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training at the FBI academy in Quantico, he was sworn in as an agent in July 1998.

As part of the bureau's graduation ritual, the newly minted agent was instructed to rank all the FBI field offices in order of assignment preference. He rated his hometown of Pittsburgh as number one—it was where Mularski had grown up, gone to school, and met his wife. His chances of transferring there evaporated the next month, when Islamic terrorists bombed U.S. embassy buildings in Kenya and Tanzania. Veteran FBI agents were dispatched from the Washington, DC, field office to investigate the attacks, and Mularski was one of fifteen fresh recruits sent to fill the vacancies in DC—the city marked thirty-second on his list.

Almost overnight Mularski went from managing furniture stores to working on some of the FBI's most important, and highly classified, investigations. When, in 1999, a listening device was found in an office on the top floor of the State Department's headquarters, he was part of the team that identified a Russian diplomat monitoring the transmitter from outside. In 2001, he helped bring down Robert Hanssen, a fellow counterespionage agent who'd been secretly spying for the KGB and its successor agency for twenty years.

It was heady work, but the secrecy chafed Mularski: He held a top-secret clearance and couldn't talk about his job with outsiders—even his wife. So when headquarters announced openings for two experienced agents to kick-start an ambitious cybercrime initiative in Pittsburgh, he saw a chance to go home and step out of the shadows at the same time.

His new job wouldn't be in an FBI office. He was assigned to the civilian office of an industry nonprofit group in Pittsburgh called the National Cyber Forensics and Training Alliance. The NCFTA had been formed by banks and Internet companies a couple of years earlier to track and analyze the latest scams targeting consumers online—mostly phishing attacks. Mularski's job wouldn't consist of chasing individual scams—in isolation, each round of phishing was too small to meet the FBI's mini-