Cybernation nf-6

by Tom Clancy

  The latest version of the sting was BC Internet Industries, Inc. Called BC Three Eyes, or just Three Eyes, the company had just enough passware and fire walls to make a bent hacker have to work a little, and all kinds of apparent goodies there for the taking once they were past security. Like a brown paper bag full of unmarked twenty-dollar bills just sitting there on the sidewalk with nobody around, it was just too good for the RBs to resist. Three Eyes had gulled a dozen thieves over the last year — under different names and slightly different configurations, of course.

  “BC” stood for “Big Con,” one of Jay’s little jokes.

  Typically, hackers would attack, then demand payment. Sometimes, a company would require more proof. Sometimes, they would even hire the thieves to set up security for them, with the idea that it takes one to catch one.

  Some of the RBs actually considered breaking into a company’s system and screwing it up to be the equivalent of a job interview.

  Three Eyes had fine-tuned their process. Once they had an RB coming after them, they first sent a small amount of money, with a promise of more — providing the thief would be willing to do a hands-on, face-time demo to their own security people of how they could get past the safeguards. The pitch had been developed and honed by a brilliant shrink who had worked for State before he’d moved to the FBI. The pitch was designed to be psychologically irresistible to a hacker mentality. Hackers thought they were smarter than normal people. They were convinced of their superiority. They thought they could think circles around any company security honcho or federal agent. They wanted to show people just how smart they were. They needed the applause, and the Three Eye pitch played right into their beliefs. It did everything but bend down to kiss their feet. They ate it up.

  The RBs, once hooked, were landed almost every time.

  The big HDTV screen was lit, and several people were standing or sitting at the table, watching. The case-cam was a briefcase that belonged to one of the agents. Typically there were a pair of these, one from the regular FBI, one from Net Force, playing the parts of the CEO and security VP for Three Eyes. They would ask for a sit-down with the thieves, and the RBs could choose the time, place, whatever. Some of the thieves had been pretty clever. They had made calls from mobile coms to the agents, changed destinations at the last instant, and one guy even had the meeting take place in a house that had been made into a kind of giant Farady Cage, complete with wide-spectrum jammers to make sure the company execs couldn’t transmit their position for help.

  These guys weren’t that smart, though they were careful.

  The case-cam on the table had a small scanning unit that panned slowly back and forth almost one-eighty. The cam panned to the left.

  “Check it out. Metal detector built into the doorway,” Toni pointed at the screen, “to make sure our guys aren’t carrying guns or knives.”

  The camera panned back. There were two men seated at the table across from the two agents, and two more men standing behind them.

  “Who are the goons?”

  “Bodyguards, we figure.”

  “Big ones.”

  “Six four, six five. Two-seventy, two hundred eighty, easy. Not fun in close quarters.”

  PIPed in the left corner of the image was a smaller, wider-angle view that took in most of the room. That would be from the sticky-cam, about the size of a dime and almost clear and invisible, stuck on the wall near the door by one of the agents when they’d arrived. The wide-angle image gave a better view of the play, and Toni picked up a remote and switched the picture-in-a-picture around.

  Toni looked at her watch. “Right about… now,” she said.

  One of the agents — the regular FBI guy — removed an envelope from his jacket pocket and passed it to the two men across from him. The thief took the envelope and checked it, smiled real big, and showed it to his partner. His partner took it, riffled what was inside with his thumb, and also smiled.

  While the two extortionists were looking at the money, the agent on the left, who was in fact one Julio Fernandez of Net Force, removed something from his pocket, which he pointed at the man across from him.

  It looked kind of like a pack of white playing cards with a small handle and a circular hole near the middle through which Fernandez had stuck his finger.

  “Strange-looking weapon,” Alex said.

