"How did it get to the NRO?"

"The virus attacked our phone line into them. It's secure from the outside but not from the inside. We'll have to do something about that."

"But I still don't understand what triggered the virus."

Stoll's big smile grew even bigger. "That's the genius of what they did. Look at this." He pulled over a laptop and booted the diskette, after carefully, almost reverently popping it from the disk drive. The title screen appeared and Stoll held a hand toward it.

Hood read everything on the screen. "South Korea diskette number seventeen, filed by him, checked by her, okayed by a general, and sent by military courier five weeks ago. What does that tell you?"

"Nothing. Read the very bottom."

Hood looked. He had to move in a little to read the fine print. "Copyright 1988 by Angiras Software. What's unusual about that?"

"All government agencies write their own software. It's not like WordPerfect where there's something to copyright. But our computers sometimes do get software with copyright notices on them, and I told the system to ignore that."

Hood began to understand. "This one triggered the virus?"

"No. This one triggered the shutdown that allowed the virus to enter undetected. That date-- 1988? It's a date but it's also a clock. Or rather, a tiny program buried in the date got its hooks into our clock and shut it down. For exactly nineteen point eight-seconds."

Hood nodded. "Good work, Matty."

"Shitty work, Paul. We see notices like that on programs and they don't even register on the brain. They certainly didn't on mine, and someone in South Korea took advantage of that."

"Who, though?"

"The date may help us there. I checked our files. One of the highlights of 1988 was when radical students demanding reunification clashed with the police. The government put the movement down, hard. Someone who's either for or against unification may have picked that date as a symbol. You know-- the same way the Riddler always used to leave clues for Batman out of some kind of twisted vanity."

Hood grinned. "I'd leave the Batman part out of my official report if I were you. But this is the extra push we may need to convince the President the South Koreans are behind this."

"Exactly."

"You really came through on this one. Send that title page to my computer and we'll see what Lawrence has to say now."

"How do we know it wasn't a North Korean mole working in the South?" Burkow asked.

"We don't, Mr. President," said Hood. He was listening on the secure phone while the President and Steve Burkow studied the document. "But why would the leaders in Pyongyang want to tinker with our satellites, make it look like they were preparing for war. They can move troops in the field, so why go through all this trouble?"

"To make us look like the aggressors," Burkow said.

"No, Steve. Paul's absolutely right. This doesn't smell like the work of the government. The DPRK isn't this subtle. It's a faction, and it could well be from either the North or South."