He looked around the pool deck at the glitterati of DEF CON here with him, and he knew that in twenty-four hours they'd have to take a number to talk to him.

This DEF CON would be his coming-out party.

Of course Levy knew it was inevitable that he would catch a lot of grief from the government about not only his successful hacking, but his revelation that he knew good and well that someone else was privy to America's deepest, darkest secrets, and he had not alerted the authorities. He thought he might get harassed by the Feds for what he had done, but he also pictured tens of thousands of members of his community coming out in support of him and standing up against the government.

Getting harassed by the Feds was a rite of passage.

There was one more chapter to Charlie Levy's story, and this he would also reveal at tomorrow's presentation.

The mystery hacker on the CIA network had discovered Levy's intrusion. His RAT had been so well built it was able to recognize when someone pushed into the network by the same means as had he.

How did Charlie know this? Because the hacker contacted him via instant messaging two weeks ago, offering DarkGod money to work remotely for him on other projects involving JWICS and Intelink-TS systems.

Levy was stunned when he realized he had been identified, but he knew there was no way in hell the mystery hacker had ID'd him through Intelink-TS. Levy was confident in his methods of attack concealment; he performed his digital breach of the CIA network over a complicated series of hops and proxies that would completely mask the machine of origin. The only explanation he came up with for how he was discovered was his research into JWICS, Intelink-TS, and the protocols and architecture used by the networks. Some of this research had been performed on open networks that, theoretically, could have been monitored by the mystery hacker.

Somehow, the mystery hacker was smart enough, and his visibility over the Internet was pervasive enough, that he'd deduced Levy's involvement.

When Levy declined the offer to work with the other entity-Levy did not want to be someone else's hired gun-his computer came under heavy persistent attack from a wide variety of sophisticated cyberthreats. The mystery hacker was doing his best to infiltrate Levy's computer. But DarkGod was no mere mortal when it came to computer security, and he took up the challenge as if he was playing chess with the mystery hacker and he had, for the last two weeks, anyway, managed to keep all malware off his machine.

Charlie Levy fully expected his new nemesis to be present at DEF CON, or else at the Black Hat conference, a more corporate convention for security professionals that would take place the following week here in Vegas.

Charlie hated to think that the son of a bitch might try to steal his thunder.

- It took a while for Levy to loosen up with the rest of the guys, but by three a.m. he'd downed close to ten Coronas and he was feeling no pain. It was always like this on the first night, when the booze flowed out at the pool. Although all of the other guys were married with children now, they came to Vegas with the dual objectives of getting as drunk as possible and carrying on and even expanding their legendary exploits around DEF CON.

The Google guy had just stumbled off to bed, but the rest of the crew was still out by the pool, drinks in hand. Levy reclined on a chaise longue with a fresh Corona while the Microsoft guys smoked Cohibas next to him and AT&T and French Bank reclined on pool floats in the water with their drinks and their laptops.

- While the party slowly died down at the South Hedgeford Court home, at another vacation rental five doors down on East Quail Avenue the glass patio door slid silently open. The home was pitch black and appeared unoccupied, but out of the darkness eight men stepped into the moonlit backyard, walked around the covered swimming pool, and made their way to a wooden fence.

Each man carried a black backpack on his back and a handgun equipped with a long suppressor in a holster on his hip. One at a time they climbed the fence and dropped down into the next yard, their movements stealthy and quiet.

- AT&T looked up from his laptop while he floated on the pool chair. "Hey, DarkGod. We've all talked about our presentations, but you haven't said shit about your topic."

One of the Microsoft guys blew out Cohiba smoke and said, "That means Charlie's talk is either really good or really bad."

"Wouldn't you like to know?" replied Charlie, slyly.

French Bank shook his head; he paddled with his hand to turn himself toward the men on the deck. "If it's anything like two years ago when you cracked into the Bellagio's physical plant and increased the pressure on the fountain pumps, I'll pass. Squirting a few dozen tourists is not my idea of- Hi. Can we help you?"

