It was almost unspeakably brilliant.

Behind a flimsy (though twisted) web of routers, DMZ subnets, WAN bridges and authentication servers, I hit a wall. A firewall, technically, but infinitely superior to anything else bearing the name. Adaptive remapping, automatic honeypot deployment, deep-net backtracing, and a few security features I didn’t even have a name for.

Unassailable. Something along the lines of burying a nuclear-hardened bunker at the center of a hedge labyrinth the size of Kazakhstan.

These guys were pros. Better than NSA . Better than Google. Better than Stallman. And, considering the situation, probably better than me.

So why did they need me to do their dirty work?

It didn’t make any sense. There were more than sixty-five thousand nodes on the surrounding network. Millions of dollars of hardware. The pentagon would be nothing to anyone willing to waste that much just to confuse hackers.

And if they could put up that sort of security, why couldn’t they keep me under better control now?