Philips turned to him thoughtfully. "Yes, but the back door isn't in the code. It's in the program — but it's not in the code."

Her audience looked confused.

The division chief shrugged. "You lost me there, Doctor."

The senior cryptanalyst offered, "You mean the relationship of things within the program?"

"Ah, now you're seeing it."

The division chief cut in. "What brought you back to the stego angle? The DDOS attacks on G/P sites?"

"No." She paused again. "Jon Ross brought me back to it." She turned back to face them. "For the last several weeks I have been exchanging e-mail communications with the man known as Jon Ross."

The impact of this revelation left her audience stunned briefly. Then there was frantic movement; previously untouched presentation binders were grabbed and thumbed through hastily.

"Why weren't we informed of this?"

The NSA chief interjected, "The Advisory Panel was informed."

"What evidence do you have that these e-mails are authentic?"

Philips was calm. "The first e-mail made reference to a conversation Ross and I had in person at Sobol's funeral."

The FBI analyst nodded slowly. "No doubt he claims innocence and that the Daemon really exists."

"He's doing more than that. He's pursuing the Daemon, and imploring us to do the same. Which leads us once again to the back door in Sobol's software. Because it was Jon Ross who helped me find it."

"That's convenient for him."

"I thought so, too. That's why I asked for a face-to-face meeting."

The NSA chief nodded in apparent recollection.

The FBI analyst looked surprised. "And he agreed?"

"After a fashion." Philips nodded to the back of the room, and the lights dimmed again.

The screen filled with an animated 3-D environment. It was a narrow, medieval-looking city street, with buildings leaning over it in irregular rows. Few in attendance recognized it because none of them had the time or inclination to play online computer games. A title in plain Arial font briefly appeared superimposed over the image:

Session #489: Elianburg, Duchy of Prendall

Philips narrated. "What you're looking at is Sobol's game The Gate.This is an online role-playing game-meaning that tens of thousands of users access game maps from central servers. The game covers a large area of virtual space. Jon Ross requested a meeting at this specific location; at the corner of Queensland Boulevard and Hovarth Alley in Elianburg."

"A meeting in an online game?"

"Yes. But since it's difficult to arrest an avatar, I decided to go into God Mode."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning I cheated; I enlisted the aid of the CyberStorm system administrators to place the intersection under surveillance with virtual cameras."

"You set up a stake-out in fantasyland?"

A chuckle swept through the room.

Philips nodded. "Something like that. The goal was to monitor every character that entered this intersection up to the appointed meeting time. It's a busy intersection-in the middle of the market where players purchase equipment-and I wanted the maximum amount of time to trace Ross."

One of the uniformed military officers spoke up. "Like tracing a phone call?"

"Similar, yes. Each player has a screen name hovering over their character's head that must be unique for that server cluster. We wrote a script that scanned for suspicious player names on the servers. It autoharvested IP addresses for likely suspects and traced them back to their ISP for follow-up. We also established a manual system where we could select any player name, and the CyberStorm techs would look up that player's originating IP address."

"Why bother with IP address? Doesn't CyberStorm have a record of each player's billing information?"

"Yes, but it seemed likely that Ross would steal or borrow an account. By using his IP address to locate the Internet Service Provider, and then contacting the ISP for the physical address of the connection, we were more likely to actually find him." She looked around the room for emphasis. "We scrambled airborne strike teams in several U.S. cities in preparation for this meeting in the hopes that Ross would be hiding in a major metropolitan area."

The FBI analyst couldn't resist. "I gather from the fact that Ross is still at large that this plan did not succeed."

A voice in the darkness: "Can we continue, please?"

Philips nodded.

The screen suddenly came to life. Animated 3-D people moved through the scene. It was eerie how realistically the people moved-although only half of them had glowing names floating over their heads.

"The characters moving around without names are NPCs, non-player characters-they are computer controlled. Only human players have names."

The perspective of the screen changed. It was a first-person view from Philips's character as she moved through the crowd.

"We conducted this session from our offices in Crypto. The game permits players with VOIP capability to speak directly to nearby players over a voice channel. Ross requested that we have such a hookup. I am controlling this character in the game, and it is my voice you will hear talking with him. I had a MUTE button on my headset, and you will also hear me issuing instructions to my team. Ross did not tell me in advance the name of his character, but he said I would be able to pick him out of the crowd. Which is why we put the auto-trace script in place. But Ross took a page out of Sobol's playbook."

The screen view changed as Philips's character turned this way and that, checking out the shoppers in the market. Then the POV moved toward a Nubian female 3-D character wearing a black leather corset with a plunging neckline. Something resembling a French-cut steel thong wrapped her shapely hips. She was a hentai cover girl. As the frame moved closer, the Nubian woman turned, revealing what was unmistakably a computer-generated version of Philips's face.

Mild amusement spread through the audience in the meeting room. Philips ignored it.

On- screen the glowing name over the Nubian avatar read: Cipher. Philips's recorded voice came in over the speakers:

Philips: Get me an IP for the screen name "Cipher." That's spelled c-i-p-h-e-r.

NSA Tech: Got it, Doctor. Looking up ISP…

The screen perspective moved right up to Cipher, and stopped. The scantily clad warrior princess faced the screen. A male voice came in over the speakers:

Ross: Good evening, Doctor.

Philips: Mr. Ross. Apparently you can't resist identity theft. How did you upload my likeness to this game?

Ross: I didn't upload anything. Players can edit the geometry of their avatars. I sculpted this one to resemble you.

Philips: I didn't realize you studied my appearance so closely.

Ross: How could I forget you? Besides, I knew you'd try to identify my account in advance of this meeting, but your automated forensics tools don't know what you look like, Doctor. Your physical appearance is a graphical encryption that the human mind is uniquely qualified to decode.

Philips: That doesn't make it any less unsettling to have a conversation with myself as a transsexual lingerie model.

Ross: I find it just as uncomfortable being seen with you.

Philips: How's that?

Ross: Well, you've got the default skin of a generic warrior, and nobody keeps the default skin. You are the fantasy world equivalent of a Fed. I recognized you a mile away.

Philips: Jon, why did you call me here?

Ross: To prove to you that I'm innocent.

Philips: And how do you intend to do that?

Ross: By showing you one of the back doors in this game.

Philips: We've been through every line of the source code, Jon. There are no back doors.