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  He had read that in an emergency, people can increase their strength tenfold. A frightened mother can lift a car off her injured child. Drugs can have the same effect.

  Nathaniel no longer needed the excuse of an emergency—nor drugs.

  The needs of the body no longer ruled.

  He gripped the two fingers and popped one back into place, then the other. The arm would have to take care of itself—he didn't mind the pain.

  I have a cosmic mind, he told himself. He could make himself believe every word—and then smile in perfect awareness that this was crazy. That he was going insane.

  But whatever—I am bringing a lot more systems online and under my conscious control than is humanly possible.

  He took the sedative with another glass of water—the water tasted like pink platinum, whatever that might be—and lay down on the bed in the condo's coolness, privacy, and extraordinary luxury.

  Leased through the efforts of that poor blown-up, beaten-down, guilt-ridden son of a bitch who was being paid, along with the rest of the Turing Seven, to corrupt the world's finances—but couldn't hear a motorbike rip past without breaking into a rank sweat.

  His past self.

  There was still plenty of money left. The Quiet Man had trained them well. Millions of dollars in hidden bank accounts, just in case. However this turned out, he would soon be leaving it all behind—United Arab Emirates, the Middle East, the desert.

  All but the money.

  He would make his way back to America. There, with what he knew, and this new sense of liberation, maybe he would finally be able to do something different.

  Meet important people outside the usual circles.

  Spill the beans. Tell the world what he had been up to. Tell them all about the incredible nastiness that was in the works.

  Do some good for a change.

  Although doing more evil would certainly be exciting.

  Chapter Four

  14 DAYS

  Spider/Argus

  Tyson's Corner, Virginia

  Jane Rowland climbed down from the humming blue-and-green bus and walked with three colleagues, known to her only by their badge numbers, across a walkway through plantings of young trees and turf-squared grass, around a small fountain, to her home away from home.

  Under a gray canopy of moody humidity, the new headquarters of Spider/Argus blended with all the other blandly efficient buildings of Tyson's Corner: gray modern architecture both blocky and tidy.

  Hotels and malls and restaurants spread throughout the small city catered to some of the most powerful and anonymous people on the planet.

  Typically Jane worked the nightshift. Her personal monitor bots were even now preparing reports that only she would see—until she passed them along to her director, who had permanently commissioned her last year to do what she did best.

  Spider/Argus had been conceived twenty years ago as a supplement to the National Security Agency, which had proved slow to transition from SigInt—Signals Intelligence: landlines, satellites, cell phones, radio—into the dataflow age of Internet Everywhere.

  In the eight years since its creation, S/A had budded off completely from its parent, taking on not just Internet and Web-based research and intelligence, but defensive CPI: counterintelligence, prevention, intervention.

  Letting a highly trained watchdog off its leash.

  Spider/Argus was not even its official name. Jane knew of just a small fraction of its operations.

  Security barricades surrounded all. Nobody approached the building without clearance at the highest levels. Hidden sonic disrupter and microwave heat and pain projectors had been installed at all entrances and in undisclosed locations around the grounds—capable of incapacitating attackers at a distance of several hundred yards.

  Lethal force was authorized inside the barbed-wire flanked corridors, patrolled by roller bots and dogs and soldiers. The tunnels of wire that covered nearby freeway overpasses were monitored by thousands of bug-eye cameras.

  At regular intervals along all the local freeways and access roads, concrete arches hid .50 caliber, high-speed, radar-guided gun mounts, similar to those used to shoot down missiles and capable of cutting cars and trucks—even armored, military-style trucks—to hamburger-filled scrap within seconds.

  Jane passed through the automatic steel and glass doors and submitted her badge and arm chip at the two security gates beyond.

  "You'll need a code refresh by tomorrow evening," the female guard told her in a droop-eyed monotone.

  For the guards, this had to be one of the most boring jobs in the greater DC/Maryland/Virginia area. Nobody interesting passed their way. Nobody spoke to them other than brief pleasantries.

  Not even sports or weather could be discussed.

  But the droop eyes stayed alert and sharp.

  Jane waited for her assigned elevator at the automated station, then rose to the third floor. No music and no smell—clean, cool, purified air. Elevators carried singles at all times. Conversation in other than work areas was not just discouraged, it was tracked and fined. Posted lists of recent fines glowed from monitors over the elevator doors—though of course with no names or numbers attached.

  There was fun to be had, of course. Floors and divisions with the highest levels of fines had to buy Christmas gifts for charities in the DC metro area. Top analysts with the highest fines had to spring for hallway treat tables.

  No holiday parties, however.

  Those guilty of prohibited violations spent three months in "time-out" at comfortable locations in the Adirondacks, until their cases were processed. Most did not return.

  Jane did not find any of this exceptional. Her new office was far more comfortable than the one at the old Naval station on the banks of the Potomac.

  The security was no worse, and definitely more effective.

