Chapter One

Jonathan had yet to attend a funeral in his life, but the descent of the elevator into the ground conjured up images of a casket gliding into its grave. Alone in the steel chamber, the silent, indiscernible motion raised the hair on his back, and after thirty seconds he was relieved when a wall rolled away as a door.

He stepped quickly into the subterranean half acre of telecommunications equipment forty feet below the earth's surface, a place where electronic technicians worked in shifts around the clock, a place fourteen thousand air miles from his native New Jersey, a place where, for the summer, he would feign engineering work while snooping on the employees.

Inside the cavernous structure he sucked in the conditioned air supplied by a 100 ton air-purification system housed in its own room and prayed none of it would fail over the next two months. Standing, waiting, he perused the forty million dollars of electronics equipment as though viewing a display of iPhones in a mall kiosk. He had seen it all before, at sites in New York and New Jersey, had designed some of it, knew the function of every part, which manufacturer had produced it, and what it cost.

As an engineering intern commencing his third summer with American Tel, he was no longer impressed with sophisticated electronic hardware mounted on row after row of steel bays stretching to the ceiling. The equipment was bland and robotic, requiring no human operator. It sat in silence, consuming digital signals by the gigabit, processing millions of telephone calls daily between Asia and North America, indiscriminately multiplexing and de-multiple

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