The sticky?sweet chime of his mantel clock accented the end of another day of his pathetic existence. Shit, he thought. Five o'clock on a Saturday. What the hell am I doing here?

“Chad?” A woman appeared in his doorway.

Brinkerhoff looked up. It was Midge Milken, Fontaine’s internal security analyst. She was sixty, slightly heavy, and, much to the puzzlement of Brinkerhoff, quite appealing. A consummate flirt and an ex?wife three times over, Midge prowled the six?room directorial suite with a saucy authority. She was sharp, intuitive, worked ungodly hours, and was rumored to know more about the NSA’s inner workings than God himself.

Damn, Brinkerhoff thought, eyeing her in her gray cashmere?dress. Either I’m getting older, or she’s looking younger.

“Weekly reports.” She smiled, waving a fanfold of paper. “You need to check the figures.”

Brinkerhoff eyed her body. “Figures look good from here.”

“Really Chad,” she laughed. “I’m old enough to be your mother.”

Don’t remind me, he thought.

Midge strode in and sidled up to his desk. “I’m on my way out, but the director wants these compiled by the time he gets back from South America. That’s Monday, bright and early.” She dropped the printouts in front of him.

“What am I, an accountant?”

“No, hon, you’re a cruise director. Thought you knew that.”

“So what am I doing crunching numbers?”

She ruffled his hair. “You wanted more responsibility. Here it is.”

He looked up at her sadly. “Midge . . . I have no life.”

She tapped her finger on the paper. “This is your life, Chad Brinkerhoff.” She looked down at him and softened. “Anything I can get you before I go?”

He eyed her pleadingly and rolled his aching neck. “My shoulders are tight.”

Midge didn’t bite. “Take an aspirin.”

He pouted. “No back rub?”

She shook her head. “Cosmopolitan says two?thirds of backrubs end in sex.”

Brinkerhoff looked indignant. “Ours never do!”

“Precisely.” She winked. “That’s the problem.”

“Midge—”

“Night, Chad.” She headed for the door.

“You’re leaving?”

“You know I’d stay,” Midge said, pausing in the doorway, “but I do have some pride. I just can’t see playing second fiddle?particularly to a teenager.”

“My wife’s not a teenager,” Brinkerhoff defended. “She just acts like one.”

Midge gave him a surprised look. “I wasn’t talking about your wife.” She battered her eyes innocently. “I was talking about Carmen.” She spoke the name with a thick Puerto Rican accent.

Brinkerhoff’s voice cracked slightly. “Who?”

“Carmen? In food services?”

Brinkerhoff felt himself flush. Carmen Huerta was a twenty?seven?year?old pastry chef who worked in the NSA commissary. Brinkerhoff had enjoyed a number of presumably secret after?hours flings with her in the stockroom.

She gave him a wicked wink. “Remember, Chad . . . Big Brother knows all.”

Big Brother? Brinkerhoff gulped in disbelief. Big Brother watches the STOCKROOMS too?

Big Brother, or “Brother” as Midge often called it, was a Centrex 333 that sat in a small closetlike space off the suite’s central room. Brother was Midge’s whole world. It received data from 148 closed circuit video cameras, 399 electronic doors, 377 phones taps, and 212 free?standing bugs in the NSA complex.

The directors of the NSA had learned the hard way that 26,000 employees were not only a great asset but a great liability. Every major security breach in the NSA’s history had come from within. It was Midge’s job as internal security analyst, to watch everything that went on within the walls of the NSA . . . including, apparently, the commissary stockroom.

Brinkerhoff stood to defend himself, but Midge was already on her way out.

“Hands above the desk,” she called over her shoulder. “No funny stuff after I go. The walls have eyes.”

Brinkerhoff sat and listened to the sound of her heels fading down the corridor. At least he knew Midge would never tell. She was not without her weaknesses. Midge had indulged in a few indiscretions of her own?mostly wandering back rubs with Brinkerhoff.

His thoughts turned back to Carmen. He pictured her lissome body, those dark thighs, that AM radio she played full blast?hot San Juan salsa. He smiled. Maybe I’ll drop by for a snack when I’m done.

He opened the first printout.

CRYPTO?PRODUCTION/EXPENDITURE

His mood immediately lightened. Midge had given him a freebie; the Crypto report was always a piece of cake. Technically he was supposed to compile the whole thing, but the only figure the director ever asked for was the MCD?the mean cost per decryption. The MCD represented the estimated amount it cost TRANSLTR to break a single code. As long as the figure was below $1,000 per code, Fontaine didn’t flinch. A grand a pop. Brinkerhoff chuckled. Our tax dollars at work.

As he began plowing through the document and checking the daily MCDs, images of Carmen Huerta smearing herself with honey and confectioner’s sugar began playing in his head. Thirty seconds later he was almost done. The Crypto data was perfect?as always.

But just before moving on to the next report, something caught his eye. At the bottom of the sheet, the last MCD was off. The figure was so large that it had carried over into the next column and made a mess of the page. Brinkerhoff stared at the figure in shock. 999,999,999? He gasped. A billion dollars? The images of Carmen vanished. A billion?dollar code?

Brinkerhoff sat there a minute, paralyzed. Then in a burst of panic, he raced out into the hallway. “Midge! Comeback!”

Phil Chartrukian stood fuming in the Sys?Sec lab. Strathmore’s words echoed in his head: Leave now! That’s an order! He kicked the trash can and swore in the empty lab.

“Diagnostic, my ass! Since when does the deputy director bypass Gauntlet’s filters!?”

The Sys?Secs were well paid to protect the computer systems at the NSA, and Chartrukian had learned that there were only two job requirements: be utterly brilliant and exhaustively paranoid.

Hell, he cursed, this isn’t paranoia! The fucking Run?Monitor’s reading eighteen hours!

It was a virus. Chartrukian could feel it. There was little doubt in his mind what was going on: Strathmore had made a mistake by bypassing Gauntlet’s filters, and now he was trying to cover it up with some half?baked story about a diagnostic.

Chartrukian wouldn’t have been quite so edgy had TRANSLTR been the only concern. But it wasn’t. Despite its appearance, the great decoding beast was by no means an island. Although the cryptographers believed Gauntlet was constructed for the sole purpose of protecting their code?breaking masterpiece, the Sys?Secs understood the truth. The Gauntlet filters served a much higher god. The NSA’s main databank.

The history behind the databank’s construction had always fascinated Chartrukian. Despite the efforts of the Department of Defense to keep the Internet to themselves in the late 1970s, it was too useful a tool not to attract the public?sector. Eventually universities pried their way on. Shortly after that came the commercial servers. The floodgates opened, and the public poured in. By the early 90’s, the government’s once?secure “Internet” was a congested wasteland of public E?mail and cyberporn.

Following a number of unpublicized, yet highly damaging computer infiltrations at the Office of Naval Intelligence, it became increasingly clear that government secrets were no longer safe on computers connected to the burgeoning Internet. The President, in conjunction with the Department of Defense, passed a classified decree that would fund a new, totally secure government network to replace the tainted Internet and function as a link between U.S. intelligence agencies. To prevent further computer pilfering of government secrets, all sensitive data was relocated to one, highly secure location?the newly constructed NSA databank?the Fort Knox of U.S. intelligence data.