John Fagan, a well-known computer hacker, enters an on-line
chat room in 1993 following the World Trade Center bombing,
and proceeds to explain what mistakes were made that day
and how he would proceed to inflict more damage and create
a larger impact. Years later, when multiple planes are
hijacked and crash into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon,
he realizes that someone took his ideas to heart and are
actually following through with them. John becomes a vital
piece to a terrorist puzzle and one of the government's
main suspects.
In lieu of the devastating day, September 11, 2001, the lax
United States government jumps to action and one of the
first items on the agenda is to enlist Jeannie Reese, a 22-
year-old child prodigy currently working for the Pentagon.
Jeannie receives a direct order to release her computer
program IRIN, which hacks into every possible technology (e-
mail, cell phones and any computer connected to the
Internet) to find those responsible. When IRIN narrows the
search to include a compound in Colorado, her own
government turns on her and Jeannie becomes a fugitive. Not
only is she running for her life, but she's also determined
to stop those responsible for such terrible acts by racing
against the government and her own program to find the
truth behind the attacks.
WOW! This is a complex, riveting thriller that engrosses
readers and intertwines them in unimaginable possibilities.
I didn't set this book down until I'd read the last
intriguing page.
Twenty-two-year-old Jeannie Reese is a computer wunderkind—
and the top architect of next-generation security for the
Department of Defense. Her latest brainchild is IRIN, the
most powerful surveillance technology ever developed. To
date, IRIN has remained ultraclassified and inactive. But
on the day a shocking act of terrorism strikes U.S. shores,
the presidential order comes to launch Jeannie’s creation
against the dark forces behind the attack.
Known only as Phr33k, forty-one-year-old John Fagan is a
legendary, reclusive computer hacker. For years he has
expertly hidden himself while operating freely within the
shadows of the Internet’s background noise. He has remained
in complete seclusion despite his infamy as the author of a
slew of massive electronic crimes — and despite his long-
ago, now eerily prophetic, scenarios of terrorist warfare
against America.
Under Jeannie’s direction, IRIN gathers and analyzes
endless data — and unearths Phr33k. If she is to stop the
next stage of a terror campaign clearly begun years before,
Jeannie will have to find the überhacker; but that is only
the beginning. For she soon discovers that Phr33k is being
held by the leader of a vast terrorist network, who now
plans to use this unique genius to conceive and deliver his
final, fatal blow: a devastating nationwide wave of
unparalleled destruction.
For his part, Phr33k is used to working alone. But all that
will have to change. He has a new challenge, one unlike any
he’s faced before: how to provide Jeannie Reese with one
outrageous, impossible shot to short-circuit the perfect,
unstoppable scheme he so masterfully — and so unwillingly —
helped to create.
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