Undercover as one of the criminals, FBI agent Art Jeffries guards fourteen year old James while trying to convince the gang’s leader, Edgar Halstrom, to surrender.

Despite pleading for more time to negotiate, an armed FBI task force storms the building, fatally shooting both James and the thieves.

This call reaches two National Security Agency cryptographers, Dean Crandell and Leo Pedranski, who created the new cypher Simon has cracked.

Pedranski and Crandell report the situation to their boss, Lieutenant Colonel Nick Kudrow, who severely rebukes the pair for their unauthorized actions, describing Simon and his abilities as a national security threat.

He berates the NSA head for targeting Simon, demands that Kudrow announce on national TV that the Mercury Encryption Project is a failure, and kicks him for trying to justify his crimes on grounds of protecting American spies.

Barry Sonnenfeld was initially slated to direct the film, but due to commitments to Men in Black dropped out and was replaced with Harold Becker.

The consensus states: "Mercury Rising lays the action on thick, but can never find a dramatic pulse to keep viewers – or Bruce Willis – engaged with its maudlin story.

[9][failed verification] Roger Ebert gave the film two stars out of four, writing: "Mercury Rising is about the most sophisticated cryptographic system known to man, and about characters considerably denser than anyone in the audience.

Sitting in the dark, our minds idly playing with the plot, we figure out what they should do, how they should do it, and why they should do it, while the characters on the screen strain helplessly against the requirements of the formula.

... Once again, certain standby plot elements – the high-level government conspiracy and the maverick law enforcement agent – are recycled, and not to good effect.

While Bruce Willis can play the action hero as well as anyone in Hollywood, this particular outing leaves him marooned in situations that are characterized by too little tension and too much nonsense.