George suddenly was standing at our table. Brain sat back as he put down our breakfast. “Anything else?” George asked as he wiped his hands on his white apron.

“No, that’s great, George, thank you.” We waited until he was gone. Then as I poured half-and-half into my coffee, I told him, “Okay, you got my attention. Tell me.”

More than three months had passed since NA342 had been cyber-jacked. The administration had twice claimed to be close to unraveling the cyber-knot, but eventually admitted those leads had not panned out. It was very hard for me to believe that a sixteen-year-old high school junior had succeeded when the best hackers at the NSA, the CIA, and all the alphabet agencies had failed. But Brain was wearing a big, confident “ha, I got you” smile that said at least he believed it.

“It started as a challenge,” McLane explained. “We knew that every intelligence agency in the world was trying to identify the hackers, so we thought wouldn’t it be really cool if we could beat them to it. If we could, we figured, we could use that on our college applications. That’s a lot better than math club or building houses in Guatemala, right?”

“Right.”

“We knew we couldn’t really compete with those guys.” He threw his arms up in the air. “Like, our whole budget was $45, which was all we’d been able to raise with this terrible bake sale.” He closed his eyes and smiled at that memory. “Boy, that was awful. But we didn’t have any of the tools they have and we didn’t have their experience, so we had to find a completely different path to follow.”

Brain was eating his bagel as he continued, and even that didn’t slow him down. All his club had to work with, he said, was the snippet of the code the cyjackers had used to take control of the plane, which the Defense Department had released to the hacker community when asking for assistance. “So we had this code.” His voice was infused with confidence. “See, Mr. Stone, most people don’t know this. Well, I’m sure you do, but most regular people don’t. Every coder leaves a cyber-footprint. Like, you know, a pattern.” He flipped his hands up in the air. His enthusiasm seemed to activate his body. “Everybody does it one way or another. Like every time people go online, they always go to the same few sites. Usually in the same order. That’s a trackable habit. An identifiable footprint.”

I thought about that. Brain was absolutely right; when I went onto the internet I always went to the same sites, generally in the same order.

“I read in this book that the feds use that to find fugitives. They work with the person’s provider, and as soon as anyone goes online and hits those sites, they get an alert.” With a chaw of bagel puffing out his cheek, he waved the other half in warning. “So you should be careful about that.”