  At the end of each work period—usually in the small hours of the morning—she returned to her apartment and her daughter, dismissed the government-provided nanny, a woman with excellent bodyguard credentials, and assumed her favorite role—devoted single mom.

  She was very good at everything she did.

  Jane approached the door to her office. Beside the door, a black sign with silver letters warned that this was a "Faraday Room."

  The room snitch checked her security codes one last time, unlocked the door, and opened access to the banks of office computers, clearing her for work.

  Her machines never shut down.

  She watched as wide ranks of rectangular displays brightened, switching from low-power mode.

  Results of the day's searches started cascading down the line like flipped cards in solitaire. She sat in her special chair—the one item she had brought with her from the old Potomac building—and flexed her fingers before highlighting with airy gestures the top items on her evening work chart.

  The room swiftly interpreted her motions either as writing, drawing, or command and control.

  On the small bulletin board hung to the left of her monitors, ten months ago—while preparing for her current operation—she had tacked a printout from a Congressional Budget Office report.

  Many nations, coming out of a long financial downturn, and having acquired assets such as at-risk real estate from beleaguered banks and other institutions, find themselves asset rich but increasingly cash poor. The United States, with debts on the order of fifty trillion dollars and an unfortunate habit of triggering recessions, is thought by a majority of nations to be the greatest threat to financial stability in the world.

  Investor and debt-holding institutions fear that a disruption similar to that of 2008-2009 will push the world economy over the edge, bringing on yet another worldwide crisis, this one of dire proportions.

  Created in 2009, the International Financial Protection Corporation (IFPC) is an international fund that contains and controls a cumulative 85% of U.S. debt through all of its participants and investors.

  The United States has agreed to c
ertain strict conditions, contingent to obtain necessary further loans from IFPC. Those conditions have not been revealed to the public.

  Below that, she had pinned a second printout framed top and bottom with blue scribbles from her boss.

  The following internal warning from the Federal Reserve and the Department of the Treasury has never been released to the public and, god willing, never will be.

  In order to qualify for all necessary further loans from IFPC, the United States executive branch, with the agreement of the Federal Reserve, the Secretary of the Treasury, and three congressional committees, has agreed to a special troubled nation loan protocol.

  Certain national assets are valued and offered up as collateral. Central authority is ultimately invested in an automated system known as MSARC—Mutual Strategic Asset Recovery and Control—which can trigger massive reallocations and call in loans, effectively putting a debtor nation into instant receivership.

  Should MSARC decide to act, collateral assets guaranteed under the loan agreements will immediately be transferred to IFPC.

  Financial corporations and investment funds around the world can then call the political shots through a Reallocation Committee.

  If MSARC so decides, for the first time in our history, foreigners will hold almost complete economic and political control of—and so they will own—the United States of America.

  MSARC poses the greatest threat to this nation since the Cold War—maybe greater.

  And it's our own damned fault. We do hate paying taxes, and we do love all our precious government services. Squealing piggies at the trough.

  Her boss was prone to expressing himself vividly. Nevertheless, she read the posted pages before beginning her work every evening. They neatly bookended the current plight of the United States.

  The monitor on her far right—smallest and most antique, losing pixels and fading in the corners to autumn gold—was devoted to displaying a simple digital clock.

  The clock counted backward, second by second.

  It now read 14 days 13 hours 5 minutes.

  The amount of time left before MSARC began formally judging America.

  MSARC was allowed access to information that once would have been considered closely-held national secrets. Its central computer banks in Geneva relied on a network surveillance capability that in two years had come to rival many in her own agency.

  MSARC also had access to the records of major corporations with government contracts—all but Talos Corporation in Lion City, Texas, one of the biggest holders of U.S. government contracts. That exemption had been passed by congress with hardly a ripple, so many members were beholden to Talos CEO Axel Price. Price had taken a particular interest in MSARC some years back, even serving on a fully briefed government advisory committee.

  The first item on Jane's evening agenda was following up on a list of MSARC queries. Stopping or interfering with those queries—or even tracking them—violated the loan agreements, so Jane was discreet, using the full range of search and masking capabilities available to Spider/Argus.

  This evening, the list included only thirty queries, concentrating on the Federal Reserve and a number of major software corporations.

  The latter might be of interest to other analysts. She copied them to a separate office that evaluated long-term patterns of foreign interest in private business.

  More sobering still, MSARC's command center in Geneva was only now ramping up to full capacity—the moment of truth tracked by her backward-counting clock.

  No one knew how extensive and powerful those systems were. It was possible Spider/Argus would be completely shut out by a superior program.

  Whenever Jane conducted surveys on that particular question, her web "helpers"—thousands of subroutines running in machines everywhere from Cheyenne Conserve to Iron Mountain to right here in Tyson's Corner—came back with results that gave her the spooky feeling she—Jane Rowland herself—was being closely watched by something with almost preternatural instincts.

  Human or machine, she could not even begin to guess.

  There was evidence this presence was working on behalf of MSARC.

