"That's what I said." Jaggard smiled. The scar echoed the smile. Sam thought back to the whirlwind of the last few weeks and shook his head, confused.

"But the White House? [email protected] Con?"

"There is no [email protected] Con," Jaggard said. "Think of it as a job application."

"And Recton Hall?"

"The job interview."

Sam was still having trouble comprehending it all. "What's this?" he asked, holding up the sheaf of papers.

"It's a job offer," Jaggard said, although he clearly thought that was obvious. "You can take it or leave it."

"I'm only seventeen," Sam said, thinking they must already know that.

"Sam"-Jaggard looked at him appraisingly-"everybody at that meeting in the old warehouse was given the same information. Hack into the White House for the Convention. You want to know how many of them got through?"

Sam shrugged.

"Just you, Sam."

Sam looked again at the figure on the bottom line of the contract. It seemed extraordinarily generous for an annual salary. Almost too high, in fact.

"What does that work out to be per month?" he wondered out loud, trying to do the math. His brain seemed to be running in slow motion.

"That is is per month," Jaggard said. per month," Jaggard said.

Sam gasped.

"You can take it or leave it," the man said again.

He didn't expand on that, but Sam had the strong sense that if he left it, that would mean a return to Recton.

"If you take it," Jaggard continued, "you're on probation for three months. If you survive the probation"-he'd said "survive," Sam noted, not "pa.s.s" or "succeed"-"then that figure doubles."

"Doubles?" Sam blurted.

"Think we're being overgenerous?" Jaggard said, and his scar smiled again.

Overgenerous? The amount was The amount was obscene obscene! Sam thought, but said nothing.

"We pay well," Jaggard said. "We have to, or at least we choose to. We select only the best of the best, so we pay them accordingly. But it goes a little deeper than that. You'll have almost unlimited access inside every government department and financial inst.i.tution in the country. We want to remove the temptation to help yourself and to avoid the possibility of bribery by outside agencies. We feel that if you have more money than you know what to do with, it makes you a little more resistant to corruption."

Sam leaned back in his chair and looked around the office, trying to get his thoughts in order.

Dodge-Skullface-had driven him straight to the same small private airfield just out of Bethesda that he had flown into a few weeks earlier.

The drive hadn't been without incident. A police cruiser had pa.s.sed them on the main street through Friendship Village and shone a light into the rear of the cab before pulling in behind them. The red-and-blues had come on.

Dodge reached for his cell phone the moment the cruiser had shown interest, talking quietly into it even as he signaled and pulled over to stop.

Two Bethesda cops stepped out of the cruiser and approached cautiously, weapons drawn, silhouetted in their own headlights. They made it only halfway to the car when they halted, and one put a radio to his ear.

That was it. The two officers retraced their steps to the cruiser, switched off the flashing lights, and just sat there.

Dodge slipped his cell phone back in his pocket as he accelerated away from the curb.

These guys have some powerful mojo, Sam thought.

The flight, in the same black Learjet (or at least an identical one), was longer this time, and he had slept on the plane. He woke at the jolt of landing. His watch said six-thirty, and he would have expected to see the early dawn lightening of the sky, but it was still as dark as tar. That meant they had flown west, into a new time zone. The flight time (they had taken off around midnight) meant California.

Signs on the freeway on the drive in from the airfield confirmed it. San Jose.

Right in the heart of Silicon Valley.

"Welcome aboard," Jaggard said as Sam finished signing the last of the paperwork. Jaggard stood. "I'll take you through to meet the rest of the team."

"What about my mom?"

Jaggard considered that for a moment and sat back down. "It's all in your contract, but the gist of it is this: For the next three months, as far as your mother is concerned, you're still at Recton. Any e-mails to your Recton account will be intercepted and relayed here. Any efforts to visit you will be rebuffed. Any legal challenges or official channels she might complain to will turn a deaf ear."

Sam nodded his understanding.

"At the end of the three months, if you survive, then your mother will be fed some c.o.c.k-and-bull story about you working out a deal with the FBI and working for them." He looked Sam in the eye. "At no time is your mother, or anyone else you talk to or anyone else you talk to, allowed to know about your involvement with the CDD. A network is only as safe as the people who protect it. If the bad guys know who you are, they can compromise you, and if they do that, they can compromise our entire operation-and with it the data infrastructure of this entire country. Is that clear enough for you?"

"Yes, s-sir," Sam stammered.

"I'm not trying to frighten you," Jaggard said.

Sam wondered what he'd be saying if he was was trying to frighten him. trying to frighten him.

Jaggard continued, "But secrecy is our first line of defense. Let's go."

Jaggard stood and led Sam through a series of doors that he unlocked with a keycard, then into some kind of control center. The room was circular with workstations arranged in pairs around the outer circ.u.mference. Dark tinted windows gave a dimly shaded view of the outside world. A few blocks away, he could see the Adobe logo on top of a group of high-rise towers, and across the superhighway was a large sports stadium that he thought was the Hewlett-Packard Pavilion.

This was Silicon Valley, all right.

In the center of the room, giant plasma screens faced in every direction. Some of the screens were security monitors, showing switching views of both the inside and the outside of the building. They surrounded a small, raised octagonal office. Sam couldn't see in, but he had a strong feeling that someone was in there, looking out.

There were at least seventy people in the control center when he arrived, and only a few empty desks. The people sat in pairs, three computer screens to each person.

He saw Dodge sitting at one of the workstations. Dodge looked up briefly as Sam walked in behind Jaggard. The rest of the workers ignored them, intent on their screens. There was a sense of urgency in the room.

