Firewall

Publishers Weekly

Pineiro (Y2K; conspiracy.com) boosts the action level and goes international in this outing, in which North Korea hires a former East Geman agent to steal access codes to a U.S. military spy satellite with the capability to cause mass destruction. The code (aka the Ultimate Encryption) is guarded by an artificial intelligence clone of computer entrepreneur Mortimer Fox; Fox's daughter, Monica, has half the password and Fox's bodyguard, former CIA and NSA agent Bruce Tucker, has the other half. Bruce runs to his old CIA boss when his nemesis, Vlad Jarkko, kills Fox, but he is followed. Jarkko drugs him with a blow dart but bungles the kidnapping, kills Bruce's former boss and frames Bruce for the death. Labeled a rogue agent to be shot on sight, Bruce calls in some debts to get false IDs for himself and Monica and races to Capri to find her, ahead of Jarkko and the Feds. Donald Bane, the CIA's aging counterterrorism chief, is closing on Capri, and his team follows the spies until a trick lands Bane on his own with Raffaela, a gutsy Italian boat captain. The plot zooms from this point on, as Monica is abducted to North Korea and the NSA head wants Bruce dead. Pineiro has a knack for spinning cliffhanging twists into impossible situations resolved by explosively clever means. Too many of the book's almost 500 pages are wasted on long, descriptive passages, and an abundance of computer jargon will prove dull for nongeeks, but tech-heads should take notice. Agent, Matthew Bialer. National advertising. (Mar.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Computer thriller by a master programmer who has given us Breakthrough (1997), about a revolutionary new chip that uses bacterial proteins to fabricate a reproducible molecular memory. Firewall has world catastrophe in mind. Bruce Tucker, top CIA agent and later a Secret Service agent as well, lost his wife and son through a CIA foul-up and-although he thinks he's killed their assassin, Siv Jarrko-quits the intelligence services to set up his own executive protection service (which keeps billionaires from being kidnapped, assassinated, and so on). Bruce is hired to protect Mortimer Fox, who headed the building of Firewall, a huge, supersecret Manhattan Project-like endeavor for the government. Even more secretly, Fox has built Creator, an artificial intelligence that duplicates Fox's own knowledge, personality, emotions and background, and personally can control Firewall through a back entrance to its program. Fox alone knows about Creator, although he has made his estranged daughter Monica memorize half of the code that will open it. Then he's assassinated, seemingly by Siv Jarrko (but really by Siv's vengeful brother Vlad, who loves to disembowel living victims, gouge out their eyes, and salt hundreds of tiny razor cuts-when in a good mood). What is Firewall? A satellite orbiting 230 miles way out that houses an unbreakable communications system that holds all our nuclear launch codes, encryption codes, military GPS navigation (controls every bomber, ship, etc.), identifies all the covert officers and agents in the CIA, contains all classified government records and has all the secrets, dirty and otherwise, of every US intelligence agency (the FBI, NSA, etc.). When Vlad murders four CIAagents interviewing Tucker in a park, Tucker gets blamed and goes on the run, bearing the other half of the code, teams up with Monica in Italy and fights the baddies (North Korea) via Creator, whose AI overheats through excess emotion about the world's suffering. Big fun and fast-paced. For all nerds.

From the Publisher

“The well executed plot twists keep you riveted until the end. Fiction of the first order.”—Clive Cussler

“Startingly authentic, Firewall offers an alarming vision of what might come to pass . . . written by an author equally at ease with complex software and superior storytelling.”—Ralph Peters, New York Times bestselling author of Traitor

“Pineiro boosts the action and goes international.”—Publishers Weekly

“Move over Tom Clancy, there is a new kid on the block.”—Library Journal