The rest of the men at the pool turned their heads, following the direction French Bank was looking. There, in the moonlight just out of the lights of the pool deck, several men stood in a row, facing the pool.

Charlie sat up. "Who the hell are you guys?"

The Corona in Charlie's hand exploded with a pop, and he looked down. His "Hack Naked" shirt was ripped, and blood drained from his chest. A second hole next to the first appeared as he watched.

A third round struck him in the forehead, and he flipped back on the chaise, dead.

The two men in the deck chairs were sluggish from the alcohol, but they both managed to stand and turn. One made it a few feet up the deck toward the house, but both were cut down by suppressed handgun rounds to the back.

One of them tumbled into the swimming pool; the other fell back over his chair into a small rock garden.

The two men on the pool floats were helpless. They both screamed out, but they were gunned down where they lay, their dead bodies draining blood into the clear water along with the blood from the Microsoft man floating facedown nearby.

When everyone at the pool was dead, Crane, the leader of the unit, turned to Stint. In Mandarin he said, "There should be one more. Find him."

Stint ran into the house with his pistol in front of him.

The Google man had slept through it all, but Stint found him in his bed, and put a single round through the back of his head.

Out by the pool, three of the men used small flashlights to pick up the spent shell casings, while three more men went back inside, checking room by room to find DarkGod's luggage. They went through it and took his laptop and all his peripherals, his papers, thumb drives, DVDs, mobile phone, and anything else other than clothing. In place of all this, they left a handful of DVDs and thumb drives of their own, and a mobile phone spoofed with Levy's number and data that they downloaded from his device.

All this took more than ten minutes, but Crane had been given several objectives, and he'd been ordered to be perfectly thorough.

Soon all four were back out on the pool deck. The swimming pool water was bright pink now. On Crane's command, Wigeon unzipped his backpack and took out three small bags of high-quality cocaine. He tossed these in the grass near the fence, with the intention that the drugs would be found with the bodies and this entire event would appear to be a nefarious deal gone bad.

That none of the men had any drugs in their bodies could be explained by the fact that the deal had gone belly-up and the guns came out before anyone had time to partake in the drugs.

Finally Crane ordered everyone but Snipe back to the safe house, and the six men departed.

After they gave them time to get clear, Crane and Snipe stood on the side of the beautiful pool and unscrewed the silencers from their FN Five-seveNs. These they slipped into their backpacks. Then they aimed their weapons high above the horizon to the south, just below the hazy half-moon, and then both men opened fire.

They fired individual rounds and short volleys in a chaotic cadence, until both weapons were empty and the handguns' slides locked open. They then quickly reloaded, holstered their guns, and kicked the fallen spent shell casings in all directions. Some of the hot brass fell into the bloody pool, where it sank to the bottom; other casings rolled into the grass; and more rolled farther away along the decorative concrete deck.

As dogs barked in the neighborhood and lights flipped on up and down East Quail Avenue and South Hedgeford Court, Crane and Snipe walked calmly but quickly down the driveway. They used a pedestrian gate by the main drive gate and then walked out onto the street.

The front door of a home across the street opened, a woman in a bathrobe stood backlighted by the overhead fixture in her entryway, and Snipe drew his pistol and fired twice at her, sending her back inside, crawling frantically to safety.

In seconds a gray panel truck pulled up and the two men climbed into the van. It rolled north, heading to I-15. While Grouse drove and the other men sat silently, Crane pulled out his phone and pressed a few buttons. After a long wait for a connection and an answer, he said, "All objectives achieved."

TWENTY-TWO.

Sitting alone in front of a bank of glowing computer monitors in a glass office that overlooked a massive floor of open cubicle workspaces, a forty-eight-year-old Chinese man in a rumpled white shirt and a loose necktie nodded in satisfaction at Crane's news.

"Begin uploading data as soon as you can."

