The next day, Shaunessy Brennan called.
“How’s your brother?” she asked.
“On the road to recovery,” I said. “He has pneumonia. Some weird fungal thing he picked up in the Amazon.”
“I’m glad to hear he’s okay.”
“Thanks for helping us out. I really appreciate it.”
“You’re welcome. Look, I called to tell you that my boss, Melody Muniz, is offering you a job. The formal letter is in the mail, but I thought you’d like to know.”
My grin was wide enough to split my face. “That’s good news. That’s very, very good news. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Though I had nothing to do with it. It wasn’t my choice.”
“I appreciate the call, anyway. Thanks for thinking of me.”
“It’s just part of the job.”
Her tone was stiff, maybe even a little resentful. “You don’t like me much, do you?” I asked.
She didn’t respond for so long that I wondered if she’d hung up. Finally, she said, “It’s your type I don’t like. Young whiz kids with entitlement coming out their ears who think the rules don’t apply to them. Fine, you’re smart; I get it. But here, everybody’s smart. And the rules are there for a reason.”
“I can follow the rules,” I said. “And I’ll be good at the job. You’ll see.”
“Report to FANX III again next Monday, 9:00 sharp. Don’t be late. You’ll join a group of new hires in what we call the Tank, where people go to wait for their clearance tickets to come through.”
“The Tank?”
“It’s officially the Awaiting Clearance Pool. But informally, it’s the Tank. We verified your lapsed tickets, so, as you said, they should be able to turn yours around quickly. You won’t be there long. In the meantime, you’ll take a few orientation courses.”
“Good,” I said. “Does this mean I’ll be on the same team as you? Will we be working together?”
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” she said. “But I hope not.”
Ouch. I winced as I hung up the phone, but I couldn’t keep the grin off my face for long. The NSA! After a lifetime kept in the dark, I was finally going to be on the inside. I would know things. I would be allowed to learn all the secrets my father could never tell me. Who cared what Shaunessy Brennan thought? She’d done her worst, but she couldn’t keep me out.
After a little dance of triumph, I went to find my dad to tell him the news. I discovered him in the living room, reading from a thick book of collected short fiction. He liked short stories because he could finish them in a single sitting, unlike novels, which he tended to lose track of before he reached the end. He was crying as he read, tears running down his face unchecked.
I looked to see what story he was reading. It was “Flowers for Algernon.”
I gave his bony shoulder a squeeze and kept my news to myself.
CHAPTER 6
NSA agent Benjamin Harrison looked nothing like his presidential namesake. He was large and bald, with crimson cheeks that turned an even brighter red when he spoke. He seemed out of place in a suit and tie, and his tight collar left an impression against his wide throat. His normal speaking voice seemed to be a shout as he addressed the newest employees of the National Security Agency.
“This is the largest intelligence agency in the world,” he said, his booming voice filling the room. “And most of the country’s intelligence comes from right here at FANX or our sister location at Fort Meade. We give our troops a decisive advantage in war. We stop terrorist attacks before they happen. We locate chemical and biological weapon factories, track troop movements and missile programs, and slow the traffic of narcotics into the country. We are the nation’s first and last line of defense.”
I wondered if Agent Harrison could be the voice actor from the video in the lobby, but I dismissed the idea. His delivery wasn’t trained enough, though he seemed to be drawing from the same basic script. Did they have a cadre of professional writers on staff just to produce this stuff? Come to think of it, in an organization the size of the NSA, with the kind of public relations problems they had, they probably did.
I sat in a training classroom with a dozen other new hires, listening to Harrison preach. The room was organized with rows of long tables, each of which had three computer stations. The monitors were recessed into the tabletops, angled upward, and blocked by panels on each side to prevent any student from seeing another student’s screen.
“The biggest battle we fight is an invisible one,” Harrison said. “We have been fighting it for decades, and it never ends. It’s the battle of cyber warfare, in which our enemies try to discover our secrets by infiltrating our computing systems, and we try to return the favor. It’s a battle where everything we know is at stake—the designs of our fighters and missiles and carriers, the locations of our defenses, our vulnerabilities. Every war ever fought in the history of the world has been won or lost by information.”
Most of the class was listening with rapt attention, though two or three were doodling or using the computers. Harrison didn’t seem to notice. At least half of the incoming class were young women, and I entertained myself by guessing their names. The tiny brunette with short hair and a cute face I decided was Maggie. The tall freckled one with red hair like a sunrise was Kathleen. Megan had wide eyes and cracked her fingers, neck, and knees compulsively, and Diane was the one looking around the room like me and missing nothing. Our eyes met for a brief moment, and I winked. She looked away. The men were less interesting to me, but I assigned them names, too: Ronnie and Argento and Goddard and Max.
Then I noticed that everyone else was typing and staring down at their recessed monitors. Agent Harrison had stopped orating and had given the class some kind of instruction, which I hadn’t heard at all. I looked up at the front of the class, a flood of adrenaline kicking into my system. I didn’t want to make a bad impression on my first day.
“You’re all hackers now,” Harrison said. “Breaking into this enemy system could mean the difference between life and death for American citizens. Let’s see which of you can be the first to crack it.”
I looked down at my monitor. It showed a training website, with links to different courses and online resource texts. It was an unclassified network, connected to the internet and presumably with no connection whatsoever to any of the NSA’s secure systems. One of the links said “Introduction to the NSA course exercise.” I clicked it. A new screen appeared with a username and password. This, presumably, was the “enemy system” that we were supposed to crack.
The other students were intent on their work, fingers moving quickly. They probably all had computer science degrees, maybe with courses in cyberespionage or web security. I hadn’t the first clue how to hack into the site. But that didn’t mean I was going to give up.
I sat there, staring at the login screen, trying to think. Guessing passwords wasn’t likely to get me very far. I didn’t have the chops to make any kind of technical assault. I would have to do this my own way. I went back to the original website and pressed a few links until I found the phone number for technical support.
I raised my hand. “Agent Harrison,” I said. “I have to use the bathroom.”
“This isn’t middle school,” he said. “Get up and go.”
I walked out, moving quickly. In the hall, I turned right—away from the bathrooms. I felt very conspicuous wandering the halls with my bright red visitor’s badge, and I was certain that at any moment someone was going to stop me and demand an explanation of where I was headed. In a few minutes, however, I found what I was looking for. Another training classroom, identical to ours, but dark and empty. I stepped inside.