He waited for his words to sink in. "This is a serious situation. Six good men died today-leaving behind wives and children. These were people Detective Sebeck, Agent Decker, and I knew. Others were maimed and injured. This isn't a game. If we guess wrong, many more people could die-and not just here."

Sebeck spoke up. "Agent Trear, I've seen Jon work. He helped me understand how Sobol killed Pavlos at the canyon scene, and he shut down the Daemon over at Alcyone Insurance when it first appeared. If it wasn't for him, this situation might be even worse. I think somebody technical should listen to what Jon has to say."

Trear nodded appreciatively.

Agent Straub cleared his throat. "Sir, if we want to make the evening news window, we've got to hold a press conference."

Trear looked at him. "Straub, this scene is being covered 24/7 by every news channel on the planet. Don't worry about the news window." Trear turned away and pulled a pen from his suit jacket. He started scribbling on a memo pad on a nearby conference table. "Look…" He tore the page off and handed it to Sebeck. "Bring Mr. Ross down to CyberStorm's corporate headquarters and ask for Agent Andrew Corland. He's head of the FBI Cyber Division. They're examining the CyberStorm corporate network and interviewing staff."

Trear turned to Agent Decker. "We did a background check on Mr. Ross yesterday?"

Decker nodded. "Preliminary came up clean-except for the address."

Ross leaned in. "I explained that."

Trear silenced him with an upheld hand. "If you can convince Corland that you know something useful, I'll be willing to listen to your theories. Failing that, I don't want to have this conversation again."

Sebeck folded and pocketed the slip of paper. "Fair enough. Thanks, Agent Trear. Agent Decker. C'mon, Jon."

Ross resisted. "But you do believe this is a diversion?"

"Have Agent Corland call me, Mr. Ross." Trear looked to Sebeck. "Sergeant, I know it's a difficult time, but I need written reports from you as soon as possible. I want your account of the attack, the cell phone call, and I want those findings from the canyon scene."

Sebeck nodded. He turned and pulled Ross out the trailer door and into the fading sunlight. Once outside, Sebeck and Ross squeezed past the gathering press corps and headed toward the estate fence line.

Ross pulled himself free. "I never even wanted to be involved in this mess in the first place."

"Jon, you've got an unusual skill set. And we need your help. Larson was engaged to be married. He was barely twenty-five. How many more people like him are going to die?"

"The Feds are wasting their time. They won't find anything on the CyberStorm network."

Sebeck grabbed Ross's arm again. "Look, I'm getting tired of hearing what we won't find. Tell me where we can find something."

"Sobol had the whole damned Internet to hide his plan. That's what I would have done."

"Don't even go there."

"It's that type of thinking that's going to limit us. We must put ourselves in his frame of mind."

"Fuck his frame of mind."

Ross met Sebeck's stare for a moment or two, then looked away. "Sorry. I guess that is annoying. If someone could just get me back to my car, I'd like to get some rest."

Sebeck's stare softened. "I forgot the Feds grilled you all last night. I'll take you back. No detours this time."

They turned and faced a barrier of concrete highway dividers ringing Sobol's estate. CALDOT crews had placed them over the last several hours. Both men looked into the distance. Beyond the estate fence, a quarter mile away, the black Hummer sat motionless in the center of the sweeping lawn amid crisscrossing tire tracks. Its whip antennae stood straight up, like the spines on some deadly insect.

A few deputy sheriffs were placed here and there along the road, sitting inside rugged-looking Forest Service crew trucks, engines idling. Sebeck guessed they were there to win a demolition derby should the Hummer make a break for it.

Sebeck turned to Ross. "You really think this is just the beginning, don't you?"

Ross scanned the terrain. "I don't know what I think anymore. Maybe Trear's right."

Sebeck took one last venomous look at the Hummer. "C'mon. Let's get you back to your car."

Chapter 15:// Countermeasures

Crypto City.That was what they called National Security Agency headquarters. Each day thousands of agency personnel took an unmarked highway exit in Fort Meade, Maryland, into a sprawling business park of mid-rise office buildings surrounded by concentric rings of barbed wire fencing and a yawning desert of parking spaces. The mirrored windows of the buildings were fakes. Behind them sheets of copper and electromagnetic shielding prevented any electrical signals from escaping the premises.

The agency was a vast communications drift net, catching hundreds of millions of electrical and radio transmissions worldwide every hour and sifting through them with some of the most powerful supercomputers on the planet. From its very beginning-back in the days of the fabled Black Chamber after World War II-the agency was responsible for creating the cryptologic ciphers relied upon to safeguard America's secrets and for cracking the ciphers of foreign powers.

A culture of secrecy dating back to the Cold War permeated the place. Posters seemingly from a bygone era hung in the common spaces, extolling the virtues of keeping secrets-even from other top-secret researchers. However, with the explosion of technology throughout the nineties, even the NSA was no longer able to keep up with the worldwide flow of digital information, and they were forced to let the rumors of their omniscience hide a brutal reality: no one knew where the next threat was coming from. Nation states were no longer the enemy. The enemy had become a catchall phrase: bad actors.

In a corner boardroom of the OPS-2B building, a group of agency directors convened an emergency meeting. No introductions were necessary. They had already worked together closely in the War on Terror and the War on Drugs, and they stood ready to combat any other noun that caused trouble. Senior intelligence and research officers from a periodic table of agencies were in attendance: NSA, CIA, DIA, DARPA, and the FBI. The talk was fast and urgent.

NSA: "So, what is it, a virus? An Internet worm?"

DARPA: "No, something new. Some sort of distributed scripting engine that responds to real-world events. It's almost certainly capable of further propagation."

NSA: "Can we write a bot to scour the Net and delete it?"

DARPA: "Not likely."

NSA: "Why not?"

DARPA: "Because it doesn't appear to have a single profile. Our best guess is that it consists of hundreds or even thousands of individual components spread over compromised workstations linked to the Net. Once a component is used, it's probably no longer needed."

NSA: "Then there's an end to it? I mean, Sobol's dead, so it will stop once it runs its course."

DARPA: "True, but there's obvious concern over the damage it might cause in the meantime. It's already killed eight people."

NSA: "Can't we block its communications? Surely the components have to communicate with each other?"

DARPA: "No. They don't. We believe the components are triggered not by each other, but by reading news stories. For example, one component just issued this press release"-he passed a printed page-"only after the siege story hit the wire services. The release is digitally signed. Sobol wants us to know it was his. We already tracked down the origin of the press release; it was e-mailed from a poorly secured computer in a St. Louis accounting firm. The program destroyed itself after it ran, but we were able to recover it from a tape backup. It was a simple HTML reader searching hundreds of Web sites for headlines about this estate siege."