Cybernation (2001)

by Clancy, Tom - Net Force 06

  Skill without direction, without purpose, was wasted.

  It was too bad he couldn’t approach Jay Gridley. Jay was the best he’d ever known, as good in school as Keller himself had been, maybe even better. They’d been friends then, trailblazers on the web, adventurers in cyberspace. But Jay had gone over to the dark side, become a Net Force op. One of the enemy. A man whose vision now stopped at the end of his nose. He fought to preserve the status quo, he lived in a tower of decay.

  What a waste of a great talent.

  Well. He had made his choice, Jay. Now he’d have to suffer the consequences. The train was leaving the station—no, the rocket ship was lifting for the stars, that was better—and Jay hadn’t booked passage. He would be left behind. Sad.

  CyberNation was going to become reality, that Keller never doubted. How long it might take, exactly how and when it would come to pass, well, those were not things he could predict with certainty, but the end was a foregone conclusion. This was the information age, the time when knowledge and accessibility to it were the two most important things in the world. That genie wasn’t going back into the bottle, not ever. The world was going to undergo a change like nothing it had ever seen in all its history.

  Jackson Keller was the best of the best, and he was leading the way to change.

  One of the netweavers, Rynar, had just pulled his sensory gear off and was stretching when he saw Keller come in.

  “Jackson,” he said. “How are we?”

  Keller smiled. It was a running joke—Cyber-Nationalists often spoke in collective terms.

  “Why don’t you tell me?” Keller said. “What is the status on Attack Beta?”

  “Going quicker than we’d hoped,” Rynar said. “ZopeMax programming is one hundred and nine percent of goal. DHTML and GoggleEye Object Links are six by six.”

  “How is Willie’s Ourobourus?”

  “Well, the python is choking on its tail a bit, but he says he’ll have it fixed in a day or two.”

  Keller nodded. “Excellent. Anything new I should know?”

  “Well, Net Force is after us. Perhaps we should be quaking in our shoes?”

  They both chuckled.

  “Do they have anything?”

  “No. They don’t have a clue. Don’t know who they are chasing, where to look, how we did it. I think you give your old friend Gridley too much credit, Jackson.”

  “Maybe. But he’s pulled down some other big players who didn’t give him enough credit. Better safe than sorry.”

  “I hear you. We’ll keep shifting the cover.”

  Keller nodded again. He headed for his own workstation. There was much to be done yet. Best he get to it.

  Net Force Shooting Range Quantico, Virginia

  John Howard had already put half a box of ammo through his revolver waiting for Julio. It was the first time he’d been to the range in at least a month, and he felt a little rusty. He was used to stopping by once or twice a week, and since he’d been gone, making the drive from town seemed like a real chore sometimes. Just for fun, he’d been shooting 9mm. His Phillips & Rodgers K-frame revolver was unique among wheelguns, in that it would load and shoot dozens of different calibers, ranging from .380 auto to .357 Magnum, this made possible by a clever spring device built into the cylinder’s rod housing. You had to adjust the sights if you wanted to do precision work when you changed calibers—the flat-shooting nines went to a different point of aim than .38 Special wadcutters or .357 hollowpoints did—but at combat distance, it didn’t matter all that much. A couple of centimeters one way or the other, it didn’t make any tactical difference.

  He’d reset his command ring before starting—he was inactive, but still technically on call—so he was good for another thirty days before they changed the codes. So far, the smart-gun technology the FBI mandated for all its small arms had not failed any of Net Force’s operatives, though there were supposedly a couple of incidents at the FBI Academy range with Glocks where there were failures to fire. Howard didn’t know if that was due to the computer-operated smart tech, or the Tupperware Glocks, but he hoped it was the latter. What you did not want was for your weapon to turn into a paperweight when the bad guys started shooting at you.