  “Starn pistola,” Toni said. “9mm stripper clip, five shots, all plastic and ceramic construction, including the springs, fragmenting bullets made from some kind of zinc epoxy boron ceramic. Light, but very fast, even from a snubby. Eighteen hundred, nineteen hundred feet per second. Bullet comes apart on impact, creates a nasty temporary stretch cavity.”

  The bodyguard on the left made as if to draw a gun hidden under his jacket in a shoulder holster. Julio waved the gun at him and said something. Too bad there wasn’t any sound.

  The bodyguard must have decided that Julio’s weapon wasn’t that dangerous. He pulled his own handgun, a big, black semiauto pistol.

  It wasn’t even halfway from the holster when Julio shot him. The resolution of the camera, while pretty good, wasn’t enough for Toni to see where the bullet or bullets hit, but the man dropped the gun and staggered back against the wall, then slid down into a sitting position.

  The second bodyguard evidently decided that trying to outdraw a man pointing a gun at your face was maybe not such a good idea. He raised his hands, fingers open wide.

  “My, my,” Alex said. “What’s the world coming to when hackers bring guns to the party.”

  “We live in dangerous times,” Toni said.

  15

  On the Bon Chance

  In the conference room next to the computer center, Keller called his team together.

  “Listen,” he said. “I know you are all doing outstanding work. Our projects thus far have been on target and very effective. However, due to the actions of Net Force, as well as other minor security agencies, our successes have not been as great as we’d hoped they’d be.”

  Nobody was happy to hear that, but it wasn’t telling them anything they didn’t already know.

  “There are real world contingencies; of course, those have always been in place, and those in charge of such matters will go forward as necessary. Some efforts have already been made in that direction.”

  This drew a disappointed murmur.

  He could understand that. It had been his hope all along that the programmers and weavers could do the job without resorting to cruder methods. That would be the real victory, to use the very tools of that which they sought to bring about and nothing more. The reality of it was, however, that there were still limits on what could be done electronically. The future had arrived, but there were still people out there who not only refused to log into it, they seemed to be heading back to the past. There were groups who still used typewriters, for God’s sake. Fountain pens were making a comeback. Handwritten letters weren’t going to replace e-mail, of course, but there were people who still corresponded that way. There were even people in the United States who not only refused to have answering machines or services, they didn’t have telephones!

  You couldn’t reach people like that, couldn’t frighten them with worries of Internet problems. They didn’t care.

  Fortunately, these Luddites were in the minority; but the computer revolution was not yet complete. Some things still had to be done the old-fashioned way. That’s why men like Santos were necessary. If you were doing surgery, you needed a laser scalpel, but now and again, despite medicine’s advances, you had to have a bone saw. Or, perhaps more accurately, a leech…

  He was wandering. He drew himself back to the meeting at hand. “We are going to have to push up our deadline on Attack Omega,” he said.

  That drew louder grumbles.

  “I know, I know. You are already running as fast as you can. There is no help for it — the decision comes from on high. We will be coordinating with the other agents of change on this, and we can’t slip t
he deadline even by an hour. Whatever we have when Omega launches is what we have. I’d like for it to be as much as possible. Okay, let’s put on our question hats and get them all out in the open…”

  Later, after they had filed out, Keller sat at the table, idly tapping his fingertips on the wood, thinking. His team would give him all they had. And he would roll up his sleeves and help them — Jay Gridley was the linchpin around which Net Force’s security operations revolved. Throw enough sand at Jay, and he’d grind to a halt, and if Jay was stymied, much of Net Force’s interference would also be slowed, maybe stopped.

  Whatever Santos thought of him, all it would take would be for Keller to point a finger at Jay, and he’d be a dead man. That was the surest way of removing him from the picture. And probably it was safer for CyberNation to do it that way.

  But…

  Where was the honor in that? The skill? The knowing that he could take Jay on and beat him, using the weapons they had developed with their brains. Any thug could crack somebody over the head with a club. Beating Jay Gridley mano a mano, VR against VR, computer to computer, that was something to make a man feel good.