  There was also evidence that MSARC was not even aware of its existence.

  That contradiction intrigued Jane.

  She loved this sort of puzzle.

  The second item for this evening was the most important. She was arranging for a brief but powerful ripple of net inactivity—amounting to a thirty-second denial of service—spreading across hundreds of server farms in the northwest and the southeast, with the ultimate goal of helping an agent infiltrated into Talos Corporation in Lion City, Texas.

  His code name was Nabokov.

  Jane knew almost everything about how the Talos computers accessed the outside world, and how they protected themselves against being accessed. Nabokov was poised to take advantage of a maintenance hole in Talos's infranet to download data crucial to a joint investigation, a rare instance of S/A cooperation with an outside agency—in this case, Alicia Kunsler at Bureau East.

  Killing a few minutes time, Jane pushed her wheeled chair over to her relaxation station—a hot plate, sink, small refrigerator, and rack of cups—and made herself a cup of her favorite, white tea.

  Cup in hand, she rolled back.

  One-handed, she used a keyboard to type in a warning of the impending system-wide interruption, alerting national security masters throughout Tyson's Corner that this was not the beginning of a foreign assault.

  She then paused her finger over the ENTER key, waiting for the precise second . . .

  Now or never.

  Chapter Five

  Lion City, Texas

  Talos Corporate Campus

  Footsteps echoed hollowly down the Buckeye main hallway to the central instructor lounge. Fouad Al-Husam was alone. The building seemed deserted.

  He had finished his afternoon class teaching regional Farsi and Arabic to a select team of Haitian troops destined to serve as mercenaries in Middle Eastern theaters.

  Normally, at the end of each day he returned to his apartment in Lion City and ate dinner alone. His free time he mostly spent reading or watching Islamic history on cable, hungry for another place, another time.

  Remembering his strange return to the hot, pure air of the Hejaz—his visit to Mecca.

  This evening, he had reserved the central computer annex for half an hour to conduct academic research over the Talos infranet.

  The Haitians had surprised Fouad with their intelligence and devotion. Talos was paying for their education. They sent more money home to their families each month than many in Haiti earned in a lifetime.

  They reminded Fouad of the Janissaries he had commanded in Turkey, it seemed an age ago—but was just two years.

  Two eventful, deceitful years.

  It could be said about Axel Price that he was a powerful man, a strange man, even perhaps a corrupt man, but he paid generous wages and maintained strict military discipline in his company and his people.

  Fouad was ten times better paid now than he had ever been as an agent.

  The Buckeye main lounge surrounding the annex was also empty. Evening classes resumed at eight.

  The annex—a smoked glass hexagon on the north side of the lounge—served both faculty and advanced students. It gave access to online instructional materials and teacher/adviser briefings, as well as a host of information services equal or superior to anything available to CEOs of other major American corporations.

  Of course, all searches were logged.

  The classrooms in Buckeye radiated in eight spokes from a central rotunda, forming a wagon wheel. Three similar wheels in other quarters of the campus were devoted to particular collections of Talos customers.

  Each was named after a regional butterfly.

  Axel Price loved butterflies. He had the largest collection in the world—hundreds of sealed glass cases, so it was said—but showed it to no one.

  Price's other hobby was collec
ting rare antique cars. They were kept in a huge garage near the Smoky, his ranch and principal residence.

  Fouad's fingerprint and arm chip logged him into the annex. The lock took a small DNA sample from his skin oils. Micro-PCR and pore sequencing technology within the lock took less than ten seconds to confirm his genetic identity and compare it with the information on the chip.

  The annex's glass and steel door unlocked with a smooth click and slid open. Had he been denied, alarms would have sounded throughout the building.

  The chip also enabled Talos to track him anywhere on the ten thousand acre campus. Every few feet, the chip was queried by sensors imbedded in walls and sidewalks, grass, and asphalt. Millions more sensors were scattered over the training fields and surrounding lawns, gardens, and tracks, maintaining a tightly woven net of constant surveillance.

  Around Lion City, planes and helicopters had dropped enough sensors to saturate the entire area with the thin disks, two centimeters in diameter—one or two per square yard.

  All in the interest, so it was said, of preventing illegal Mexicans from causing trouble.

  Fouad carried ice in a cup from the cafeteria to cool his hands. He applied it briefly to his forehead. Within any of the campus buildings, Talos security could record his heart rate, blood pressure, and body temperature for face, hands, and feet. The ice in the cup reduced his blood flow and brought his stress profile more in line with normal activity.

  The hexagonal space was equipped with three chairs. There were no tables or monitors. The entire room served as a display. The neutral gray walls were equipped with hundreds of tiny lasers.

  Fouad sat in the middle chair.

  In a few minutes, a general ripple in the dataflow would pulse through selected servers regularly utilized by the Talos infranet. That would cause no damage, but it might give him a few minutes of deep, unfettered access into the corporate goody bag—without the access being logged.