"Yes, sir," said Crane.

"Shi-shi"-thank you-the man in the office replied.

Dr. Tong Kwok Kwan, code name Center, tapped the secure voice-over Internet earpiece in his right ear to disconnect the call. He looked out past his monitors toward the open office floor and considered his next play. He decided to make the quick walk across the operations floor to the workspace of his best coder to let him know DarkGod's data would be coming in shortly from America.

Normally he would simply touch a button on his desk and talk to the young man via videoconference, but he knew a personal visit would encourage the coder to take this matter seriously.

Tong looked around his spotlessly clean office. Though there were no pictures of family or other personal items in view, a small, unframed cardstock sign hung from the glass door to the hallway.

It was written in flowing Chinese calligraphy, the characters one above the other in a single vertical row. Taken from the Book of Qi, a history of China from AD 479 to 502, the line was one of the thirty-six stratagems, an essay about deception for politics, war, and human interaction.

Tong read the words aloud: "Jie dao sha ren." Kill with a borrowed knife.

Although his unit of operatives in the United States had just killed on his behalf, Tong knew he himself was the borrowed knife.

Not much gave him pleasure, his brain had been virtually programmed by the state so that it did not respond to such banal stimuli as pleasure, but his operation was on track, and this satisfied Dr. Tong.

He stood and left his dark office.

- Tong Kwok Kwan was from Beijing originally, the only child of a union between two Soviet-trained mathematicians who worked in China's then-fledgling ballistic missile program.

Kwok Kwan had no Princeling pedigree, but his brilliant parents pushed academics upon him relentlessly, focusing his attention and his studies on mathematics. He consumed workbooks and textbooks as a child, but he reached adolescence in the early days of the personal computer, and his family saw immediately that his future lay in the near limitless power of the incredible machines.

Because of his good grades, the state sent him to the best schools, and then to the best universities. He went to the United States to heighten his abilities in computer programming, to MIT in 1984, and then to Caltech for his master's in 1988.

After Caltech, Tong came home and taught programming for a few years at China's University of Science and Technology, before beginning a doctoral program in computer science at the prestigious Peking University in Beijing.

By now the concentration of his studies was the Internet and the new World Wide Web-specifically, their vulnerabilities and the ramifications of these vulnerabilities in any future conflict with the West.

In 1995, while a thirty-year-old doctoral candidate, he wrote a paper titled "World War Under Conditions of Informationization." Almost immediately the paper made its way from the world of Chinese academia to the People's Liberation Army and the Ministry of State Security. The Chinese government classified the document top-secret, and immediately MSS operatives fanned out into any institutions of higher learning where the paper had been distributed, picking up hard copies, retrieving floppy disks containing the work, and giving long, intense, and intimidating talks with any professor or student who had come into contact with it.

Tong was immediately brought to Beijing, and within weeks he was lecturing the military and intelligence communities on how to leverage cyberoperations against China's enemies.

The generals, colonels, and spymasters were in over their heads in Tong's lectures, since the arcane terminology used by the brilliant young man was difficult for them to follow, but they realized they had, in Tong, a valuable resource. He was handed his doctorate and placed in charge of a small but powerful cyberwarfare testing, training, and development group within the MSS, and he was also given responsibility over PLA and MSS computer defensive operations.

But Tong was not content to run teams of government computer network operators. He saw more potential for power in the harnessing of the individual and independent Chinese computer hacker. He formed an organization of independent Chinese hackers in 1997 called the Green Army Alliance. Under his direction they targeted websites and networks of China's enemies, achieving intrusions and registering some damage. Although their impact was relatively minor, it showed that his academic paper could, in fact, be implemented in the real world, and it only increased his cachet even more.

Later he started the Information Warfare Militia, a collection of civilians in the technology industry and academia who worked independently but under the direction of PLA's Third Department (Signals Intelligence).

