CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Tuesday, 7:45 A.M., the National

Reconnaissance Office

It was one of the most secret and heavily guarded sections in one of the world's most secretive buildings.

The National Reconnaissance Office in the Pentagon was a small room with no overhead lighting. All of the room's illumination was provided by the computer stations, ten neat rows of them with ten stations in each row, laid out like a NASA control room; one hundred lenses in space watching the Earth in real-time, providing sixty-seven live, black-and-white images a minute at various levels of magnification, wherever the satellite eyes were pointed. Each picture was time-encoded to the hundredth of a second so that the speed of a missile or the power of a nuclear explosion could be determined by comparing successive shots or by factoring in other data, such as seismic readings.

Each station had a television monitor, with a keyboard and a telephone below each monitor, and two operators were responsible for each row, punching in different coordinates for the satellites to watch new areas or provide hard copy of images for the Pentagon, Op-Center, the CIA, or any of America's allies. The men and women who worked here went through training and psychological screening nearly as thorough as that of the people who worked in the control centers of the nation's nuclear missile bases: they couldn't become anesthetized by the steady flow of black-and-white images, they had to be able to tell in seconds whether a plane or tank or soldier's uniform belonged to Cyprus, Swaziland, or the Ukraine, and they had to resist the temptation to check in on their folks' farm in Colorado or brownstone in Baltimore. The space eyes could look at any square foot on the planet, were powerful enough to read a newspaper over someone's shoulder in a park, and the operators had to resist the temptation to play. After looking at the same mountain range, plain, or ocean day after day, the urge to do so was intense.

Two supervisors watched the silent room from a glass control booth that occupied one full wall. They notified the operators of all requests from other departments, and double-checked any changes in satellite orientation.

Supervisor Stephen Viens was an old college buddy of Matt Stoll. They'd graduated one and two in their MIT class, jointly held three patents on artificial neurons for silicon brains, and in a national mall-tour shootout were, respectively, the number two and number one highest scorers on Jaguar's Trevor McFur game. Atari executives had to agree to pay for overtime as Stoll's game continued four hours past mall closing time. The only thing they didn't share was Viens's passion for weight lifting, which gave their wives the idea for their nicknames: Hardware and Software.

Stoll's E-mail arrived just as Viens was settling in with his coffee and chocolate-chip muffin before starting his eight o'clock shift.

"I'll take it," he told night Supervisor Sam Calvin.

Viens rolled his chair in front of the monitor; he stopped chewing as he read the message: