"She just smiled at you, mate," Dodge said. "Go on over and say h.e.l.lo."

"I don't think it was me she was looking at," Sam said.

"Go on," Dodge said.

Sam just laughed and casually glanced over toward the younger girl, trying not to make it obvious that he was looking.

"So how come we all live in this fancy hotel, anyway?" he asked.

"We don't live here," Dodge said. "You're here 'cause you're on probation, and we just moved in for a few weeks 'cause of the threat level."

"I have an apartment over in Milpitas," Kiwi said.

"They keep us close at hand in a crisis 'cause it's quicker, and also so they can protect us better," Dodge added.

"Protect us?" Sam asked.

"If the bad guys got hold of you, it could compromise the whole CDD," Kiwi said.

Sam nodded. John Jaggard had said something similar that morning.

"So how does this all work?" Sam asked. "CDD I mean. You're from New Zealand, Dodge is English, and that Gummi Bear guy has got some kind of accent too. How'd you all end up working for the U.S. government?"

"Ain't no national borders on the Internet," Dodge answered for him. "Best of the best. From around the world. That's official CDD policy. They don't care where you come from as long as they think they can trust you."

"Gummi's from Zimbabwe," Kiwi added.

"And that whole story about robbing a bank in Nebraska. You made that up?" Sam asked.

Kiwi shook his head. "That's how they got me." He laughed. "Next thing I knew, I was being invited to dinner at the White House."

"Yeah." Sam nodded. "How about you, Dodge?"

"They grew him in a tank," Vienna muttered, but there was a smile in her eye.

"I was born in Los Angeles," Dodge said, and seeing Sam's questioning look, added, "But I mainly grew up in London."

"So how'd they catch you?"

Dodge winked and tapped the side of his nose. "More than my life's worth to tell you, Sonny Jim."

Sam looked at Kiwi, who shook his head. "I've been trying to get it out of him since I've been here."

Sam shrugged. "And you, Vienna?"

There was an uncomfortable silence, and then she dismissed him with a glance and shut her eyes, turning her face to the sun.

Kiwi gave Sam a small shake of the head. Don't bother asking Don't bother asking. "How did you get into hacking?" he asked.

"Well..." Sam hesitated. "When I was younger, we couldn't really afford a computer, but I got a part-time job at a computer company, helping out in the repair section. We'd often get computers in with some kind of fault that meant they had to be replaced. But usually most of the computer was okay. So I'd salvage any parts that were worth keeping before chucking the rest in a Dumpster.

"Eventually I got enough spare parts to build an entire computer at home. I hot-wired the neighbor's broadband connection to get Internet access, and it kind of all grew from there."

"How old were you?" Dodge asked. "When you did all this?"

"Twelve," Sam said.

There was a stunned silence from the others, which Vienna broke by saying, "Had to happen, Dodge. We finally found a bigger geek than you."

"So what's with the doorbell thing? At the White House," Sam asked.

"We just do that to freak people out." Dodge grinned.

"It works," Sam said.

"Now go on over and introduce yourself to Miss Congeniality before she starts to think you're a numb-nuts," Dodge said.

"Yeah, yeah, soon," Sam said, not moving. "Tell me more. Is there anywhere we can't go? Anywhere off-limits?"

"Not much. Some financial stuff. CIA, of course. Some cla.s.sified government files," Dodge said, rolling over onto his stomach and resting his head on his hands.

"Where they keep the answers to all the big questions," Kiwi said.

"JFK, Roswell, Vegas, stuff like that," Dodge said.

Sam sat up on the lounge chair and looked over with sudden interest. The a.s.sa.s.sination of JFK last century was still a cause for speculation and conspiracy theory, even now; the purported alien-s.p.a.ceship crash at Roswell was regarded as a joke by some and as gospel by others; while Vegas was often described as the world's biggest unsolved murder.

"Serious?" Sam said. "And you can't get in?"

"I said we weren't allowed to. I didn't say we weren't capable," Dodge said.

"Leave it alone, Dodge," Vienna said. "He's an egg."

Dodge leaned toward Sam and spoke in a low voice. "Do you really want to know who actually killed JFK?"

"Yeah, of course. Doesn't everyone?"

"Not who you'd think," Dodge said enigmatically.

Sam began, "But-"

"Whatever you've read, whatever you've imagined, you're not even close," Dodge cut him off. "Want to know the truth about Roswell?"

"h.e.l.l, yeah!"

"Never happened. No s.p.a.ceship, no dead aliens, nothing. It was a cover-up, all right, but not for a crashed UFO. That was just the diversion, to draw attention away from what was really going on, which is even harder to believe."

"What-"

"And Vegas..."

It was strange, the names that were given to major tragedies, Sam thought. The World Trade Center disaster was always known by the date, 9/11, while the explosion three years earlier that had left a radioactive scar on the desert where Las Vegas used to be was known simply as Vegas.

