Tony had been surprised on that trip. The windowless room had always seemed subterranean to him, but it turned out to be on the second floor—to protect it from flooding, he’d learned, should a hurricane hit.

The facility he’d just entered was even higher up, on the twentieth floor of an office tower in Alexandria, Virginia. It contained four rows of workstations, each with five analysts. The stations in the first row were known as the “hot seats,” and were manned by experts dealing with the highest-priority threat, which, right now, was the China situation. Tony had his own station at the right side of the back row, where he could watch over everyone.

All the workstations had large freestanding LCDs instead of Houston’s console-mounted CRTs. Shelton Halleck’s was the middle position in the third row. Tony sidled along until he was standing behind Shel, a white man two decades younger than himself with broad shoulders and black hair.

The room’s front wall contained three giant screens, each of which could be slaved to any analyst’s LCD. Above the right-hand monitor was the WATCH logo—an eye with a globe of the Earth for the iris—and the division’s full name spelled out beneath: Web Activity Threat Containment Headquarters. Above the left was the circular seal of WATCH’s parent organization, the National Security Agency; it depicted a bald eagle holding an old-fashioned key in its talons.

Neither part of Tony’s bifocals was suitable for reading Shelton’s screen from this distance, so he reached over and touched the button that copied its contents to the middle of the wall-mounted monitors. The active window was a hex dump—and one hex dump looked pretty much like any other. This one happened to begin 04 BF 8C 00 02 C9. “What is it?” Tony asked.