The zenith angle Read Online Free Page A

razors. It’s our networks versus their death cult. For as long as that takes.”
    Van was in a rage. His ears thumped with each heartbeat. “It’s a real good thing they like dying, then.”
    “Van, I need you on my team. Has anyone else called you?”
    “Oh, yeah, lots,” Van blurted. Jeb had called first, it was true, but since then he had heard from the Bureau. The Commerce Department. The CIRC. The OMB. Several Air Force outfits he had never heard of. Even the Bureau of Weights and Measures.
    “Lotta headhunters out there all of a sudden,” Jeb agreed cordially. “But where were they when the screen was blank, huh?”
    Van said nothing. Jeb had been the very first cop to take serious, practical notice of Van’s talents. The state and local cyber-cops in California were so hip that they ran their own user’s groups. Silicon Valley cops met a lot of white-hat hacker kids, and tended to think they were cute. But when Van had encountered Jeb, Van’s life had changed overnight. Young Derek Vandeveer, a dewy-eyed comp-sci student with an intellectual interest in security issues, had suddenly met the maven’s maven. Jeb had collared Van and dragged him right behind the curtains. Suddenly there were special, classified courses for Van in FLETC and Quantico, with behind-the-scenes briefings from panting, sweaty computer emergency-response teams. Jeb had shown Van the ropes, put him in the know, enrolled him in the big-time show. He’d shown Van the realities of federal information technology: awesome levels of screwup that only a superpower could create or afford. “Situation Normal: All Fouled Up.” If a SNAFU
    remained a superpower, it was due to guys like Jeb.
    “In my outfit,” Jeb promised, “we actually know what we’re doing. That’s what’s so different and refreshing about us at the CCIAB.”
    “Jeb, I’ve got to talk to a consultant about all this.”
    Van glanced up guiltily at the passenger seat. To judge by that stricken look in her eyes, Dottie knew very well what he was doing. Dottie knew about Jeb and Jeb’s world. But Dottie was not his
    “consultant.” Dottie was just his collateral damage. Dottie had the look of a woman in a Titanic lifeboat, watching the black icy water come up over the bows at the man she had left behind. Van had never been able to hide anything important from Dottie. He had married a woman with an IQ of 155. And besides, New York was on fire.
    “I knew your father, Van,” Jeb said. “We never had to ask him twice.”
    “I told you I needed seventy-two hours to make up my mind.”
    “You just call me whenever you reach a decision, Van. I’ll be here in the Beltway.” Jeb clicked off. As he labored on his computers in the back of the truck, Van thought darkly of the various times in his life when he should have felt terrorized. Basically, there weren’t any. He’d had some strange experiences, here and there. Van could rightly say that he had been blooded out in the field. He was a civilian computer expert from a large, aggressive corporation. He’d taken part in five hacker raids with joint federal-state investigation teams. American computer cops often took large crowds with them when they raided computer hackers. This made it clear to the other, more everyday cops that kids sitting alone in their bedrooms really were committing crimes. So Van had been there when muscled Secret Service guys in their tasseled shoes and Kevlar armor were stomping from attic to basement, menacing Mom and Dad with drawn guns.
    Mom and Dad were always pretty terrified by this. Van just concentrated on the bagging-and-tagging, hauling Junior’s piece-of-junk hotrod PC out to the white Chevy vans. Van rather liked that part of the assignment. Especially that look on the face of the code kid when he realized that he knew nothing about the people who really owned and ran the Internet.
    The hacking scene was pretty brainy as crime scenes went, but it did have down-and-dirty sides.