Natalie is a brilliant college junior in Southern California. Obsessed with algorithms and socially inexperienced, she is an easy target for abuse. But not long a victim she exacts a punishing revenge by unleashing her wizard hacking. She reaches out to her coding mentor: the mysterious, gifted, Mario Del Campo. But before joining him, insatiably curious to a fault, she hacks his computer and blunders into his investigations of quasi-government contractors, producing a danger that follows her to Mario in the California mountains, the Sierra Buttes, which he teaches her to climb. Considering what threatens to follow, he tutors her in self-defense, as well. All of which bonds them in love. Then, as he reveals the person responsible for her parents' deaths, the threat materializes, forcing them to separate and run for their lives. She knows how she got here, yet she remains astonished by how far from California that she has been forced to run, from college, from Mario Del Campo, to live in this nightmare that is not a dream. To Seattle where she confronts a new menace. Then running again, escaping this time for dubious safety into the terror of the war in Iraq. Returning, a hardened Natalie Stone reunites with Mario to engage in brilliant but risky investigative hacking, unearthing the crimes of the wealthy and powerful man responsible for the loss of her parents. Threatened again, they escape together to Italy, enlisting young international allies in a final life and death struggle with Natalie's powerful, very dangerous, adversary."--Amazon.com