in?”

  Van considered this. It was unexpected. “Can I see some ID first?”

  The woman showed him a plastic-coated mag-stripe card with an embedded photo. The card had a nice red lanyard. The card identified her as “Fawn Glickleister, Executive Assistant, CCIAB Technical Services.”

  “Huh,” Van said.

  Fawn held up a different badge, still in fresh shrink-wrap. “I brought your badge, too, uhm, Derek. These badges are new. You haven’t been to work in three days.”

  “I am working,” Van insisted, stung. “I just can’t do any meetings with anybody right now.”

  “Can I come in please? It’s kind of scary out here!”

  Van undid his rattling chain.

  Fawn came inside. She studied the big plastic weight-lifting bench, which dominated Van’s small apartment. The grimy wall behind the bench was covered with posters of Full-Contact Karate champions, guys with staring eyes, flying sweat, and feet swathed in red plastic gauntlets. “Is all this yours?”