He spread his arms. “What strategic significance could there be in things a sixteen-year-old looks at? Stuff at the mall, rock videos?”

Shel lifted his serpent-covered arm. “That’s what I thought, too. So I nosed around. Turns out her father is a physicist.” He brought up a Wikipedia page; the typically god-awful Wikipedia photo showed a horse-faced white man in his mid-forties.

“Malcolm Decter,” said Tony, impressed. “Quantum gravity, right? He’s at the University of Texas, isn’t he?”

“Not anymore,” said Shel. “He moved in June to the Perimeter Institute.”

Tony blew out air. People like himself and Malcolm Decter—the mathematically gifted—had three career options. They could go into academia, as Decter had, and while away their days pondering cosmology or number theory or whatever. They could go into the private sector and become cube monkeys coding games at EA or hacking together cutesy user interfaces at Microsoft. Or they could go into intelligence and try to change the world.

Tony looked briefly at the analysts hunched over their consoles, faces intent on glowing screens, reflections of the data visible in the eyeglasses most of them wore. What the hell difference did it make whether brane theory or loop quantum gravity was right or wrong if terrorists or a foreign power started something that ended with the world blowing itself up?

But—the Perimeter Institute! Yes, yes, there was a part of Tony that envied those who had taken that path and had ended up there: the world’s leading pure-science physics think tank. WATCH had tried to lure Stephen Hawking to come work for them. They’d failed, but Perimeter had succeeded; Hawking spent several months each year at PI.

“Decter’s just a theoretician,” Tony said, dismissively.

“Maybe so,” replied Shel. “But this is who he works with.”

A picture of a brown-skinned man with straight gray hair appeared, along with a bio compiled by the NSA. “That’s Amir Hameed,” continued Shel. “Also a physicist, also at Perimeter—now. But he used to be with Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons program. And he personally recruited Decter to come work with him in Canada.”