“National Reconnaissance Office—one of the Big Five intelligence agencies. They run all the satellites and, as a result, their computers are under constant attack by the Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans, Iranians, you name it. They were putting together teams of white hats and black hats to shore up their firewalls. Russ loved the work. And not only was he getting a steady check, but they promised to deep six his felony record.”

“They can do that?”

Now Donny gave her an are-you-kidding? look. “The federal agencies have been totally off the hook for years. You wouldn’t believe what I hear in the dark-web chat rooms. It’s the wild west out there. But the thing is, the felony was never deep-sixed because Russ was suddenly dead. Coincidentally, another hacker from my chat room, who dropped the news that he was doing something similar but wouldn’t say who for, has stopped saying anything. We haven’t heard from him since early February, which was when Russ drowned.”

“And you think he and Russ suffered a similar fate?”

“Let me lay out what I’ve put together: Russ told me their job was to take the most virulent worms and trojans the Russians and Chinese had used against the NRO’s computers and make them even worse. Then they were to develop defenses against them. Once they’d done that, they were to find ways to breach those defenses. And then build a firewall to block that attack. Russ said NRO referred to their group only as ‘the Operation.”

“Banal as can be.”

“Russ called me a few hours before his supposedly accidental death, all psyched because the Project was closing down and he was going to meet with some NRO people that night about making his felony go away. Coincidentally, I found regular ‘grants’ in the Septimus Foundation’s books to ‘the Operation.’ I don’t know when they started—I only went back to the first of the year—but they stopped right around the time Russ drowned.”

Donny was building a very thin circumstantial case. Normally Hari would delight in shooting something like this down in flames, but the pain in his eyes stopped her. He was hurting for his brother.

But he seemed to have left out one major point that she couldn’t let pass.

“Motive?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“Not to me.”

“Okay. Follow my logic: Shorting the Internet stocks shows that Septimus knew the crash was coming; most likely they were intimately involved in making it happen since in all Art’s research he couldn’t find anyone else making similar bets. In order to wreck the Net, they posed as the NRO and hired a bunch of hackers from the dark web to perfect intrusion software. When the work was done, they had to eliminate them because they’d recognize their own work in the worms and trojans that helped bring down the Net.”

It made a queer sort of sense, but…

“Again: motive? You’ve given a motive for killing your brother, but not for bringing down the Net. I can’t buy that they’d go all through that just to clean up on the crash.”