Gadgets and Kurtzman began to toss around ideas on how to decode Charon's computer domain.

April Rose joined them. Her advanced degrees in electronics and solid-state physics made her no stranger to the arcane mysteries of electronic computation.

In front of Mack on the polished surface of the War Room conference table, in an unmarked file folder, was a digest of the dossier of Frederick Charon. It occupied no more than three pages of sprocket-hole-edged computer paper. Bolan had no need to consult it. He knew the details on those pages well enough. And they told an old and familiar tale.

The salient points were simple: it was the American success story. To a point. Charon was the only son of Italian immigrant parents, his father a self-educated salesman and opera buff, his mother an elementary school teacher. They were dedicated, ambitious people, and they instilled ambition in their son. From Boston Latin High School, Charon went to MIT for his undergraduate work, then Stanford for graduate and post-doctoral programs. His first and only job as an employee was with the prestigious Rand Corporation think tank; when he was twenty-five he left that firm to form his own company, DonCo. In ten years he had built it into one of the most respected theoretical hi-tech firms in the country, and a repository for the country's most profound trust.

And then he chose to betray that trust.

Somewhere along the line, the ambition inculcated in Charon by his hard-working parents had been perverted-impulsion. A brilliant man, Charon was also brilliantly flawed. No matter whatever had achieved-intellectually, socially, financially — he had to have more of everything that fed his will.

Perhaps, Bolan mused, his downfall was preordained, as is the defeat of any man whose appetites forever exceed his reach.

Just a few hours before, as he and Gadgets had withdrawn from the DonCo headquarters along the predetermined route that evaded the unblinking TV surveillance cameras, Bolan had stopped to look back at Charon's building.