Stoll punched off even as the pictures were scanning onto his monitor. The first photograph showed the terrain as it really was: no troops, no artillery, no tanks. The second photograph had them edging into the frame. Everything from the grain to the shadows looked authentic.

"If it's a fake, it's a damn good one," Katzen said.

"Maybe not. Look here."

Stoll hit F1/Shift, then went to the magnify option. The screen returned with a cursor, and he moved it over the windshield of a jeep at the top of the screen. He pressed Enter, and the windshield filled the monitor.

"Get a load of that."

Katzen looked, squinted, then exhaled loudly. "No way."

"Way," said Stoll, smiling for the first time in hours. He grabbed his mouse, hit the button on top, and rolled the cursor across the windshield, drawing a fine yellow line around the reflection of an oak tree. "No trees in the neighborhood, Phil. This image was lifted from another photo or it was shot somewhere else and inserted, digitally." Leaving the photo on document one, he switched screens to document two and asked the computer to search the NRO files for a matching shot. Two minutes and twelve seconds later, the photograph was on the screen.

"Unbelievable," Katzen said.

The technical data on the photograph appeared in a sidebar: it was taken 275 days before in the woods near the Supung Reservoir near the Manchuria/North Korea border.

"Someone went through our photo files," Stoll said, "selected all the images they wanted, and created a new program."

"And loaded it in.001 seconds," Katzen said.

"No. The loading was what the shutdown was all about. Or at least, what seemed like a shutdown to us."

"I don't follow."

"While we thought the computers were off-line, someone, somehow, used the twenty seconds to dump this photo and every successive photo into the system. It took.001 seconds to kick in, and now, like a recording, those prefabricated images are being played back to us every.8955 seconds."

"This is too goddamn fantastic--"

"But the fact remains that we-- the NRO, DOD, and the CIA-- are all closed systems. No one could get to any of us over the phone lines. To download that much data, someone would have to have been sitting somewhere in Op-Center popping in diskettes."

"Who? The security videos turned up nothing."

Stoll snickered. "What makes you think you can trust them? We've got someone screwing with our satellites. A camcorder isn't going to be much of a challenge."

"Christ, I didn't think of that."

"But you're right. I don't think this was done on premises. It would mean that someone here's a bad penny, and whatever I think of Bob Herbert personally, he's one very careful cashier."

"I like that."

"Thanks." Stoll went back to document one and looked at the windshield. "So what've we got? Somewhere in this system is a rogue program, and on it are photographs that the NRO satellites haven't even taken yet-- photographs that they will appear to take every.8955 seconds. That's the bad news. The good news is, if we can get to that program, we can drop-kick it, restore our space eyes, and prove that someone's out to stir up big trouble in Korea."