In addition to this unit, Tong formed the Red Hacker Alliance. By courting or threatening hundreds of China's most accomplished amateur computer coders via online bulletin boards frequented by the hackers, and then organizing them into a purpose-driven force, he used the men and women to penetrate industry and government networks around the globe to steal secrets for China.

But Tong and his army developed the means to do more than steal digital data. During a public dispute between China's state-owned petroleum organization and an American oil company over a pipeline contract in Brazil, Tong came before the leadership of the MSS and asked them, quite simply, if they would like his Red Hacker Alliance to destroy the oil company.

He was asked by the ministers if he intended to destroy the American oil company's dominance in the marketplace.

"That is not what I mean. I mean, physically ruin them."

"Shut their computers down?"

Tong's impassive face did not let on what he thought of these foolish ministers. "Of course not. We need their computers. We have obtained command-level control of their pipelines and oil-drilling capacity. We have kinetic capabilities at their locations. We can cause actual real-world destruction."

"Breaking things?"

"Breaking things, blowing things up."

"And they can't stop you?"

"There are manual overrides for everything at the site, at the physical location. I am just assuming this, of course. Some human being can get in the way and close a pump or cut power to a control station. But I can do so much, so quickly, that there is no way their humans can stop me."

No physical action was taken on the oil company. The Chinese government recognized, instead, the importance of Tong and his capabilities. He was not just a valuable resource, he was a potent weapon, and they would not waste this capability on ruining a single firm.

Instead he and his team hacked into the oil company's website and read sensitive internal communications between the oil company's executives about the acquisition attempt of the Brazil pipeline. Tong passed this on to China's state-owned National Petroleum Corporation, which used the information to underbid the Americans and win the contract.

Later, when K. K. Tong was tasked with stealing the plans for the U.S. Navy's quiet electric drive for its submarines, Tong and his hackers had the plans, representing five billion dollars in research by the U.S. Navy, in less than six weeks.

Dr. Tong next personally extracted more than twenty terabytes of data from the Department of Defense's unclassified database, handing over to the PLA the names of all American Special Forces operators and their home addresses, the refueling schedules for every ship in the Pacific, and the training and leave rotations of virtually all military units.

He and his men also stole the plans for America's next-generation fighter, the F-35.

Shortly before the end of the decade, Tong, along with the heads of the PLA's Third Department (Signals Intelligence) and Fourth Department (Electronic Counter Measures and Radar), developed the computer network operations component to the PLA policy of INEW, Integrated Network Electronic Warfare, the formal name of China's entire electronic warfare strategy. INEW would rely on electronic warfare to jam, deceive, and suppress America's ability to receive, process, and distribute information, and it was clear to all in the PLA by now that K. K. Tong and his civilian hacker army would be critical to INEW's success.

He and his minions infected millions of computers around the world, creating a robot army, a botnet, that could then be directed to attack a website or a network, overloading it with requests and denying service to anyone who attempted to log on. He directed his botnets to attack China's adversaries with devastating results, and the owners of the nodes on the robot army never knew their hardware was working for the PRC.

Unlike the rest of China, Tong operated in a constant state of war against the United States. Via espionage or harassing actions, he and his force of men and women, most of whom worked from home or their "day job" workstations, endeavored to compromise American computer network operations at every turn and build a massive target portfolio in case a shooting war broke out.

There was only one problem with Tong and his endeavors, as far as the Chinese were concerned. He was too successful. He'd been given nearly free rein to go seek out access to U.S. networks, and eventually, the Americans began to notice. The U.S. government realized someone was, in effect, attaching a vacuum cleaner to their data and sucking it out.

They called the persistent attacks into their government and industrial networks at first Titan Rain, and a second series of attacks they called Shady Rat, and the Americans tasked hundreds of investigators with finding out who was behind them. China was suspected from the beginning, and as Tong's operation grew in scope and importance, the MSS and the Politburo insiders who knew of the cyberprogram grew worried that some of the more high-profile attacks could be positively attributed to China.

