He called Hack. I know all this because Hack told me. He and Steingruby had known each other for years; they had worked together on a number of classified projects, had even dated sisters for a brief time. Without thinking about it, Hack told him that this guy he worked out with at the gym, guy named Rollie Stone, the Detroit whistleblower, had asked him to check it out. Nah, he didn’t know where the two segments had come from or what they represented. “I told him you were a good guy who had asked me to do him a favor.”

“It’s an interesting concept,” Steingruby told him in what Hack described to me as an offhanded manner. “But it isn’t an especially good way of making a valid comparison. There are just too many variables. It might work in very limited situations, but I don’t think any competent person would have much confidence in the results. Computer coding just doesn’t work that way. A talented hack is virtually untraceable.”

Hack thought that report was really interesting. That didn’t square with the work he had done. To test Brain’s theory, he’d run two segments of code he had previously written using the kid’s method and found repetitive characteristics in them that he hadn’t known existed. Peaks, valleys, and intervals. He had identified his own footprint and it was there in every segment of his own code that he tested.

Which is why alarm bells went off when Steingruby reported a different conclusion. He was much too casually dismissive of a technique that Hack had seen produce positive comparisons in his own lab. “Thanks a lot, Paul,” he said, then just to be cautious added, “That’s pretty much what I decided too.” To reinforce his little lie, he’d told Steingruby not to bother returning the samples: “Just go ahead and toss them.”

Which is why the next morning Hack told me he believed the method was valid; the two codes I gave him had been written by the same person or group.

But now you know what I didn’t: the government was aware of the danger.

What happened next is conjecture. There are a few pieces I know to be accurate; the chain might be a little bit different, but the end of it is the same. In some version, here’s what must have taken place. Steingruby couldn’t be certain his dismissal had ended Wilson’s investigation. He called his contact in Hunter’s office; who knows, maybe he called the vice president directly.

The vice president would have shared this information with people on his need-to-know list. NSA director Bobby Satin would have been on the list. Rip McCord probably would have been on it. Rocky Penceal at Homeland Security certainly was informed. The president? Who knows, plausible deniability plays an important role in American politics.

I’m guessing some of those people found the whole story farfetched; and perhaps a beard to cover the horrendous possibility that there was a traitor on the inside.