  And, while he worried about that, so far at least eight or nine regular FBI agents had lost their handguns in fights and the smart guns had saved them from being shot by their own weapons. If you weren’t wearing the control device, either a ring or a watch, the guns using them simply would not go bang. Made keeping a piece at home in a drawer at night safer, too. While Howard’s son was trained to shoot, and well past that age where he might accidentally blast himself or some playmate, a lot of federal employees who carried guns as part of their daily wear had small children at home.

  Well. It wasn’t really his problem at the moment, was it? He was on “extended leave,” which was probably a prelude to full retirement. Somebody else’s worry, now.

  Here finally came Julio. Howard nodded at him. “Lieutenant.”

  “General. Sorry I’m late. Your godson.”

  “How is little Hoo?”

  “Oh, he is fine. It’s Joanna and I who are tearing our hair out. How come you didn’t tell me what would happen when he got seriously mobile? One second you’re standing there trying to take a leak and he’s in the doorway, the next, he’s in the kitchen pulling stuff out of the cabinets. It’s like he can teleport—zip, and he’s gone!”

  “You have to kidproof the place, Julio. Get those little latches that install inside doors and drawers, plug all the electrical outlets, put everything you value high enough so he can’t reach it.”

  “Right. We thought we had done that. Yesterday, he climbed up onto a chair, leaned over, and punched the power control on the DVD player half a dozen times before I could grab him. He’s turned into this little tornado that destroys everything in his path. We clean the house top to bottom, spic-and-span, and five minutes later, there are toys, books, food, clothes, you name it, piled a foot deep everywhere. I’ve been picking peanut butter out of my running shoe soles for a week.”

  Howard chuckled.

  “It’s a conspiracy, isn’t it? Those of you who have had children deliberately kept the knowledge from those of us who didn’t, right?”

  Howard laughed louder. “Of course. If people knew how much trouble they’d be, they’d never have kids, and the race would die off. Soon as you figure this out, you get a call from the Parent Police, and you have to take the secrecy oath.”

  “Once I would have thought that was funny. Now, I halfway believe it.”

  “You going to shoot, or are you going to bitch?”

  “Well, sir, bitching is more fun, and probably I’m better at it, since I’m getting more practice doing that than shooting. The little brat is a full-time job. I get to sleep maybe two hours uninterrupted a night.”

  “Life is hard.”

  “Like you would know? How is retirement, General? You been gone a while now, you sure you still remember how to shoot? The bullet comes out of that end, right there.”

  “Tell you what, Julio, I could leave this handgun on a shelf for ten years and still be able to outshoot you. I’ll spot you the first attacker, just so I don’t take advantage of a tired and bleary old man such as yourself.”

  “Keep your charity. I’ll shoot your ass off half-asleep and with one eye closed.”

  “Not with that beat-up old Beretta of yours, you won’t. I’ll even let you use your cheating laser grips.”

  “I don’t need those to beat an armchair, nap-taking commander such as you, General Howard, sir.”

  Both men laughed.

  Gunny came on the intercom. “I hate to interrupt your waste of good ammunition, General Howard, sir, but you have a com.”

  “Tell them to call back later.”

  “It’s Commander Michaels, sir.”

  Howard looked at Julio, and his old friend smiled—butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.

  “You knew he
was going to call me, didn’t you?”

  “I’m sure I have no idea what the general is talking about.”

  “He’s going to ask me to come back, isn’t he?”

  “What—I’m a mind reader now?”

  Howard shook his head. He went to take the call.

  3

  In the Air over the Central Atlantic Ocean

  Roberto Santos prowled up and down the aisles of the private jet, a stretch 737 rigged with all the comforts needed to keep a bunch of corporate fat cats happy. No gym, but at least a couple of flat spots wide enough to lie down and stretch out. That was good, ’cause sitting for a long time on a plane trip could cause blood clots in your legs. Santos had an aunt who died that way. She was taking a trip from Rio to London, and she’d been jammed into one of those little seats between two other people for like eighteen or twenty hours. Only time she had gotten up was to go pee, and then only a couple times, ’cause she didn’t want to cause the guy sitting on the aisle any problems. For being so nice, Aunt Maria had gotten a blood clot that had cramped her leg so bad she’d started screaming. They were a thousand kilometers away from anywhere, and by the time they landed, the clot had broken loose and gone to her heart or lungs or something, and she’d been dead ten minutes before they got her off the plane.