The United States made a series of arrests of hackers involved in the operation, and some of them were ethnic Chinese. This worried the Chinese greatly, and pressure was put on the PLA and MSS to do a better job covering their tracks in the future.

When the full scope of Tong's vulnerability became apparent to the PLA and the MSS, the decision was made that he needed to be protected at all costs, and his organization needed to be completely sequestered and distanced from the Chinese government. Deniable computer network operations were critical in this time of declared peace, and to remain deniable there could be no comebacks to China itself.

But Tong had become known in the United States as a key civilian computer operations official working for the PLA. The investigators in the FBI and NSA looking into China cyberoperations referred to his influence over cyberstrategy as the Tong Dynasty, and when the Chinese realized Tong had been outed to such a degree, they knew they had to act.

After much discussion, the decision was made by the head of the Ministry of State Security that K. K. Tong, whose official title of director of technological training for the Chengdu Military Region First Technical Reconnaissance Bureau belied his field-marshal level of influence on one of war fighting's five domains, would be arrested on false charges of corruption, and then he would "escape" from custody.

Then Tong would relocate to Hong Kong and go under the protection of the 14K Triads. "Triad" was something of a catchall title referring to an organization with many unaffiliated branches, but the 14K was the largest and most powerful branch in Hong Kong. The MSS and the 14K had no operational relationship with each other. Triad activity had long been a thorn in the side of the Chinese government, but Tong would "sell" himself and his army of hackers to the Triads, and then repay them for their protection with money from any of the dozens of financial schemes his men and women ran around the globe.

The 14K would, of course, know only that Tong had escaped prison on the mainland and now was working in computer-related embezzlement and blackmail operations-black-hat computer crime.

The Triads would have no idea that ninety percent of the Tong organization's productivity involved cyberespionage and cyberwarfare, all on behalf of the Communist Party of China, the enemy of the Triads.

Tong was "arrested," and a short notice of his charges was printed in the People's Daily, a newspaper in China that served as a mouthpiece for the government. He was charged with computer crimes, and the article described an effort by Tong to embezzle electronically from ICBC, the state-owned Industrial and Commercial Bank of China.

The article was written to show the West that the mysterious Dr. Tong was out of favor with Beijing, and it was written to show the Triads in Hong Kong that this mysterious Dr. Tong had skills that could make them a great deal of money.

Tong was sentenced to the firing squad, but on the day of his scheduled execution, rumors came out of the prison that he had escaped with inside help. To enhance the ruse, prison officials ordered several guards shot the next day for their "collaboration."

The 14K Triads, the largest and most powerful underworld organization in Hong Kong, and the largest Triad in the world, took K. K. Tong in weeks later. He rebooted the army of civilian hackers that he had cultivated, and he reacquired his botnet army, and within months he was generating money for the Triads by using tens of thousands of nodes from his botnet to swindle credit card numbers with phishing e-mails.

Tong then started a new endeavor. With the 14K's blessing, though without any understanding of what he was really up to, Tong purchased hundreds of computers and recruited top-level hackers from the mainland and Hong Kong to operate them, bringing them slowly into Hong Kong and into the fold of his new operation.

K. K. Tong adopted the handle "Center" and called the physical hub for his new worldwide operation, his nerve center, the Ghost Ship. It was housed on the eleventh through the sixteenth floors of a Triad-owned office building in Mong Kok, a gritty high-density and lower-income portion of Kowloon, well to the north of Hong Kong's lights and glamour. Here the Triads watched over Tong and his people night and day, although they remained oblivious of his true mission.

Tong employed dozens of the best coders he could find, mostly men and women from his earlier hacker "armies." The rest of his employees he called controllers-these were his intelligence officers, and they all used the handle "Center" when dealing with their assets. They operated from workstations on the operations floor of the Ghost Ship, and they communicated via Cryptogram instant messaging with the hackers and physical assets who unknowingly worked for them around the world.