I didn’t say a word. I didn’t move, not wanting to interrupt this narrative. It wasn’t possible that a bunch of high school kids could do this, I knew that. But it did make sense.

“A long time ago, three or four years at least, there was this big international teenage hackers’ competition. We were just kids then, none of us even were in high school, and we didn’t win anything. They gave everybody samples of code to hack. We went back and looked at all of those samples.” He looked at me.

I waited. Then wound my hand in the keep-going gesture.

“One of them had exactly the same rhythm. We couldn’t believe it. We couldn’t believe it really worked. But we tested and retested it.” He hummed a few bars that sounded equally awful as the first one. “So we could say with a high degree of confidence that whoever wrote that code for the competition was the same person who hacked into the airplane.” He nodded toward Mighty Chair’s arm. “Go ahead, check your screen. I sent it to you.”

I glanced at Mighty’s pop-up monitor. I was looking at a graph showing two roughly parallel lines. While the baselines were different, both lines spiked at about the same points. While not duplicates, the similarities between the two were obvious. I nodded. “Okay, I get it.” I have to admit, the kid had me at “I know who cyjacked the airplane.” I looked at him. “Go ahead. Who wrote these?”

McLane squeezed every bit of enjoyment out of this moment. He sat perched on his chair like a peacock on a perch. “You know how cool this is?” he marveled. “I mean me, sitting here with you. You know, Mr. Stone, you’re like my idol. I’ve read everything they wrote about you and Mighty Chair.”

I imitated his surreptitious glances around Nonna’s to make sure no one else could hear me. Then I whispered, “Don’t forget Cher. She’s very sensitive.”

Brain laughed with the delight of a sixteen-year old Spider-Man discovering his web-slinging powers.

“Now, tell me, who do you think it is?”

“It’s not exactly who.” He shook his head, then admitted, “We don’t know exactly who it is. Just where it comes from.”

Several months earlier I had played the guessing game with just about every journalist in the country. I had pored through all the available information and decided that the cyjackers had to be Eastern Europeans, or possibly Iranian. Iranian hackers were good. In 2012 they had wiped the servers of Saudi Aramco, Arabia’s state-owned oil company, successfully attacked a Las Vegas casino, dug into numerous American banks, and—this was key to me—they had attempted to take control of a small dam in upstate New York. But the Russians were good too. And so were the Chinese. I thought the cyjacking was a demonstration of capabilities and would soon be followed up with a demand for a billion dollars. But that hadn’t happened; in fact, no one had claimed credit for it, which had made it even more of a mystery. “I give up. Where did it come from?”