  Kill Jay? No. Not with a gun or knife. Beating him at his own game, that was how he would do it. Defeating him intellectually, shattering his confidence, taking away what he thought he was, that was worse than death for a man like Jay Gridley.

  Nothing less would do.

  He took a deep breath. Well. Might as well get started. He had a couple of things he could give Jay to chew on. He smiled. Yes, indeed.

  Santos finished his exercises. Drenched in sweat, he headed for the shower.

  The workout had been good, but he was getting stale. It had been too long since he had trained against an expert. The solo dances were okay for maintaining muscle tone, to stay flexible and to keep alive the basics, but you did not learn to fight men by practicing alone. Mirror warriors were no threat. To keep a skill sharp, you had to hone it against another player of equal or better skill. Timing, distance, position, those could only be learned against dangerous opposition. The flow had to be there.

  Soon, he would have to find players of enough ability to challenge him. There were none on this ship, none within easy travel range. Maybe in Cuba — he had heard there were some old-line players still there, hiding in the cane fields, practicing by moonlight, since the art was still frowned on, even after the Old Man was gone — but finding them would be the trick. There were some in the U.S., of course, even in Florida, but to get a real challenge, he would need to go home, that’s where the best players still were, and that was not in the cards in the near future — not until this job was finished.

  He sighed. A man had to learn to put off his wants to deal with his needs.

  He turned the cold water on full blast, shucked his pants, and stepped into the shower. The cold needles made him catch his breath, but it was a good feeling.

  Then there was the problem of Missy Chance to consider. She was sleeping with Jackson Keller, at least, maybe others — who knew? One of the barmaids in the casino had told Santos this while she had been enjoying his body in her room, after he had returned from dispatching the vice president of the server company.

  Santos soaped the long-handled and stiff-bristled brush and began to scrub his face and neck.

  He saw no irony in finding out that his mistress was sleeping with another man from a woman he was screwing. Men were allowed to be with more than one woman, God had made men that way, but a woman who was unfaithful? That was wrong. He could not blame Keller for wanting Missy, though he, too, would have to pay. But if it was not rape, and he could not imagine that happening to her, then Missy must be made to… atone for her action.

  He moved the rough brush down, scrubbed his shoulders, his armpits, his back.

  Missy was expert in bed, but she was too sure that such ability made her superior to other women. It did not. In the dark, they were all the same, true?

  She must be made to understand that some things could not be allowed by a man such as Santos. Not allowed.

  Washington, D.C.

  “A nightclub?”

  “Not exactly,” she said. “More like a… roadhouse,” she said.

  Michaels looked at Toni and raised one eyebrow.

  They were in the living room. The baby was asleep, and so was Guru.

  “We haven’t been out since Alex was born,” she said.

  “Yes, we have,” he said.

  “Not by ourselves,” she said.

  “We didn’t have a baby-sitter,” he said. “And if we had had a baby-sitter, we wouldn’t have trusted her.”

  “Well, we do now,” she said, smiling. “Guru.”

  “She’s a witch, you know. She’s put a spell on our son. No baby should behave that well.”

  “Alex…”

  “So, what is the attraction of this roadhouse exactly?”

  “The food is supposed to be terrific, and they have a great live band.”

  “As opposed to a great dead band?”

  “Has anybody ever told you how funny you are?”

  “All the time.”

  “Yeah, well, they lied.”

  “Now who’s being funny?”

  “Anyway, the band is called Diana and the Song Dogs.”

  “What kind of music do they play?”

  “Well, it’s kind of, well, uh… country/rock/folk/blues fusion.”

  “Oh, please. Not another of those new-age bands playing touchy-feely elevator music—”

  “No, no, nothing like that. It’s just the kind of music you can listen to while having a beer. Foot-stompin’, bug-squashin’ music.”

  “Had a lot of that in the Bronx, did we?”

