Once inside, Joe put his shirt back on and curled up on the leaf litter. It was dry and soft and there weren’t too many mosquitoes. All in all, a good idea. He vaguely heard Suryei say, ‘You’ve got an hour, then it’s my turn,’ through the plunge into merciful sleep.

NSA HQ, Fort Meade, Maryland, 1210 Zulu, Wednesday, 29 April

Jesus, ten past eight. It was too early for serious brain-work, especially given the late finish the previous evening. Indeed, it felt like he’d never even left the joint at all. Bob Gioco’s mind didn’t function until he’d had at least two double espressos. The real stuff, full strength and black as sump oil. He had them both poured into the one Styrofoam cup. He sipped the hot, bitter liquid and felt it going to work on his synapses. This group was something special, and worth missing a couple of hours of sleep for.

The expertise gathered in the lecture theatre represented a whole new ball game for the NSA. It was part of ELINT, the division once concerned only with the interception and analysis of radar signals and missile telemetry, largely from the Soviet Union. After the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc, there was a proliferation of nuclear materials and other weapons of mass destruction, and of their delivery systems. And now there was an insidious new threat to world peace: computer terrorism. It was now entirely possible to bring a country to its knees, and cause widespread death and mayhem, simply by tampering with the appropriate computer network. ELINT’s new role was to provide early warning and counter-intelligence to prevent these dangerous new threats from ever coming to pass.

Gioco stifled a yawn while he settled into his chair and smoothed a hand across hair still wet from the shower, but an aberrant lock refused to obey the pressure and sprang up annoyingly.

Like all organisations, especially US government ones, the NSA had a passion for acronyms. The one for this gathering was COMPSTOMP: Computer Security, Tasking, Observation and Manipulation Protection. It was a fancy title for the NSA’s new anti-cyberterrorist node. The group had its problems — too much intelligence dedicated to information anarchy in the one place, Bob often thought.

A young mathematician, indeed the one giving this morning’s briefing, was the creator of COMPSTOMP, and a vindication of the NSA’s policy of poaching the finest math brains in the country. She had followed a hunch that hackers left individual and distinctive signatures — fingerprints — when they entered systems. She thought it doubtful that hackers would crack computer systems with a one-day pad mentality, never using the same logic process twice. It was more likely they would find a key that worked for them, then use it over and over because, she assumed, even people with above-average intelligence were lazy. If her theory checked out, then those fingerprints could be identified, catalogued and tracked. As it happened, she was right. Hackers used consistent processes, rarely changing them, and no two processes were the same.

The NSA supported the theory with a budget, and COMPSTOMP winked into existence. Within six months it had quite a comprehensive database containing over 4000 fingerprints. Each rap sheet detailed a hacker’s misdeeds, call sign, off-line name, address, employment records, all of which were continuously being updated and checked. It was a massive job, but it was paying dividends.

The overwhelming success of COMPSTOMP made the theory’s author, the twenty-one year old woman sitting on the floor amongst her comrades, a hero within the NSA. But COMPSTOMP was super secret, so her fame was limited. Hackers weren’t stupid. If they knew Big Brother was watching their every move, they would start employing their own counter-measures, such as altering their signatures, and the group’s effectiveness would be drastically impaired.

As was normal practice with the NSA, COMPSTOMP had new detection software developed in-house to employ in the fight to keep information secure. The most successful of these was called Watchdog. Watchdog alerted COMPSTOMP of a computer break-in in progress. COMPSTOMP would then check the hacker’s signature and determine his or her identity against the register. If the system was part of the nation’s defence, or essential to its national security, the hacker would be tracked and arrested. If he or she was extremely good and managed to break through the internal firewalls that protected the core of these systems from outside interference, an ultimatum would be given — join the US government willingly or become a reluctant guest of it in a small, dark cell.