that she wasn’t getting any extra credit from the bureau for wasting weekends. Becks was too practical to let a holy quest interfere with her climb up the FBI’s ladder. Soon enough, she told him—no pretense of asking—that they were headed to D.C., she’d taken a job at headquarters.
“Counterintelligence.”
“Being stupid? That’s an official desk?”
She didn’t smile. He couldn’t remember the last time she smiled at a joke he’d made.
* * *
The kids complained less than he expected about the move. They weren’t into Houston either.
But D.C.… In Houston Rebecca had whined about not being able to spend the way she liked. But in D.C. they really couldn’t live on her salary. Not anywhere that wasn’t at least an hour-plus drive from the Hoover Building. Exurbs, the real estate agents called them. Like if you lived there you didn’t even qualify for the suburbs anymore.
Of course, no law said FBI agents had a right to a fifteen-minute commute. The problem of their housing costs did have a solution, which was for them to move out to Germantown or Clarksburg, and for Rebecca to deal with the drive. But Rebecca insisted they be in one of the fancy close-in suburbs. For the schools, she said. Maybe. Or maybe Becks was just tired of driving. And of living in places where pickup trucks were more common than Volvo station wagons. You could take the girl out of Massachusetts…
Once again, what Rebecca wanted, Rebecca got. Instead of living in a town they could afford, they were stuck paying backbreaking rent for a dump in Chevy Chase. Stuck in a way Brian remembered from his childhood, when they had to choose which bills to pay and he dreaded the end of the month.
Worst of all, he knew what she was thinking. If you’d just make decent money everything would be fine.
She was wrong. They were way past that now, even if she wanted to pretend they weren’t. But whatever. He figured it would be easier to get a job than deal with her disapproval. So he did. At the National Security Agency, no less. Turned out that his résumé looked better than he expected to the government. ConocoPhillips was the kind of place the NSA liked to hire from. The fact that his wife was a senior FBI agent didn’t hurt either.
* * *
Then he caught a break. A break that changed his life even more than the night he’d walked into that bar in Charlottesville and met Becks.
The NSA did everything from operating spy satellites to protecting the fiber-optic cables that connected the White House with the Pentagon. It made the CIA look small.
But at the agency’s heart was a group called Tailored Access Operations—the government’s hackers. TAO was the computer equivalent of the military’s Special Ops units. Its coders inserted malware into North Korean nuclear plants, hacked the phone of Iran’s supreme leader. The Tailored Access guys could write code which would have gotten anyone else arrested. One famously nasty TAO bug called Carrie caused laptops to overheat and burn, even on sleep mode. The agency had used Carrie only twice, both times against North Korean nuclear scientists.
Tailored Access had barely two hundred coders, the elite of the elite. Brian’s résumé was far too thin for the agency even to consider him as a hire. But the NSA knew that many of its engineers considered the chance to work for TAO a major job perk. Once a year, it offered an open competition, a twenty-four-hour chance to solve what the agency called a “theoretical targeting opportunity.” Anyone who did was given the chance to join.
The official name for the challenge was the Annual Special Entry Program. It was more popularly known as “Ender’s Game,” from the famous Orson Scott Card novel. Despite the agency’s insistence that the puzzles were theoretical, everyone assumed they were related to actual Tailored Access operations. They were next to impossible. One week after the contest, the agency announced how many winners it had had. The coders joked that in most years the number was binary—either 0 or 1.
Brian’s first Ender’s Game had come five months after he joined the NSA full-time. He was still learning the quirks of the place. But any coder could sign up, even one as new as he was. To avoid interfering with regular work, Tailored Access dropped the challenge at midnight on a Friday. Employees worked at their desks. They had access to their regular computers and the NSA’s usual non-TAO software tools