"You want to know who set off that warhead and turned the place into a nuclear c.r.a.p-hole?" Dodge asked.

"Yeah."

"So do they, matey. So do they."

Later, upstairs in his room, Sam tried to watch TV, but no shows held his interest. He worried about the new job and how he would cope. He worried about his mom and what she was thinking. He worried whether he was worrying too much and would not be able to sleep.

Eventually, about eleven-thirty, he flicked off the lights and, despite his worries, fell almost immediately to sleep.

After a while he dreamed, and in his dream he was a knight in strange, electronic armor that fizzled and crackled with electrons, emitting a ghostly greenish glow. Slimy mud dragons with red LED eyes were scaling the walls of the castle around him, jagged daggers held in their teeth. Desperately, he looked around for Dodge for help; there were just too many of them. But he was on his own.

The first of the creatures was almost upon him, the dagger in its strange, doglike jaws.

Sam prepared for battle as the creature opened its mouth, dropping the dagger, and began to bark.

It was a dog, not a dragon; why had he not realized that before? He raised his sword and swung at the creature, which dissolved in a cloud of digital particles.

The barking persisted, though, and the castle was gone, along with the armor and the mud creatures.

The glowing clock on the nightstand said 2:53 a.m.

And the phone was woofing at him again.

15

PEACH BOTTOM

Dodge said, "Sorry, mate, but you're out of bed right now. One of our sniffers has picked up a nasty smell on the Net, over by the Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania. There's been a fifteen percent rise in data-packet transfer over the last two hours. We're going in quiet. Just monitor the activity and decode it, see what's moving around." He hung up the phone without saying goodbye.

A guard in a dark suit and curly earpiece was waiting for him by the elevators. He recognized the man, Special Agent Tyler, he recalled, with the gelled-back hairdo and mirrored gla.s.ses. The man who had arrested him.

The gla.s.ses were missing, but the hair was still the same. Too cool for school Too cool for school.

It was the same routine with the gray van: up the ramp, across the road, and down the ramp on the other side, which still seemed a bit silly, but it was not up to him to argue with their procedures.

Dodge was already seated when Sam entered the control room. He just glanced up as Sam slid into the chair beside him.

"Nothing yet," he said. "Firewall is wound up tighter than a two-bob watch. All the data traffic looks legit, but that don't explain a sudden increase at this time o' the morning."

"I thought all nuke plants were air-gapped," Sam said. "Not just firewalled."

"That's right. This ain't coming from the control software. That's a self-contained system. It's from the general admin offices. Jump in behind me and see what you make of it."

Sam picked up the location from his left screen and shot out a probe. As he did that, he scanned the central CDD database for information on Peach Bottom and added in a Google search for good measure.

"It's an older plant," he said. "Two BWR units, whatever they are."

"Boiling water reactors," Dodge said, not taking his eyes off the screen. "Most of the modern ones are pressurized water reactors, PWRs. Don't matter. What we want to know is what data is leaking outta that site and who's picking it up."

"It's an inside job," Sam said after a few moments.

"Too early to tell," Dodge said. "Could just as easily be an outside hack. There are some old Windows servers on the LAN, so I'm thinking it might be a null session hack."

"No," Sam said, more firmly than he felt. "It's an inside job. I already checked the registry on the old servers, and they're set to restrict anonymous access."

"Still don't mean an inside job," Dodge said thoughtfully.

"The data packets are mimicking backup activity," Sam said. "But it's running under a user account, not a machine account, which is suspicious, isn't it? I checked the firewall, and it blocks remote log-ins, so it has to be a direct log-in on that computer itself. Someone inside the plant is doing this."

A low voice came from behind them. "What's going on, Dodge?"

It was Jaggard. He was in jeans and an old Spartans sweatshirt and looked as though he had just got out of bed.

"Rogue trader," Dodge said. "Looks like it, anyway."

"An inside job?"

Dodge nodded and gestured at Sam. "Newbie over here picked it up right away. 'Course, I would've picked it up myself if I'd been proper awake."

He winked and Sam felt a glow of pride.

"What data are they taking?"

"Dunno yet. There's nothing new about the technology there-it's just old BWR stuff. Nothing of use to any foreign power."

"Could they use the information to compromise the plant? Cause a meltdown?"

"Well, it would help. But so would Google."

"Okay, where's the data going?"

"A public server in a small farm in Cleveland. I boxed it off the moment I traced it. Surrounded it with fishhooks. Anybody goes in there to retrieve the data and I'll reel 'em in like a bluefin tuna."

Jaggard turned to Sam. "Good work, Sam. First day on the job."

"Second," Sam said, pointing to his watch.

Jaggard smiled briefly. "Stay on it. I want to know who wants that info and why."