the great man’s attention through his job at the NSA, cracking the core code to the horrific Stuxnet worm, the most advanced malicious software worm to date, the first to be called a cyberweapon, that had baffled the best cyber security analysts for months. Variations on the Stuxnet worm had sucked up information on US advanced weapons systems, clandestine asset locations, forward initiatives by the military in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and drone strike targets in western Pakistan. He had also been the one to realize that the SecurID tokens the federal clandestine operatives used had been hacked. He identified the security flaw that had allowed the breach and sealed it.
He was like Einstein formulating the equation for the speed of light. At least that was how he had been described to the president by Mike Holmes, his former boss at NSA. Now he worked strictly for the president, reported to him directly. Their relationship was unprecedented, and quite naturally caused no end of jealousy among the members of the president’s cabinet, who resented his presence, let alone his cyber triumphs. What it boiled down to, Richards thought now, as he climbed into his chair and faced his computer screen, was that they didn’t understand him. Human beings, he had discovered, hated and feared anyone or anything they couldn’t understand.
Now his new directors were firmly in that restive camp. Pity. He had begun to like Director Marks, and he might have felt the same way about Director Moore had either of them given him a chance. Someone else might have been angry at them for this gross disservice, but Richards’s mind didn’t work that way. He knew, also from experience, that the best way for him to not only survive at Treadstone, but to flourish, serving the president as he was expected to do, was to change the co-directors’ opinion of him.
Opening the slim file Director Moore had handed him, he read through the close-set typescript, which, he saw immediately, was little more than unreliable bits and pieces—ephemera from the field. Still, there remained the possibility, slim though it might be, that at the heart of this smoke-and-mirrors show there lay an actual piece of uncharted topography. And he knew without a shadow of a doubt that if he could reveal this topography for the directors, they would begin to see him in a new light. This, more than anything else, was what he desired. It was what needed to happen. His master’s command.
He opened his Iron Key browser to the Internet and, fingers flying over the keyboard, began his search for a myth.
Rebeka stared out at the beautiful, bleak expanse of Hemviken Bay. Sitting at a waterside table at Utö Wärdshus, the only restaurant in this area of the southern Swedish archipelago, she nursed a coffee and her sore right shoulder. She’d received no more than a flesh wound from her quarry’s sudden attack. Anyone else would have berated herself for failing to deflect the attack, but not Rebeka. She had trained herself to let go, not to feel remorse or, worse, to castigate herself. She lived in the present, thinking only of the perilous future, and how to get there successfully while absorbing the minimum of damage.
Upon entering the restaurant, her practiced eye had noted all sixteen tables, only three of which were inhabited, one by a pair of old men, one of them in a wheelchair, slowly and deliberately playing chess, another by an ancient mariner with rough hands the color of a boiled lobster claw, reading a local paper while smoking a smallbowled pipe, and the third by a pregnant woman and her daughter, who Rebeka judged to be five or six. Her professional assessment was that none of them posed a threat, and she promptly forgot about them.
After her target had gone into the water, Rebeka, completely ignoring her knife wound, had spent the better part of an hour wading in looking for him. For all her efforts, standing firm against being pulled out with the tide, for the almost-frostbite in her toes, she had failed to find him. This was both unfortunate and frightening. She was fairly certain her shot had done nothing more than crease her target’s head. If she hadn’t killed him, she wanted to make certain the frigid water didn’t. She needed what was in his brain, and she cursed herself for shooting at him at all. She should have simply jumped in after him. Overpowering him in the water, she