Fault Line by Barry Eisler Page A

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    True, there were downsides to the fear. After the U.S. took out Saddam Hussein, every bush-league enemy of America out there realized he needed an insurance policy. Because if Saddam had had a few nukes and had demonstrated the insanity or even just the minimal resolve to use them if attacked-and who would bet against a guy who had gassed his own people?-the U.S. would have stood down for sure. The Iranians understood this. It was part of why they were trying so hard for a nuke of their own.
    He smiled. Well, they'd suffered a bit of a setback recently, hadn't they?
    But killing the scientists was mostly just buying time. America was the world's richest, most networked, most technologically advanced nation, with unparalleled military superiority. Nukes might be enough to check a power like that, but that didn't mean America's enemies weren't also looking for a checkmate. The Chinese were experimenting with antisatellite technology, looking for a way to put out America's eyes in space. For the Russians, it was all about cyberwarfare, with their massive denial-of-service attack on Estonia a trial run. The Iranians and other third-tier powers who knew? In a thousand garages and bunkers and secret laboratories all around the world, motivated men probed for weakness. When they found it, they would exploit it.
    Luckily, there were hundreds of guys in the bowels of the Pentagon whose job was to ruminate over all the possibilities, imagine, predict, monitor, counter. Of course, there had been people assigned to figure out how to protect America from asymmetrical threats pre-9/11, too. But there were more of them now, and they were better motivated. The Defense Department had even formalized some of it, turning the Eighth Air Force into something called a Cyber Command, tasked with training and equipping forces to conduct network defense, attack, and exploitation. Ben hoped they were doing their job.
    Well, he was doing his. He was proud of that. If his folks were alive, maybe they would have been proud, too.
    Maybe not, though. He'd always been the black sheep. There was a reserve about him, a stillness at his core his parents found vaguely discomfiting and other kids mistook as a kind of cool. The stillness had made him popular, and that unsought, effortless popularity, along with the friends and dates and parties that came with it, had acted to balance the stillness and to some extent conceal it.
    His father had been an engineer with IBM, and the family had moved three times when Ben was a kid-first, Yorktown Heights in New York; then Austin, Texas; and then Portola Valley, in California's Silicon Valley, a stone's throw from the San Andreas Fault. Ben had a knack for football and wrestling, and sports were always a good way to quickly get accepted in a new school. His younger sister, Katie, never had a problem, either. She was a beautiful girl with a radiant smile and nothing but goodwill in her heart, who had it in her just to naturally like everyone, and naturally enough, everyone seemed to like her in return.
    Alex, the youngest of the three, was the problem. He was shy and awkward everywhere but in the classroom, where the little teacher's pet would have an answer to every question and never made a mistake. Alex's constant need to show everyone how smart he was would invariably attract the attention of a bully, and then it would fall to Ben to straighten the bully out. The bully would typically have an older brother, and the brother would always have friends. Usually it took three or four fistfights before Ben established that even if his younger brother was a dipshit, that didn't mean people could pick on him. During these periods, when Ben had to make things clear to people, he often found himself suspended from school. His parents were appalled. They demanded explanations, but what could Ben really tell them? Alex, with his instant aptitude for science and school, was his father's favorite, and the old man wouldn't