The grumpy, reluctant NSA and NRO techs hated telling Van anything. Their stovepipe was melting awfully. They were dropping their pants and revealing their family jewels. The NSA satellite geeks came from some strange parallel world of computation where everything important had been invented in the 1960s by forty thousand mathematicians under a big hill in Maryland. Van felt a strange respect for them—not for the modern NSA guys, who were sort of lost and snooty and owlish, but for the amazing Cold War rocket state of his grandfather’s generation. A lost empire of truly macho engineering, where America’s best tech guys just sort of rolled up their sleeves, lit an unfiltered Camel, and detonated hydrogen bombs.