  Roberto might die young, but by God, it was not going to be from sitting in one place too long.

  He dropped to the floor next to a pedestal table and did fifty quick push-ups, flipped over onto his back, and did fifty twisting crunches, alternating from side to side, to work the obliques. That was what kept a man’s stomach pulled flat, the lateral muscles, not the abs in front.

  He snapped up to his feet with a gymnastic move, a kip-up, then headed up the aisle again.

  Jasmine was asleep in one of the recliners up front, the chair leaned back to make a bed, her seat belt fastened across her lap. Damn, but she looked good for a woman her age. Good lay, too, she knew some tricks. Maybe he should wake her up, join the mile-high club. Well. Renew their membership, anyway.

  And maybe not. She was mean as a snake if anyone woke her suddenly. Besides, they had done it on the plane before. And on trains, buses, taxicabs, and once, in a horse carriage going around Central Park in New York. Never done it on a boat, though. When they got to the gambling ship down in the Caribbean, that would be the first chance to do it there.

  He grinned at the thought. Nothing was better for a man than pussy.

  Besides pussy, Santos had but one passion, and that was The Game. Jôgo de Capoeira. It wasn’t just for fighting, though it gave you that. There was so much more—the music, the rituals, the manners, the company of fighting men. Yes, one learned the way to position oneself, the posicionamento, so that one could ataque or offer proper defesa. And all the flashy, acrobatic moves that impressed the unwary were necessary, but at the higher levels it was the subtle dance that played. The slight lean this way that told your opponent he could not touch you if he attacked. The shift that way that opened up an attacker like a blank book upon which you could write whatever you wished. It was art.

  When first he had begun The Game, Santos had wanted only to know the fastest way to knock an opponent from his feet, the methods to throw a powerful fist or elbow or knee that would send a man sprawling. And he had learned those. But real mastery lay in the small details, the constant circle in and out that hypnotized opponents, whether one or five of them, caused confusion and missteps that an expert could use to his advantage. The real experts were fifty, sixty years old, and you could not touch them no matter how fast or strong you were, because they knew what you were going to do before you could do it. He was getting closer to that, but he was not there yet. He would be, eventually.

  And the money he was making as Field Operations Head of CyberNation’s security force was very good—enough that after a couple more years, he could retire, go back to Rio, and study and teach The Game full-time. Work out all day, screw all night, sleep on the weekends. What more could a man ask for?

  Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia

  In their third meeting since the electronic attack on the net and web, Alex Michaels and his team had figured out the easy part of the Five-W-and-One-H question: They knew what, when, and how. What they didn’t know was: who, why, and where they were.

  Now in the conference room with Jay Gridley, Lieutenant Julio Fernandez, and Major Joseph Leffel, the acting head of the military arm, Michaels raised his eyebrows at the others. General John Howard would be arriving later in the day. It had taken some talk to get him to agree to come back, and he had to go home and tell his wife face-to-face before he would agree to it. But Michaels had had a bad feeling about this, and he wanted Howard—who had proved himself more than a few times—back on the team, at least until this was cleared up. He had a hunch it might come to guns, and when and if that happened, he wanted his best man leading the troops.

  “Gentlemen?”

  “Nothing new, boss,” Jay said. “My guys are back-walking every trail, but so far the pirates covered their asses pretty good. The regular feebs’ Carnivore and NSA’s snoopware have come up zip. The hackers had to be coordinating stuff on-line, there’s way too much going on, so we’re looking for ways they hid it. We’ve got random sampling of JPEGS, GIFS, TIFFS, PICTS, and all the common sound files attached to e-mail running through the stegaware plexes, but so far, nothing.”

  Fernandez said, “Somebody want to translate that for the computer illiterate among us? Meaning me.”

