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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