In the arguments about whether we should write the code and give it to the NSA as a demonstration, or actually take control of the satellites, one of the guys I didn't know, who said his name was Loomis, said that we were about to become the Old Man of the Sea.

"From the way Sinbad looked at it, he couldn't get the Old Man of the Sea off his back. From the Old Man of the Sea's point of view, he couldn't get off Sinbad's back, or Sinbad would kill him. If we get on the NRO's back, or the NSA's, we can never let go, or they will hunt us down like rats. If they just say fuck it, and put up a new Keyhole system, and we're locked out of it, we're cooked."

"But there's a time element," Bobby said, his voice rattling down the phone connection and then out a couple of cheap computer speakers. "If we can keep the government off for three, four, five years, it'll be too late to really do anything about us. The control of the world is slipping away from those people; in five years, it'll be gone."

"Still."

"There's another thing. We'll let it be known that this whole thing was pulled off by Bobby, the phamous phone phreak. I've got maybe five years left on earth. I'll be on a voice synthesizer by this time next year. If I'm their target, and they catch me two or three years from now. they ain't gonna catch much."

"Goddamn," I said. "That's harsh."

"Life sucks and then you die," Bobby said.

We took control on December third.

Bobby transmitted the changes over a four-hour period from a dish normally used for satellite telephone communications. The way it worked, essentially, was this: we took the NRO's spot, giving us control of the system. The NRO got the OMS controls, plus some enhancements we addedthis would not be a secret for very long, so we didn't have to go to all of AmMath's trouble to hide what we'd done.

If we hadn't told them about it, the NRO might have taken a while to discover what we'd done. They still talked to the satellites with the same encrypted commands; they could still take pictures and maneuver the satellites; in fact, before we told them about it, the only change that would have given us away was a difference in the number of computer bytes in the satellite's memory. But that changes often enough that we expected that they wouldn't notice. Not right away.

On December third and fourth, we ran checks, and tried to find ways to break our control. We made a couple of small patches, and the other five guys headed home. I went to Washington.

Rosalind Welsh, the NSA security executive, left her home at six-thirty in the morning, driving a metallic blue Toyota Camry. I noted the license plate; Bobby'd gotten the number the day before from the DMV, but he we wanted to make sure. I couldn't follow her all the way to the NSA building, but we'd done a time projection, and I called Bobby on a cell phone and said, "She's crossing the line now. Four or five minutes to the parking lot."

"Did you get the plate?"

"Yeah. Your numbers were right."

"Are you nervous?"

"Yeah "

"So you've still got your sanity." He chuckled. "One way or another, this is gonna be interesting."

The next day, I was in eastern Ohio, on my way home I pulled into a truck stop on I-80, got out the cell phone, and called Rosalind Welsh at her desk. Her secretary answered and I said, "This is Bill Clinton. You've got fifteen seconds to put Welsh on the phone. This may be the most important call she'll get this year, so I'd suggest you find her."

Welsh came on five seconds later. "What?"

"I need a phone number where I can dump a computer file."

"Why should."

"Don't argue with me. You'll want to see these photos. Give me a number or I'm gone."

She gave me the number.

I called Bobby from a truck-stop phone, gave him the number, and headed back east. I didn't doubt that the NSA could spot the cell that my call had gone through, and would be able to spot the next one. From that, they would be able to tell that I was headed east.

I called again twenty minutes later. "This is Bill Clinton," I told the secretary.

"Just a minute."

Welsh picked up, but the phone sounded funny. "What are you doing with the phone?" I asked.

"We've got some people here who want to listen in," she said. "You're on a conference call."

"Did you look at the pictures?"

"Yes."

"Do you know what they are?"

"Well, we have an idea. They look like our parking lot."

"They are. If you check the arrangement of carsthat's your car up in the northeast, and that's you getting out of ityou'll find out that the pictures were taken yesterday, with a Keyhole satellite. That's what AmMath was doing. They'd written a code sequencewhich you approved, by the waythat sat on top of the satellite encryption engine, and allowed them to use the satellites. They've been retailing satellite recon photos all over the Middle East and South Asia since the Keyholes went up. From what we've figured out, they were supplying recon for both India and Pakistan."

"Who have you told about this?" A man's voice, deep, harsh, angry.

"Nobody," I said. "But we've got a PR package ready to go to a dozen congressmen and senators, as well at The New York Times, The Washington Post, the L.A. Times, The Dallas Morning News, the Chicago Tribune, and a few other places you wouldn't want to see it. I mean, maybe we're going to do that."

"Maybe?"

"If you don't get off our backs. You fuckin' fascists are running innocent people all over the place, this so-called Firewall crackdown. AmMath invented Firewall and the IRS attack was just a bunch of punks from Europe. You know it, we know it, and most of the press knows it, but they're riding along with you for the amusement value. We want you to knock it off, or we'll ship our PR package, and the NSA becomes a greasy spot on the road. A few of you, I wouldn't doubt, will be looking at the inside of Leavenworth."

"We know who you are: we're tracking you right now, we're breaking down the walls," the male voice said.

"Bullshit. You've only found a couple of serious people so far and you only got them because they got careless," I said. "The rest of us are going to fuck you up if you don't back off."

"You're talking to the U.S. Government here, asshole."

"No, I'm not. I'm talking to a scared bureaucrat. But not as scared as you will be when we start sending recon photos to the press."

"You're gone; you no longer have any access to the Keyholes "

"Sorry, pal, it doesn't work that way," I said. "We own Keyhole. The only access you have is entirely walled off by our software. We built a firewall around your access port. Go ask your guys who are trying to get inside; go ask them. They can take picturesif we let them. They can even retask the satellites, if we let them. But if we get pissed, we'll eliminate your access and then we're gonna start taking pictures of nude beaches and the Royal Families and the president's vacation, and start flogging them off to The Star and People and whoever else wants them. With a nice little Keyhole credit line on them."

There was a long silence; then Rosalind Welsh said, "Don't do that."

"It's up to you," I said. "You'll be able to tell when we're pissed, because we'll cut off your Keyhole access. I mean, you could go ask Congress for another twenty billion to put up another Keyhole system, but I suspect that they'll be pretty pissed when they find out you lost the one you had."

The male voice: "You fucker. you fuckin' traitor."

"This is Bill Clinton you're talking to," I said. "We don't want to overthrow anything. We just want you off our backs."

"We can't promise anything in detail." Welsh said tentatively.

"Look, we're not bargaining with you," I said. "Don't get that idea. This is a straightforward extortion. If you get off our backs, you can run Keyhole like you always have. Nobody'll ever hear about how AmMath was selling American recon photos to Pakistan, or how AmMath invented Firewall to cover up a couple of murders and that you knew about it, or about how Keyhole now belongs to a bunch of hackers. All you have to do is stop. If you don't, well, you better grab on to something solid and bend over, because something ugly is about to happen."