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Wars Storm Trooper contraption.
    Shaking with road jitters, Van booted the ground-control positioner. The Cosmoband receiver whined and labored grumpily. Then, with dim, mechanical reluctance, it connected. The dish’s target was dusty, old-fashioned, and underused. It was one-fifth the size of Van’s Range Rover. And it was orbiting twenty-three thousand miles above the Earth. Van triumphantly sucked e-mail from the sky.
    Dottie appeared. “Honey bear, you want a Slurpee or something?”
    “Nope.”
    She examined the cables. “Can I log on now?”
    “Yep. Right through the LAN.”
    A smile broke. “That’s great, Derek!”
    As the Rover rolled on, Van read all his mail. Then they stopped the truck again, he hauled the dish out, and grabbed fresh work out of a sequence of Mondiale internal Web sites. He struggled with Mondiale’s broken router code. He spewed more mail back into the sky. Then he did this again. And again. He did it under the stars, and at dawn. Then he slept on the futon. Then he did it again. When they reached Burbank, Van was driving the Rover, the only one left awake. He was six hours ahead of schedule. They had crossed four time zones and broken speed laws in eight states.
CHAPTER
    THREE
    BURBANK, CALIFORNIA, SEPTEMBER 14, 2001
    E xcept for his bone-weariness and persistent itches inside his stale clothes, Van had no problem driving around Burbank. He had spent a lot of time in Burbank with his grandfather, in summers and on holidays. For a time, during his marriage to Grandmother Number Two, Elmer “Chuck” Vandeveer had owned a weekend ranch up in the hills, not far from the Ronald Reagan spread. The times spent on the ranch were Van’s happiest childhood memories. He had much enjoyed falling off horses, setting fire to bales of hay, and shooting rats and rabbits there.
    Grandpa Chuck was one of the world’s top aerodynamicists. As a jet designer, he tackled his toy ranch as a make-or-break project: feverishly digging post holes, efficiently splitting firewood. Even Grandpa’s relaxation was high performance. Grandpa’s only true home, the place where he logged all his overtime, the source of his deepest passions in life, was a windowless, two-story concrete bunker, near the Burbank airport. It had lead-lined rooms for antisurveillance. It was frequented by the Air Force elite and the CIA.
    Grandpa belonged to the Lockheed Skunk Works.
    The city of Burbank had exploded since Van’s childhood in the 1970s, eating every orange grove and rolling up the hills. The palmy streets near the airport were still vaguely familiar to him. Van sensed that he himself had transformed even more radically than the town of Burbank. From a little kid with a popsicle stick, a stammer, bad allergies, and a plastic Star Wars X-wing fighter, into a big, quiet, bearded geek with black glasses, smelling of sweat.
    Something wasn’t adding up here. Van thumbed at the Rover’s GPS, alarmed. He had input the proper street address, but he didn’t recognize the neighborhood at all. This was not his grandfather’s elder-care facility.
    Van had rarely seen his grandfather during the long hectic frenzy of the dot-com boom. Since he’d left Stanford, he’d scarcely seen his grandfather at all. Old folks’ homes were far from cheerful places. Phone calls, e-mail, digital Christmas cards, and digital photos of the baby. That was pretty much it between himself and his grandpa Chuck. But now the GPS had guided him to a completely unknown destination. It appeared to be a private home, a cheap stucco duplex. Worse yet, it was only 6:17 in the morning, local California time. Van pulled to the overgrown grassy curb and stopped the Rover. He got out, and gently shut the solid door, with care for his sleeping brood. When he stretched, his cramped spine popped loudly in three places. Carpal tunnel twinged in his overworked wrists.
    Feeling lost and absurd, Van approached the front door. Duplex A belonged to “C. Chang,”