Gideon Malcolm is an ambitious Washington D.C. police detective. True, his career has not achieved the heights of his older brother Raphael who’s in the FBI. And the DC police department doesn’t really have men to spare to help him follow up on a tip concerning a stolen supercomputer, Daedalus. (We see its theft at the beginning of the novel.) So, Gideon asks Raphael to help him check out an empty building where Daedalus may be.

Well, the building isn’t empty, and the brothers find themselves ambushed. Both are shot, Raphael fatally. And, to make matters worse, the shooters (or, at least so their uniforms say) are from the Department of Treasury.

Well, this is another disaster like Ruby Ridge and Waco, and some public official has to be sacrificed. And we see that high levels of the CIA and National Security Advisor D’Arcy are concerned with Daedalus and finding one Dr. Julia Zimmerman.

Meanwhile, Gideon, on medical disability, decides to investigate the real story behind that fateful night. That will mean following up with informants, engaging an old detective colleague turned security consultant, and going to Zimmerman’s old employer of MIT.

Along the way, there will be plenty of dead bodies, attacks, and double-crosses.

Rogue intelligence operations would have seemed merely stock espionage thriller cliches if I had read this book when it first came out. Now they seem more plausible.

I haven’t read a lot of mystery and suspense novels from this time period, but, from the perspective of 23 years on, it’s an impressive cyberthriller that edges into science fiction. We have references to Y2K, computer viruses, evolutionary algorithms, artificial life of the cybernetic variety, cyberwarfare, and even the Riemann hypothesis.

Zimmerman is not one of Swann’s usual villains with a mere will to power. She has different obsessions. But she’s unconcerned about collateral damage in pursuing them. Or, by some lights, maybe she’s not a villain at all.

If you make allowances for its time, this story is an engaging, fast-moving novel that successfully combines intrigue and action with some ideas from mathematics, philosophy, and computer engineering. (It’s also somewhat shorter than Swann’s usual novels.) ( )