  “We had radio. We had television. Why, we even had transportation that could take us to places outside our neighborhood.”

  “Ah. I see.”

  “No, you don’t. But you will.”

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t just rather stay home and enjoy the quiet? Just the two of us in the house? Alone?” He waggled his eyebrows. “Guru can take Alex to the park for a couple of hours—”

  “We are going out. I am not going to become one of those women who, if she ever gets the chance to talk to anybody, prattles on about what color her little darling’s last poop was when she changed his diaper.”

  “What color was it?”

  “Go get dressed, Alex,” she said. Her tone was ominous.

  * * *

  The roadhouse was called the Stone Creek Pub and Grill, and it was far enough out into the Virginia countryside that it took a while to get there. There were a lot of trees, so there was plenty of oxygen in the air when they found a parking spot in the crowded lot. And there were animals living in the area, too — less one skunk somebody had run over, adding a fragrant stink to the evening breeze.

  “Jeez, what an odor,” Toni said.

  “You wanted to come here.”

  The place appeared to be a converted barn, lots of open woodwork and bare walls with old metal signs and horse harnesses and such hung on the walls. They managed to find a table, and it was noisy, filled with people, and busy. Still, Michaels was fine once he had gotten up and past the inertia. Toni was right; they needed to get out more. Having her back at work was good, but hardly restful. Becoming parents had put a big crimp in their lives. Michaels really didn’t mind, since he would usually just as soon stay home as go out after a hard day at the office. But it was all too easy to turn into a couch potato who stayed home all the time, warm and secure in the nest. The baby hadn’t helped that. It was easier to be where they had everything they needed; if they went out, they had to pack diaper bags with bottles and clothes and rattles and stuff, and it was a hassle. He had gone through that with Susie when she’d been a baby, but he had forgotten, it had been so long.

  The waitress came, took their orders for pints of beer. Toni got something called Ruby — beer “with a hint of raspberry,” ick — and he got one called Hammerhead, which
seemed appropriate. The waitress promised to be back for their sandwich orders in a few minutes.

  The band consisted of a woman in jeans and a work shirt with a guitar slung around her neck, a guy with a fiddle, another on a double bass, and one more with a mandolin. They cranked up and started playing a lively tune that did have a folksy-bluesy sound to it. The harmony was pretty good, and the song was something about doing cartwheels on a gravel road or some such. The woman singer — Michaels assumed she was Diana and the men were the Song Dogs — had a pleasant voice and an animated face. When she sang lead, she belted it out pretty cleanly, and she sang a nice harmony for the bass player in a couple of places.

  She had her web page address painted on the front of her guitar.

  Well, you could hardly get away from that, even here in the country. Hank Williams would have been amused.

  The beer came, and as she promised, the waitress dutifully took their sandwich orders. Michaels went for the barbecued chicken, Toni got the Reuben, and they decided to split a small order of fries.

  The band began another song. The words were hard to hear, given the noise of the diners, but everybody seemed to be having a great time. And, Michaels had to admit, he was feeling pretty good himself. It had been a long time since he and Toni had been out together.

  The band got through another tune and the food arrived. The basket of fries was huge, the sandwiches also generous, and the waitress brought catsup and vinegar and mustard and plopped them onto the table. Along with a ream of napkins.

  “I’m glad we decided to get a small order of fries,” Toni said.

  He saw why they had gotten all the napkins as soon as the barbecue sauce squished out of the sandwich and ran down his chin.

  For the band’s next number, a harmonica player appeared from somewhere to sit in; the Song Dogs sang about traveling on the railroad and long stretches of empty prairie, and the blues harp wailed like a train whistle, long and mournful.

  Michaels watched Toni, enjoying the look of pleasure on her face as she watched and listened to the band. This was what life was all about, wasn’t it? Watching your woman have a good time, and being a part of that? Drinking beer, eating greasy fries, listening to a band — how much better did it need to be? He could do this. Definitely.