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transmit them when Dean's remote unit pinged it. Power for that transmission came from the ping itself, so routine security scans of the upstairs office shouldn't pick it up, not even active scans by units designed to pick up feedback from more conventional microcircuitry.
    "We're getting clear keystrokes," Rubens told him. "Don't move for a bit."
    "I'm not going anywhere," Dean told him.
    Upstairs, someone--either Lockwood or, God help them all, the young punk with the big mouth--was typing on the console keyboard, calling up names and other data on the passengers as they filed through. Each keystroke made a distinct sound, as individual as a fingerprint. As the strings of keystroke clacks and clatters were beamed across the Atlantic, they were processed and stored at the Tordella Supercomputer Facility on the grounds of Fort Meade.
    Over the space of several hours, the NSA computers would gather more and more keyboard information. Space bars, for example, made a very different sound when struck than regular keys. So did the return key, and it was always struck at the end of a string of characters representing a command. Individual letters and numerals were slightly different from one another, and certain strokes-- the numerals 1 and 2 and the letters e and a, for instance-- were statistically more common than others. In the course of an afternoon, the NSA's powerful decryption algorithms could with fair to high reliability assign an ASCII code to each distinct keystroke click, producing a transcript of Lockwood's typing that would be almost as clear as it would have been if the Art Room had a camera peering over her shoulder. By tomorrow morning, the Art Room would be able to watch as she or whoever else might be on duty in the security office entered the passwords that gave them access to the entire system at the start of the workday.
    And the NSA would then have that access as well.
    That access wouldn't give direct access to all of the Royal Star Line's security and financial records, but it would give them direct access to the security software running on the company's internal network. Netguardz was one of several commercial and industrial software packages originally written by coders working for the NSA under a black project called Trojan Horse. Sold worldwide to government and business clients in over eighty countries, each program included built-in back doors allowing the NSA to bypass firewalls and security passwords as easily as if they weren't even there.
    And since Royal Star Line did have computers that talked to the Internet for credit card transactions and taking reservations, Netguardz could use wireless technology to give the NSA direct access even to an internal system that was not hooked up to the Internet.
    A tall, lanky man in a rumpled suit walked up and sat down on the plastic couch a few feet to Dean's right, unfolded a copy of the Sun, and began to read. Ilya Akulinin was relatively new to Desk Three. The son of naturalized Russian immigrants and a native of Brooklyn, New York, Akulinin spoke fluent Russian that had led to his running numerous ops with America's new Russian Federation allies, first as a Green Beret in the Army and now as an NSA officer working out of the agency's Deep Black ops department, and Desk Three.
    "So what happened to your British nanny?" Akulinin asked, his voice pitched low enough that only Dean--and the electronic eavesdroppers in the Art Room back at Fort Meade, of course--could hear.
    "Who, Mitchell?"
    "Yeah. Looks like he was sticking pretty close to you all morning."
    "He took me to lunch in the employee cafeteria," Dean said. "Then he said he had work to do, we shook hands, and he left me on my own. Get the Art Room to read you the transcript, why don't you?"
    "I would if you had anything interesting to say."
    "See the guy at two o'clock, gray suit, leaning against the wall next to the ladies' room?"
    "Yeah."
    "He showed up five minutes after I sat down here.