It could be this afternoon, or it might not be for months. Sam recalled the words that the strange woman had said earlier.

Jaggard put two fingers in his mouth and made a piercing whistle. Work stopped.

"Team, I'd like you to meet our new probationer," Jaggard said in a voice that filled the whole of the large room. "This is Sam."

He heard a voice somewhere behind him mutter, "Fresh meat."

Another voice, from across the room, called out, "Two weeks."

"Ten days."

"I give him a month."

Jaggard rolled his eyes. "Sam is the one who pulled off the Telecomerica hack a few weeks ago."

There was a sudden, emphatic silence in the room.

Dodge jumped up from his console and bounded over. He shook Sam's hand. "Welcome aboard," he said, and smiled, creasing the biohazard tattoo on his forehead.

He wore denim shorts, raggedly ripped off at the knees from a pair of jeans; steel chains crisscrossing a tight tartan T-shirt; and a skull on a leather strap around his neck.

Jaggard said, "You'll be working closely with Dodge. You've also met Vienna."

Vienna was a short-haired girl with a fierce gleam in her eye. She wore a leather miniskirt and a black T-shirt that read WHO ARE YOU AND WHY ARE YOU READING MY T-SHIRT? WHO ARE YOU AND WHY ARE YOU READING MY T-SHIRT? But it was the intertwined dragons tattooed on her arm that gave it away. But it was the intertwined dragons tattooed on her arm that gave it away. Rock Chick Bride! Rock Chick Bride!

A succession of others came over to meet him.

"This is Socks, Zombie, Bashful, Gummi Bear." Jaggard introduced each of them in turn.

Sam didn't hear the door open behind him, but he noticed Jaggard's glance.

"You're late," Jaggard said.

"A few problems with the paperwork," said a voice Sam well recognized.

Sam half turned, his mouth gaping.

"G'day, mate," Kiwi said.

13

LAST LINE OF DEFENSE

Sam settled down into the chair and looked at the three large monitors in front of him.

An ergonomic keyboard, one of those oddly angled ones that were supposed to be better for your wrists, and a wireless wheel mouse were the only things on the desk in front of him, although a standard microphone headset hung on the side of the central monitor.

He had never got the hang of that style of keyboard and wondered if he could get it changed. It crossed his mind that a neuro-headset could be useful, but it was a little early for that. It was only his first day.

He looked at Dodge, seated to his right. Not so much seated as embedded in the soft leather of the high-backed chair. He looked like a part of the furniture. Like he belonged.

Sam shuffled his backside around a bit, getting used to the chair, which was larger and more comfortable than he was accustomed to. No doubt he was going to end up spending long periods of time in it.

To his left and to Dodge's right, fabric-covered part.i.tions separated them from the teams on either side. Dodge's was adorned with stubs from rock concert tickets, including a few backstage pa.s.ses, while Sam's was empty, although several pinholes and indentations in the fabric showed that some items had recently been removed. He wondered who had owned this seat before him.

"Fire 'er up, and we'll go for a dive," Dodge said, glancing over at him. "I'll show you around."

Dodge put on his headset, and Sam followed suit, adjusting the microphone to the level of his mouth. A feeling of trepidation-would he be up to this?-was balanced by tremendous excitement at the thought of a whole new world that was about to be revealed to him.

Dodge's voice sounded strong and clear in his ear. "Everything you say is recorded and monitored by both our guys and Swamp Witch in the middle there." He nodded at the raised octagonal office with the reflective windows in the center of the room.

"Swamp Witch?"

Dodge laughed. "She's got a proper handle, but n.o.body ever uses it. Just hope that you don't get to meet her. Official-like, that is."

"Swamp Witch?" Sam asked again.

"Oversight officer. Permanent representative of the Congressional Oversight Committee. The sort of power we have around here, someone's got to make sure we don't abuse it. Know what I mean?"

Sam glanced up at the office, wondering if he was being watched right now.

"Right, follow me," Dodge said. "We'll head out on a short patrol, just to give you the feel of things. I'm on your left screen. Everything I see, you'll see there. Center screen is you, and your right screen is your overview-your 'navigation map,' some like to call it. Also has most of your scanners, scopes, and weapons systems. We're going to head over to the Pentagon, run a sweep through their networks. It's serious stuff over there, so no mucking about, right?"

"We're going to hack into the Pentagon?" Sam raised his eyebrows.

"Hack?" Dodge laughed. "You're on the other team now, mate. We've got a backstage pa.s.s. Access all areas."

Sam looked at his row of monitors, then back at Dodge. "Before we start, Dodge." He hesitated. "I don't want to sound stupid, but I don't even know what my job is yet. What do I do here?"

Dodge raised an eyebrow. "Sorry, Sam, mate. I thought Jaggard had already run through that with you. You're my new wingman."

"Wingman," Sam said, nodding as if he understood.

"I'm on point. You back me up. I go after the bad guys, and you stop them from going after me. Got it?"

Sam nodded again.

"After three months, if it works out, then we'll pair up officially until you move on to take point and get your own wingman." Dodge grinned and continued, "Or until one of us burns out. Whichever comes first."

That sounded a little ominous, but Sam didn't pursue it.

"So my only job is to protect you," he said for confirmation.

"I'm the quarterback; you're the lineman. It's your job to keep the bogeys off my a.r.s.e while I make the play. Okay?"

"Okay...," Sam said cautiously. "I'll try my best. What about training?"

"This is the training," Dodge said. "On the job. Let's head over to the Pentagon. I'll explain more as we go."