When I was little, everyone who knew me thought I was odd.
I never wanted to play
with dolls and I didn’t enroll in ballet or gymnastics.
Instead my paramount
interest was numbers. For years I carried around math
flashcards and liked to
entertain my parents’ friends by adding, subtracting and
multiplying in my
head. As I grew older, I quickly moved on to more mature
themes, devouring
linear algebra, differential equations, quadratic
reciprocity and stochastic
processes. Computers were my only friends and the
internet, my playground.

Today, some twenty years later, I’m still fascinated with
numbers, computers and code.
But this time around, I’m getting paid for it as an
information security
technologist with the U.S. National Security Agency, or
NSA for short. Most of
us call it the “No Such Agency” because we are so secret.
I heard somewhere
that less than five percent of Americans even know we
exist.

Basically,I do a lot of web surfing and looking for bad
guys. Using methodical,
mathematical and logical techniques—and when that fails,
sheer imagination—I’m
supposed to stop hackers from compromising America’s
national security.

Although I work for a top-secret agency, I’ve
unfortunately never participated in even
one exciting car chase, had a sip from a stirred (not
shaken) martini, or shot
a poison dart from an umbrella. That kind of action
belongs to the spooks at
the CIA. Some of us at the NSA joke that we are the brains
of the nation, while
the CIA is the brawn. I don’t imagine CIA employees would
be amused to hear
that.

In fact, at this very minute, I was sitting in my cramped,
government-issued
cubicle checking out a popular chat room. My boss,
Jonathan Littleton, hovered
behind me, doing what we computer types call shoulder
surfing. Jonathan had
joined the NSA in the seventies—before computers were
commonplace. Although he
now officially headed the Information Security Department,
better known as
InfoSec, he was more a manager than a techie.

Jonathan whistled under his breath as he perused the data
displayed on the
twenty-five-inch color flat panel monitor on my desk.

“Having fun in there?” he asked.

The there Jonathan referred to was a creepy chat
room called Dark Hack where I
was currently imping a brash, male teenage hacker. I’m not
the type of girl who
typically hangs out in the dark and eerie underbelly of
the internet in rooms
with names like Dark Hack, Mute Slay or CrackHack, but
sometimes we do what we
have to in the name of national security, and today that
meant impersonating a
social misfit with a grudge.

I was pretty sure I was currently chatting with the guy
who had hacked into the
NSA’s Public Affairs website a couple of weeks ago using
some pretty robust and
unusual code. Utilizing fairly colorful language he
defaced the site, drew a
mustache on the president and urged teen hackers to unite
to breach the
electronic barriers that separated people from the free
flow of information.

Since I’m a fairly junior member of the team, Jonathan
thought this particular
assignment was right up my alley. So last week he tossed
the case file onto my
desk with a sticky note on top that read “Lexi Carmichael—
Urgent” in bold red
pen.

Lexi Carmichael. That’s me—a computer geek with a name
better suited to a bubbly
cheerleader. Lexi isn’t even short for something more
dignified, like Alexandra
or Alexis. And to make matters worse, I look nothing like
a Lexi. Imagine a
delicate-boned, pink-cheeked girl with long, curly blond
hair, blue eyes and an
adorable, pert nose . . . and that’s exactly what I
don’t look like. To
my mother’s great dismay, I inherited nothing of her
remarkable looks except
for a pair of exceedingly long legs. By the seventh grade
I was five foot
eleven—skinny and all legs with a short torso, no boobs
and ordinary brown hair
like my dad. I’d also been given his facial genes—a thin
nose, wide mouth and
hazel eyes. At age twenty-four, not much has changed,
including the fact that I
still have zip in the boob department.