So, Wang realized, this had not been a strategy session but an audition. The Presidium had already made its choice.

Armando Chavez exhaled when he made the initial slice. As his mentor Dr. Jimenez had explained so long ago, the key to precision was to move slow but steady, advancing the blade at a consistent pace. The cut complete, Chavez reached down, picked up the withered rose branch, and placed it into the faded canvas bag slung over his shoulder.

Landscaping was a step down for someone with an MD from Universidad Central de Venezuela. But it was the only kind of work Armando Chavez had been able to get since he’d arrived as a refugee from the chaos in his homeland seven years ago. He could get angry or he could focus on achieving the little perfections that made life satisfying.

As he trimmed the flowers at the base of the sign, he glanced at the etching in the black marble: Defense Intelligence Agency. He wasn’t sure what the DIA did. Hadid, his supervisor, said it was something like the CIA, but for the U.S. military. It didn’t matter. The landscaping crew was almost done here. After the break, Hadid said they would head over to trim the hedges behind the base’s elder-care center.

Because of security, the landscapers were not allowed inside the building. When break time came, the others gathered in the shade, but Chavez walked over to sit by the small decorative pond beside the entrance doors.

He flipped open the tablet he kept in his pocket to see if he had any messages. The screen projected a 3-D packet from his cousin back in Caracas. More pictures of his granddaughter. Such lovely eyes.

Armando’s smile went unnoticed by Allison Swigg as she cut across the grassy field by the pond in her rush from the parking lot. The imagery analyst had gotten stuck in the traffic on I-295 on her way back from a networking lunch out at Tysons Corner. And now she was late for the staff meeting.

Neither of them noticed the other, but as she passed the landscaper, his tablet recognized the RFID chips embedded in Swigg’s security badge. A localized wireless network formed for exactly 0.03 seconds. In that instant, the malware hidden in the video packet from Caracas made its jump.

As Chavez finished the iced tea his wife had made for him the previous night, Swigg approached the security desk manned by a guard in a black bullet-resistant nylon jumpsuit. A compact HK G48 assault rifle hung from the glossy gray ceramic vest that protected his chest. The only insignia on his uniform was the eagle-silhouette logo of the security company that guarded the DIA headquarters. No Personal Devices Allowed read the sign suspended above a row of silver turnstiles.

“Hey, Steve,” said Allison. “How’s the little one?”

“Pretty good,” the guard replied with a smile. “She slept through the night.”

She placed her iTab bracelet in a metallic lock box and pulled out the key. But Swigg’s badge stayed with her. As she walked toward the gate, the software in her badge automatically communicated her security clearance to the machine via a radio signal. And at the same moment of network linkage, the malware packet jumped again in less time than it would take to read the engraving on the entrance wall: Committed to excellence in defense of the nation.

The idea of using covert radio signals to ride malware into a network unconnected to the wider Internet had actually been pioneered by the NSA, one of the DIA’s sister agencies. But like all virtual weapons, once it was deployed in the open cyberworld, it offered inspiration for anyone, including one’s enemies.

The turnstile gate lifted. Swigg rushed down the hall, too far behind schedule to make her ritual stop at the Dunkin’ Donuts stand just inside the spy agency’s entrance. By the time she had passed the old Soviet SS-20 ballistic missile that stood mounted in the lobby like a Cold War totem pole, the malware packet had jumped from the gate onto another security guard’s viz glasses. When the guard walked his rounds, the packet jumped into the environmental controls that cooled a closet full of network servers supporting aerial surveillance operations over Pakistan. After that, it went to an unmanned-aircraft research and development team’s systems. And bit by bit, the malware worked its way into the various subnetworks that linked via the Defense Department’s SIPRNet classified network.

The initial penetrations didn’t raise any alarms among the automated computer network defenses, always on the lookout for anomalies. At each stop, all the packet did was link with what appeared to the defenses as nonexecutables, harmless inert files, which they were, until the malware rearranged them into something new. Each of the systems had been air-gapped, isolated from the Internet to prevent hackers from infiltrating them. The problem with high walls, though, was that someone could use an unsuspecting gardener to tunnel underneath them.

A thin teenage girl stood behind a workstation, faintly glowing metallic smart-rings on all her fingers, one worn above each joint. Her expression was blank, her eyes hidden behind a matte-black visor. Rows of similar workstations lined the converted lecture hall. Behind each stood a young engineering student, every one a member of the 234th Information Brigade — Jiao Tong, a subunit of the Third Army Cyber-Militia.

On the arena floor, two Directorate officers watched the workers. From their vantage point, the darkened arena seemed to be lit by hundreds of fireflies as the students’ hands wove faint neon-green tracks through the air.

Jiao Tong University had been formed in 1896 by Sheng Xuanhuai, an official working for the Guangxu emperor. The school was one of the original pillars of the Self-Strengthening Movement, which advocated using Western technology to save the country from destitution. Over the following decades, the school grew to become China’s most prestigious engineering university, nicknamed the Eastern MIT.

Hu Fang hated that moniker, which made it seem as if her school were only a weak copy of an American original. Today, her generation would show that times had changed.

The first university cyber-militias had been formed after the 2001 Hainan Island incident. A Chinese fighter pilot had veered too close to an American navy surveillance plane, and the two planes crashed in midair. The smaller Chinese plane spun to the earth and its hot-dogging pilot was killed, while the American plane had to make an emergency landing at a Chinese airfield on Hainan. As each side angrily accused the other of causing the collision, the Communist Party encouraged computer-savvy Chinese citizens to deface American websites to show their collective displeasure. Young Chinese teens were organized online by the thousands and gleefully joined in the cyber-vandalism campaign, targeting the homepage of everything from the White House to a public library in Minnesota. After the crisis, the hacker militias became crucial hubs of espionage, stealing online secrets that ranged from jet-fighter designs to soft-drink companies’ negotiating strategies.

That had all taken place before Hu Fang was born. She’d grown up sick from the smog; a hacking cough kept her from playing outside with the other kids. What Hu thought was a curse became a blessing: her father, a professor of computer science in Beijing, had started her out writing code at age three, mostly as a way to keep her busy inside their cramped apartment. Hu had been inducted into the 234th after she’d won a software-writing competition at the age of eleven.