Susan sat alone in the plush surroundings of Node 3. She nurseda lemon mist herb tea and awaited the return of her tracer.

As senior cryptographer, Susan enjoyed the terminal with thebest view. It was on the back side of the ring of computers andfaced the Crypto floor. From this spot, Susan could oversee all ofNode 3. She could also see, on the other side of the one-way glass,TRANSLTR standing dead-center of the Crypto floor.

Susan checked the clock. She had been waiting almost an hour.American Remailers Anonymous was apparently taking their timeforwarding North Dakota's mail. She sighed heavily. Despiteher efforts to forget her morning conversation with David, thewords played over and over in her head. She knew she'd beenhard on him. She prayed he was okay in Spain.

Her thoughts were jarred by the loud hiss of the glass doors.She looked up and groaned. Cryptographer Greg Hale stood in theopening.

Greg Hale was tall and muscular with thick blond hair and a deepcleft chin. He was loud, thick-fleshed, and perpetuallyoverdressed. His fellow cryptographers had nicknamed him"Halite"—after the mineral. Hale had always assumedit referred to some rare gem—paralleling his unrivaledintellect and rock-hard physique. Had his ego permitted him toconsult an encyclopedia, he would have discovered it was nothingmore than the salty residue left behind when oceans dried up.

Like all NSA cryptographers, Hale made a solid salary. However,he had a hard time keeping that fact to himself. He drove a whiteLotus with a moon roof and a deafening subwoofer system. He was agadget junkie, and his car was his showpiece; he'd installed aglobal positioning computer system, voice-activated door locks, afive-point radar jammer, and a cellular fax/phone so he'dnever be out of touch with his message services. His vanity plateread megabyte and was framed in violet neon.

Greg Hale had been rescued from a childhood of petty crime bythe U.S. Marine Corps. It was there that he'd learned aboutcomputers. He was one of the best programmers the Marines had everseen, well on his way to a distinguished military career. But twodays before the completion of his third tour of duty, his futuresuddenly changed. Hale accidentally killed a fellow Marine in adrunken brawl. The Korean art of self-defense, Taekwondo, provedmore deadly than defensive. He was promptly relieved of hisduty.

After serving a brief prison term, Halite began looking for workin the private sector as a programmer. He was always up front aboutthe incident in the marines, and he courted prospective employersby offering a month's work without pay to prove his worth. Hehad no shortage of takers, and once they found out what he could dowith a computer, they never wanted to let him go.

As his computer expertise grew, Hale began making Internetconnections all over the world. He was one of the new breed ofcyberfreaks with E-mail friends in every nation, moving in and outof seedy electronic bulletin boards and European chat groups.He'd been fired by two different employers for using theirbusiness accounts to upload pornographic photos to some of hisfriends.

"What are you doing here?" Hale demanded,stopping in the doorway and staring at Susan. He'd obviouslyexpected to have Node 3 to himself today.

Susan forced herself to stay cool. "It's Saturday,Greg. I could ask you the same question." But Susan knew whatHale was doing there. He was the consummate computer addict.Despite the Saturday rule, he often slipped into Crypto on weekendsto use the NSA's unrivalled computing power to run newprograms he was working on.

"Just wanted to retweak a few lines and check myE-mail," Hale said. He eyed her curiously. "What was ityou said you're doing here?"

"I didn't," Susan replied.

Hale arched a surprised eyebrow. "No reason to be coy. Wehave no secrets here in Node 3, remember? All for one and one forall."

Susan sipped her lemon mist and ignored him. Hale shrugged andstrode toward the Node 3 pantry. The pantry was always his firststop. As Hale crossed the room, he sighed heavily and made a pointof ogling Susan's legs stretched out beneath her terminal.Susan, without looking up, retracted her legs and kept working.Hale smirked.

Susan had gotten used to Hale hitting on her. His favorite linewas something about interfacing to check the compatibility of theirhardware. It turned Susan's stomach. She was proud to complainto Strathmore about Hale; it was far easier just to ignore him.

Hale approached the Node 3 pantry and pulled open the latticedoors like a bull. He slid a Tupperware container of tofu out ofthe fridge and popped a few pieces of the gelatinous whitesubstance in his mouth. Then he leaned on the stove and smoothedhis gray Bellvienne slacks and well-starched shirt. "You gonnabe here long?"

