Part 9 (1/2)

”That's what I said.” Jaggard smiled. The scar echoed the smile. Sam thought back to the whirlwind of the last few weeks and shook his head, confused.

”But the White House? [email protected] Con?”

”There is no [email protected] Con,” Jaggard said. ”Think of it as a job application.”

”And Recton Hall?”

”The job interview.”

Sam was still having trouble comprehending it all. ”What's this?” he asked, holding up the sheaf of papers.

”It's a job offer,” Jaggard said, although he clearly thought that was obvious. ”You can take it or leave it.”

”I'm only seventeen,” Sam said, thinking they must already know that.

”Sam”-Jaggard looked at him appraisingly-”everybody at that meeting in the old warehouse was given the same information. Hack into the White House for the Convention. You want to know how many of them got through?”

Sam shrugged.

”Just you, Sam.”

Sam looked again at the figure on the bottom line of the contract. It seemed extraordinarily generous for an annual salary. Almost too high, in fact.

”What does that work out to be per month?” he wondered out loud, trying to do the math. His brain seemed to be running in slow motion.

”That is is per month,” Jaggard said. per month,” Jaggard said.

Sam gasped.

”You can take it or leave it,” the man said again.

He didn't expand on that, but Sam had the strong sense that if he left it, that would mean a return to Recton.

”If you take it,” Jaggard continued, ”you're on probation for three months. If you survive the probation”-he'd said ”survive,” Sam noted, not ”pa.s.s” or ”succeed”-”then that figure doubles.”

”Doubles?” Sam blurted.

”Think we're being overgenerous?” Jaggard said, and his scar smiled again.

Overgenerous? The amount was The amount was obscene obscene! Sam thought, but said nothing.

”We pay well,” Jaggard said. ”We have to, or at least we choose to. We select only the best of the best, so we pay them accordingly. But it goes a little deeper than that. You'll have almost unlimited access inside every government department and financial inst.i.tution in the country. We want to remove the temptation to help yourself and to avoid the possibility of bribery by outside agencies. We feel that if you have more money than you know what to do with, it makes you a little more resistant to corruption.”

Sam leaned back in his chair and looked around the office, trying to get his thoughts in order.

Dodge-Skullface-had driven him straight to the same small private airfield just out of Bethesda that he had flown into a few weeks earlier.

The drive hadn't been without incident. A police cruiser had pa.s.sed them on the main street through Friends.h.i.+p Village and shone a light into the rear of the cab before pulling in behind them. The red-and-blues had come on.

Dodge reached for his cell phone the moment the cruiser had shown interest, talking quietly into it even as he signaled and pulled over to stop.

Two Bethesda cops stepped out of the cruiser and approached cautiously, weapons drawn, silhouetted in their own headlights. They made it only halfway to the car when they halted, and one put a radio to his ear.

That was it. The two officers retraced their steps to the cruiser, switched off the flas.h.i.+ng lights, and just sat there.

Dodge slipped his cell phone back in his pocket as he accelerated away from the curb.

These guys have some powerful mojo, Sam thought.

The flight, in the same black Learjet (or at least an identical one), was longer this time, and he had slept on the plane. He woke at the jolt of landing. His watch said six-thirty, and he would have expected to see the early dawn lightening of the sky, but it was still as dark as tar. That meant they had flown west, into a new time zone. The flight time (they had taken off around midnight) meant California.

Signs on the freeway on the drive in from the airfield confirmed it. San Jose.

Right in the heart of Silicon Valley.

”Welcome aboard,” Jaggard said as Sam finished signing the last of the paperwork. Jaggard stood. ”I'll take you through to meet the rest of the team.”

”What about my mom?”

Jaggard considered that for a moment and sat back down. ”It's all in your contract, but the gist of it is this: For the next three months, as far as your mother is concerned, you're still at Recton. Any e-mails to your Recton account will be intercepted and relayed here. Any efforts to visit you will be rebuffed. Any legal challenges or official channels she might complain to will turn a deaf ear.”

Sam nodded his understanding.

”At the end of the three months, if you survive, then your mother will be fed some c.o.c.k-and-bull story about you working out a deal with the FBI and working for them.” He looked Sam in the eye. ”At no time is your mother, or anyone else you talk to or anyone else you talk to, allowed to know about your involvement with the CDD. A network is only as safe as the people who protect it. If the bad guys know who you are, they can compromise you, and if they do that, they can compromise our entire operation-and with it the data infrastructure of this entire country. Is that clear enough for you?”

”Yes, s-sir,” Sam stammered.

”I'm not trying to frighten you,” Jaggard said.

Sam wondered what he'd be saying if he was was trying to frighten him. trying to frighten him.

Jaggard continued, ”But secrecy is our first line of defense. Let's go.”

Jaggard stood and led Sam through a series of doors that he unlocked with a keycard, then into some kind of control center. The room was circular with workstations arranged in pairs around the outer circ.u.mference. Dark tinted windows gave a dimly shaded view of the outside world. A few blocks away, he could see the Adobe logo on top of a group of high-rise towers, and across the superhighway was a large sports stadium that he thought was the Hewlett-Packard Pavilion.

This was Silicon Valley, all right.

In the center of the room, giant plasma screens faced in every direction. Some of the screens were security monitors, showing switching views of both the inside and the outside of the building. They surrounded a small, raised octagonal office. Sam couldn't see in, but he had a strong feeling that someone was in there, looking out.

There were at least seventy people in the control center when he arrived, and only a few empty desks. The people sat in pairs, three computer screens to each person.

He saw Dodge sitting at one of the workstations. Dodge looked up briefly as Sam walked in behind Jaggard. The rest of the workers ignored them, intent on their screens. There was a sense of urgency in the room.

It could be this afternoon, or it might not be for months. Sam recalled the words that the strange woman had said earlier.

Jaggard put two fingers in his mouth and made a piercing whistle. Work stopped.