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got no sins, padre. My soul’s as lily white as a bedsheet.” Bowen lit up a cigar. “Besides, I could get used to this kind of hell.”
    Cameron had taken a glass ornament from the Christmas tree. He threw it against the wall. “This is crazy. This is like Nero fiddling while he watched Rome burn. Shouldn’t we be doing something instead of just sitting here on our thumbs?”
    Bowen blew a cloud of cigar smoke in his direction. “Like what?”
    “Oh, right. I forgot. This is productive, isn’t it — getting drunk and smoking the president’s cigars?”
    “I don’t think he’ll mind, boy, do you?”
    “Cameron’s right.” Loeb put his glass down. “We can waste time later. Right now we should focus on finding the others. I need access to your computer center, your phones, the Internet, camp schematics, everything.”
    “Sure, but I’m telling you there’s no one out there. I already tried.”
    “There’s at least one other person out there. We’ll start with him.”
    Cameron and Loeb left the others and went to the command center where Loeb again checked for messages, comments, posts, anything to indicate someone else was out there. The video counter was still a “1.” He tapped the keyboard: “Someone viewed the video, but they either can’t or won’t contact us. What do you make of that, Cameron?”
    “How do you know the “1” isn’t you? Or maybe it’s a computer troll, or something like that.”
    “Valid question. The software is supposed to filter me out by login, but I hadn’t considered the possibility of it being an automated program. Do we have access to the CIA from here, not the one the hackers play with on the Internet, I mean the secure connection?”
    Cameron handed him a red folder marked “Top Secret.” “I found this in the camp commander’s office. It has the daily password from the twenty-first. Last I checked they hadn’t changed it. You’ll have to use the gray dinosaur over there. It’s the only one on the private network.”
    Loeb clicked through a maze of screens on the isolated computer until he arrived at the CIA secure site.
    “What are you doing?” Cameron asked.
    “The CIA has access to every phone record, every Web transaction, every click, every view, everything we see or do electronically. And they store it all right here.”
    “I’m sorry. I guess I missed that on CNN. They track everything we do? Without a warrant? Isn’t that somewhat illegal?”
    “Don’t be naïve. Of course they do. I realized it about three years ago when the technology for ultra-massive storage became affordable even to people like you and I. It was only logical that the CIA had been using it when price was not an issue. Of course, I never went public with my beliefs. I have enough trouble with the media as it is and no desire to end up in a ditch in Rock Creek Park.”
    “Yeah, that would suck.”
    The page split into a double screen of Loeb’s video on the left and computer gibberish on the right. He ran his finger down the symbols and statements line by line. “There it is. The video was accessed from the backbone of the capital hub on this main trunk. And there is the IP address.”
    “And that is helpful how?”
    Loeb made a face.
    “I’m not a geek,” Cameron said. “I’m a writer.”
    “Every computer on the Web has an IP address. That’s what makes it possible to send and receive information between distinct individuals over the Internet. Think of it as a phone number. If you know someone’s phone number, you can call him. If you don’t, you can’t.”
    “So call him.”
    “He’s apparently not online now.”
    “Who does the number belong to?”
    “Therein lies the problem. What do you do when you know a phone number and need to know who it belongs to?”
    “Is this a test? I hate tests.”
    “Do you even own a cell phone, Cameron? You do a reverse lookup, obviously.”
    “Silly me. Of course you do. Everyone knows that. It’s so