“Yes, he has. But taking him out into the field is a whole other thing. I’m worried that if we get close to WR8TH that he’ll burn us. Even if that means burning himself.”

“The proverbial scorpion on the turtle’s back.”

“He’s undependable,” she said. “Respectfully, sir.”

“Is that all?”

“I don’t like him poking around in our computers.”

“Anything else? His haircut perhaps?” George stood and fetched a bottle of mineral water from a built-in refrigerator. He sat beside Jenn and gazed off into space. He often took his time composing his thoughts and never spoke before he was ready. She knew better than to interrupt him now that she’d said her piece. It used to make her nervous, but she’d come to admire her employer’s introspective nature.

“You may be right,” he said at last.

The answer surprised her, but she remained silent.

“About all of it. You may be right. I have my doubts too.”

“Is he really worth the risk, then?”

“How much do you know about what Vaughn did in the Marines?”

“I know he was a penetration tester. A glorified hacker.”

“Not exactly.”

“That’s what it says in his file,” she said and realized as she did that there was more to it. “But that was a cover, wasn’t it?”

“It was, yes.”

“What did he really do?”

“Well, let me ask you this. How do you fly two Blackhawk helicopters into a sovereign nation, brazenly violating their airspace, and set them down in the heart of one of their biggest cities without drawing attention?”

“You’re talking about bin Laden. Pakistan.”

“Theoretically,” Abe said. “Supposing I am. Ask yourself how we managed it. Ask yourself why they didn’t know we were there until they saw it on the news.”

“The choppers were specially outfitted. Some kind of stealth technology.”

“Partially true, but only partially. You can baffle a helicopter, to a degree, so that it runs quiet if not silent, but what about radar? You can’t make a Blackhawk completely invisible to radar and certainly not to Pakistani air defense. The Pentagon canceled the program to build a stealth helicopter in ’04. And stealth is not a design feature you can easily retrofit.”

“So how?”

“Radar is a machine. Software translates electrical impulses so that users can see what radar sees. So rather than spending billions on stealth helicopters, wouldn’t it be simpler to take control of the software? Insert code right into their system so that the software only showed them what you wanted them to see. Voila, Blackhawks that are there but not there. If you follow me.”

“We did that?”