"All night," Susan said flatly.

"Hmm…" Halite cooed with his mouth full. "Acozy Saturday in the Playpen, just the two of us."

"Just the three of us," Susan interjected."Commander Strathmore's upstairs. You might want todisappear before he sees you."

Hale shrugged. "He doesn't seem to mind youhere. He must really enjoy your company."

Susan forced herself to keep silent.

Hale chuckled to himself and put away his tofu. Then he grabbeda quart of virgin olive oil and took a few swigs. He was a healthfiend and claimed olive oil cleaned out his lower intestine. Whenhe wasn't pushing carrot juice on the rest of the staff, hewas preaching the virtues of high colonics.

Hale replaced the olive oil and went to down his computerdirectly opposite Susan. Even across the wide ring of terminals,Susan could smell his cologne. She crinkled her nose.

"Nice cologne, Greg. Use the entire bottle?

Hale flicked on his terminal. "Only for you,dear."

As he sat there waiting for his terminal to warm up, Susan had asudden unsettling thought. What if Hale accessed TRANSLTR'sRun-Monitor? There was no logical reason why he would, butnonetheless Susan knew he would never fall for some half-bakedstory about a diagnostic that stumped TRANSLTR for sixteen hours.Hale would demand to know the truth. The truth was something Susanhad no intention of telling him. She did not trust Greg Hale. Hewas not NSA material. Susan had been against hiring him in thefirst place, but the NSA had had no choice. Hale had been theproduct of damage control.

The Skipjack fiasco.

Four years ago, in an effort to create a single, public-keyencryption standard, Congress charged the nation's bestmathematicians, those at the NSA, to write a new superalgorithm.The plan was for Congress to pass legislation that made the newalgorithm the nation's standard, thus alleviating theincompatibilities now suffered by corporations that used differentalgorithms.

Of course, asking the NSA to lend a hand in improving public-keyencryption was somewhat akin to asking a condemned man to build hisown coffin. TRANSLTR had not yet been conceived, and an encryptionstandard would only help to proliferate the use of code-writing andmake the NSA's already difficult job that much harder.

The EFF understood this conflict of interest and lobbiedvehemently that the NSA might create an algorithm of poorquality—something it could break. To appease these fears,Congress announced that when the NSA's algorithm was finished,the formula would be published for examination by the world'smathematicians to ensure its quality.

Reluctantly, the NSA's Crypto team, led by CommanderStrathmore, created an algorithm they christened Skipjack. Skipjackwas presented to Congress for their approval. Mathematicians fromall over the world tested Skipjack and were unanimously impressed.They reported that it was a strong, untainted algorithm and wouldmake a superb encryption standard. But three days before Congresswas to vote their certain approval of Skipjack, a young programmerfrom Bell Laboratories, Greg Hale, shocked the world by announcinghe'd found a back door hidden in the algorithm.

The back door consisted of a few lines of cunning programmingthat Commander Strathmore had inserted into the algorithm. It hadbeen added in so shrewd a way that nobody, except Greg Hale, hadseen it. Strathmore's covert addition, in effect, meant thatany code written by Skipjack could be decrypted via a secretpassword known only to the NSA. Strathmore had come within inchesof turning the nation's proposed encryption standard into thebiggest intelligence coup the NSA had ever seen; the NSA would haveheld the master key to every code written in America.

The computer-savvy public was outraged. The EFF descended on thescandal like vultures, ripping Congress to shreds for theirnaïveté and proclaiming the NSA the biggest threat to thefree world since Hitler. The encryption standard was dead.

It had come as little surprise when the NSA hired Greg Hale twodays later. Strathmore felt it was better to have him on the insideworking for the NSA than on the outside working against it.

Strathmore faced the Skipjack scandal head-on. He defended hisactions vehemently to Congress. He argued that the public'scraving for privacy would come back to haunt them. He insisted thepublic needed someone to watch over them; the public needed the NSAto break codes in order to keep the peace. Groups like the EFF feltdifferently. And they'd been fighting him ever since.