Jerome Preisler: Net Force--Attack Protocol

It was four minutes and nine seconds before the explosion in Ops.

“Any word from the Scalpel team?” Fernandez said.

“Nothing yet, sir. The colonel’s on pins and needles. And turning us into pin cushions . You know how he gets.”

Fernandez’s laugh turned into a tired, sleep-deprived yawn halfway through. “Why do you think I’m hanging around after an eighteen-hour shift?” he said. “I figure you guys might need protection from him.”

“So it isn’t because you’re as anxious as the rest of us.”

“ Of course not , bro.”

Wasserman smiled a little and reached for the coffeepot. “Reading one of your e-books?” he said, nodding toward the sergeant’s tablet.

“Yeah,” Fernandez said. “ Chasing the Millennium Prize . By Dr. Martin M. Lewy.”

“What’s a millennial prize?”

“Millennium,” Fernandez said. “See? The problem with millennials is you can’t stop thinking about yourselves.”

“I’m borderline Gen Z, sir. Born twenty-oh-three,” Wasserman said. “Respectfully, you would fall squarely in the millennial age group, being twenty years older than me.”

“Which is the reason I know how you so-called borderliners think! Plus, when did I ever tell you my birthday?” Fernandez lifted up the partly drunk coffee cup in front of him and made a face. “Mud’s cold, bleh.”

“I’ll pour you a fresh cup. Black, no sugar, right, sir?”

Fernandez stared at him. “What the hell don’t you know about me?”

Wasserman grinned and poured. In his view, the sergeant was cool enough to be microwave safe. Barely forty, standing five foot eight in thick-soled boots, he had recently updated his haircut from a modified mohawk to what he called a brushback fade—thick on top, shaved on the sides, plus a full, neatly clipped beard to round things out and totally irritate Colonel Howard, who hated fades and facial hair even more than mohawks. Being technically off duty, he was wearing an army-green tank top over his broad, hairless chest, which sported a single tattoo picturing a man and woman that looked like trees—or trees that looked like a man and woman—facing each other with their roots and branches tangled together. Wasserman thought the man looked a lot like Fernandez, though he’d never commented on it. He also thought the woman was damn hot stuff, though he’d never said anything about that, either.

Now he carried the coffees to the table, put one down beside Fernandez’s first cup, and took a seat opposite him. In the corridor above them, Howard was filling his Italian pipe while thinking about Rose Cotes, her hypnotic brown eyes, and her smooth, coltish legs. It was four minutes and fifty-one seconds before the explosion.

“Anyway, it’s millennium prize,” Fernandez said, picking up the conversation where he’d left off. He sipped the hot coffee and grunted with pleasure. “Back around the year two thousand, when, um... borderline millennials like you were popping out of maternity wards in droves, a board of scientists at a place called the Clay Mathematics Institute—it’s in Massachusetts, near Cambridge, naturally—was granted seven million dollars to solve the hardest math problems of the time. They decided to hold a contest, listed the top seven, and offered a cool one-mil prize for every solution. Hence, the book title, Wassy.”

Wasserman looked at him. “A million bucks? Seriously?”

“Seriously,” Fernandez said. “But it isn’t like any of them were cinches. To give you an idea, one of ’em, the Reimann hypothesis, was from an older list somebody put together around nineteen hundred. And only a single problem on the Clay list’s been solved so far.”

“Was the Reizman one of them?”

“Reimann,” Fernandez corrected. “And no, it was actually the Poincaré conjecture.”

“Oh. Sounds like an episode of Star Trek .”

“Which would be right up my alley,” Fernandez said. “Actually, it’s a geometric problem about three-spheres and three-dimensional manifolds.” He noticed the confounded look on Wasserman’s face. “Better skip the details. What’s important about Poincaré is that a Russian genius came up with a mathematical proof.”

“And won the million?”

“Yup. Then turned it down. Go figure.”

Wasserman mouthed a silent wow . It was ninety seconds before the explosion. Upstairs, Howard’s pacing was interrupted by a thunderous noise across the compound.

Down in the former Pit, meanwhile, Fernandez and Wasserman heard nothing through the foot-thick walls and ceiling.

“So, is this contest still a thing?” Wasserman asked, sipping his coffee.

“You bet,” Fernandez said. “In fact, I’m shooting for one of the prizes.”

“No.” The private searched Fernandez’s face for any sign of a put-on. He didn’t see one. “I mean...really?”

“Absolutely,” Fernandez said. “It’s high time my computational science degree was worth something.”

“Wait. Didn’t you just get your intelligence designer rating, like, last month?”

Fernandez flapped a dismissive hand. “Small potatoes, dude. I’m trying to solve the P Versus NP problem.”

Wasserman stared at him over his steaming coffee. “Sounds amazing. I think.”

“It would be, if I can prove the theorem.” Fernandez lowered his voice to a confidential tone. “If I can prove it, it could change the field of computer security. Revolutionize it. First, by making most current encryption applications obsolete. Second, by opening the way for better methods.”

“No shit,” Wasserman said. “I mean, no shit, sir. ” He lowered his cup to the table. “Y’know, you ought to be a guest on Net Talk .”

Fernandez looked at him blankly. “What’s Net Talk ?”

“You know. Net Talk !”

“I’m sleep-deprived, not deaf .” Fernandez frowned. “That a game show or something?”

“It’s the official Net Force podcast, Sarge. Hosted by Alex Michaels.”

“Wait.” Fernandez looked at him. “You mean Professor Alex Michaels?”

“That’s right, sir.”

“Our boss?”

“Right,” Wasserman said. “He does an episode a month and has great guests. Like the latest show. It’s about that cloud-computing deal everybody’s arguing about. You know the one I mean—”

“CloudCable. Worth ten billion bucks—”

“Right. The topic’s usually internet security...”

“Which is what we were just talking about...”

“Which is exactly why I brought up the podcast, sir. He had Adrian Soto on the show I just mentioned.”

“Soto? Wow. The dude’s kind of my hero.”

“No shit.”

Fernandez nodded. “I grew up in San Diego, which, come to think, you probably already freaking know,” he said. “Anyway, a computer geek like me from the city’s toughest neighborhood didn’t have many guys to identify with. But Soto’s the Man. In fact, I’ve been hoping to meet him in person. You know, with us becoming part of Net Force, and him also becoming part of it.” He scratched his chin and hmmed. “Now that you mention that podcast, I wonder how I would—”

He never finished the sentence. There was a sudden, booming noise, closer than the last, and this time both men heard it clearly. It came from right above them, muffled by the foot-thick ceiling, but still loud enough to make everything in the room vibrate. The table, chairs, everything. They trembled, shook, and shuddered like crazy. Like in a severe earthquake. A seven-point Richter-magnitude earthquake. Coffee sloshed in Fernandez’s cup, though he was holding it steadily in his hand.