  Michaels grinned. “Jay is talking about steganography. Hiding things in plain sight.”

  Jay, already tapping away at the keyboard of his flatscreen, said, “Check it out.”

  A holoproj shimmered into view over the flatscreen. It was a picture of the Mona Lisa. “What do you see?”

  “A famous painting of somebody who probably didn’t want to smile too big ’cause she had bad teeth?” Fernandez said.

  “But that’s all,” Jay said. “However, we touch a button, presto! and look again.”

  The image melted, and left several words floating in the air: “Up yours, feds!”

  Fernandez looked at Jay.

  “We got this off a steganography website run by a ten-year-old kid.

  “The word means ‘covered writing.’ It goes back to the Greeks,” Jay said, “though the Chinese and the Egyptians and Native Americans all did variations of it. Since the Greeks gave us the word, here’s how an early release worked: Say Sprio wanted to send a secret message to Zorba, so what he did was, he had a slave’s head shaved, tattooed the message on the scalp, then waited for the slave’s hair to grow back. Then he sent the slave to his bud, who shaved his head again. Slave didn’t even know what it said. Even if he could read, he wouldn’t be able to see it.”

  “Clever. But kind of a slow process,” Fernandez said. “How long it take for the hair to grow back enough to cover it? Five, six weeks?”

  “Those were the good old days. Um. Anyway, you can do much the same with electronic pictures. They are made up of pixels, millions of them in some cases, and some aren’t as important as others. Without getting too technical, you can take a standard RGB—that’s red, green, blue—image and, with a little manipulation, hide all kinds of information bits in it without affecting what a human eye can see. If you run it through the right program, the hidden stuff shows up.

  “So, you send an e-mail addressed to your mother with a picture of your beautiful two-year-old boy, and right there in the middle of his face can be the specs for how to build a nuclear bomb.”

  “Great,” Fernandez said.

  “Welcome to the future, Lieutenant.

  “See, if somebody sends a big bunch of encrypted material and we happen to spot it, we might get suspicious. Everybody is watching the net these days, and a lot of e-mail gets scanned by one agency or another. Even if we can’t break the code, it might alert us enough to track down who sent it and received it, maybe pay them a little visit to see what
they look like. But a picture of a little kid sent to his grandma? Who’d suspect that?”

  “Some paranoid Net Force op who couldn’t find anything else?” Fernandez said.

  “Right. And if you really want to make our jobs hard, not only do you hide the sucker in the middle of somewhere nobody is gonna look, you also encrypt it, which is double protection. Use a one-time-only code, and by the time anybody might be able to break it, whatever you were talking about is ancient history.”

  “All of which is fascinating but not helping us find the bad guys,” Michaels said. “All right, let’s break this up. We’ll meet again in the morning, call if you get anything useful before then.”

  Jay nodded.

  Jay watched the others leave, until only he and Fernandez were left in the conference room. He said, “So, you up to speed on all this, Julio?”

  “Might as well have been speaking Swahili far as I’m concerned.”

  Jay laughed. “Maybe I can translate. How much do you know about the net and the web?”

  Fernandez shrugged. “There’s a difference between the net and the web? I dunno if you remember or not, but it took me six months to figure out where the on/off button was on my issue computer. I got a few things from Joanna since then, but I’m basically an analog kind of guy. I figure if God had wanted us to count higher than twenty, He’d have given us more fingers and toes.”

  “Okay, let me lay it out for you in base ten, Jay Gridley’s quick and dirty history of computer communications.”

  “Fire away.”

  “Right. The original Internet was designed so it couldn’t be taken out. It was decentralized, nodes and servers all over the place, so if one went down, information flow could be rerouted. Think of it like a sixteen-lane superhighway. Block one lane, you just jump into another and keep going in the same direction. Only with the net, there are a whole bunch of superhighways going in all directions. Blow up a whole freeway, you just take an off-ramp to another one. Might have to get to San Francisco by way of Seattle and then Miami, talking a big loop, but you don’t have to pull over and stop ’cause there ain’t no more roads.”