Cybernation (2001)

by Clancy, Tom - Net Force 06

  It was scary, but not altogether unexpected when the scrambled call came in from the Japanese SysOp a few minutes later. The barge’s computers were history, too.

  That left the ship, and if Gridley and his guys knew about the train and the barge, they had to know about the Bon Chance.

  Fortunately, the ship was in international waters. If the U.S. could get a Coast Guard cutter or Navy ship to go there—not politically likely, according to Jasmine—the gambling boat’s crew would see it coming fifteen miles away. Plenty of time to wipe those computers, too, though that would be a last resort. With Germany and Japan gone, all their work was on the ship. They would have to be damned certain it was endangered before they trashed it. Thousands and thousands of man-hours erased would hurt way too much.

  He had better call Jasmine and let her know where he was and what was going on. Better she hear it from him first.

  On the Bon Chance

  In her office alone, Chance was absolutely pissed off. First there had been Roberto’s little routine with that slut of a secretary—she could have strangled him when he looked at her all innocently and said they were just having a friendly drink. Now there were the goddamned hits on the train and barge, with a terrified Keller on his way back here practically peeing in his pants. She wasn’t worried that the U.S. Navy was going to come calling as much as she was frustrated over the losses. How had they figured it out? Keller had told her it was impossible.

  She was going to have to speak harshly with him about this.

  And the schedule was going to have to be moved up, just in case. They only had one arrow left in their quiver now, and it had to be strung and loosed before their target had a chance to move out of the line of fire. She paged Roberto, a priority-one call. If he was interrupted trying to get into the secretary’s pants, too bad. She sent half a dozen other pages, also P-1 calls. She didn’t like the way this felt. Not at all. She did not want it to come unraveled now, not when they were so close to winning. Better to move and win a partial victory than to stand still and lose it all. The clock was ticking, and if time ran out before they launched, it would be all over.

  Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia

  Howard looked at Julio. “So, what do you think?”

  Fernandez shook his head. “It’s just simple enough it might work. Gridley can get the computer stuff done?”

  “He says so.”

  “So if we get approval, we’d go when?”

  “Tomorrow. After dark.”

  Julio shook his head. “Technology. Amazing stuff.”

  “Put together three squads, mixed male and female. I want thirty troopers, two pilots and copilots, the usual bells and whistles, given the limitations. Air transport, briefings, maps, assignments, I need everything ready to roll by 0600 tomorrow.”

  “Yes, sir. I’m on the way. Guess we’ll see if the new top kick is as good as he thinks he is.”

  “He can’t possibly think he’s as good as you thought you were when you were a sergeant.”

  “Well, sir, that’s because he couldn’t possibly be that good.”

  Howard smiled.

  After Julio had left, he looked at the computer images floating in the air above his conference table. The best plans were the simple ones, he knew, but maybe this one was too simple.

  Only one way to find out.

  On the Bon Chance

  Santos didn’t like being hurried. Once he set his mind to a plan, he liked to have it flow naturally. Sometimes, you had to adjust to the unexpected, but this new bug up Missy’s butt was too much, too quick. He’d tried to tell her, but she wasn’t having any of it. Still pissed at him for the secretary.

  Too bad, that. This speeded-up schedule was going to put a crimp in his seduction. The secretary was as good as on her back when Missy came in, all Ice Bitch, and started trying to pull his chain. She was gonna pay. It was just one more coin it was gonna cost her.

  Meanwhile, he had to get his teams ready to move. Missy wanted it fast. Tomorrow, if possible, the day after at the latest. Too soon—but what could you do? He didn’t want to miss the action.

  Toni wandered around, taking more pictures, but feeling a sense of impending something. As the day wound down, nothing new happened she needed to think about. No sign of Santos, so maybe his boss had put the fear of God into him.

  She briefly considered trying to get onto the private decks. Even went so far as to seem to get lost and wind up at one of the entrances to one such deck. But the electronic card reader would need a key, and as she started back the way she’d come, the door opened and revealed a couple of men standing on the other side, wearing photographer’s sleeveless vests over their shirts, which in this kind of climate meant they were using the vests to cover pistols tucked into their belts—they certainly weren’t cold.

  One more small piece of circumstantial evidence, the armed guards. Of course, maybe they were there to guard a vault room, where the gambling winnings were kept?

  Not likely. Most of what Toni had seen was cashless, all done on credit exchanges. You didn’t need guards for that.

  No, she would pack up and catch a late-afternoon helicopter out, head home. Earlier, she had heard somebody say it was supposed to rain tonight or tomorrow, a little tropical depression, not a hurricane or anything, but some wind and weather. She would just as soon be gone if that was going to happen—she didn’t like to fly in the rain. She’d known some people who had been on a jet that tried to take off in a typhoon once. The jet had crashed and burned, and the folks she knew had been lucky to survive. Bad weather and flying didn’t go together in Toni’s book.

  Le Boy, South Zone Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

  Jay looked around, and felt a little uncomfortable. The club was noisy, the music playing very loud, lights flashing, and people dancing. Most of the people dancing were men, there were only a handful of women, and some of them looked pretty mannish, too.

  He turned back to his virtual beer. According to what he had learned, Le Boy was the biggest gay night club in the city. You kinda had to expect to see a lot of men, now, didn’t you?

  A tall, well-built bodybuilder in a pair of skin-tight leather pants and a tank top arrived at the bar to Jay’s left and flashed him a big, toothy smile. “Com lisença,” he said, “voce é ativo? O passivo?”

  Jay tapped the tiny translator hidden in his right ear, and the Portuguese the man had spoken was translated into English: “Excuse me, are you a top or a bottom?”

  Even in VR, Jay flushed. “I’m waiting for a friend,” he subvocalized. The translator turned the reply into Portuguese.

  The buffed bodybuilder—they called them “barbies” here, Jay recalled from his research—kept smiling. “I could be your friend,” the translator said in Jay’s ear.

  “Maybe,” Jay said. “Do you know a man named Roberto Santos?”

  His would-be friend’s face went dark. “Bicha!” he said.

  Jay didn’t need the translator for that one.

  “He is a friend of yours?” the barbie said, his voice dangerous.

  “No. An enemy.”

  The man nodded. “He is a bastard among bastards, a son of a whore, a fucker of his sister and grandmother!” He reached into his mouth and tugged. A partial dental plate came out—his top four front teeth were false. The barbie waved the plate at Jay. “He did this to me!” He put the plate back in.

  Jay made sympathetic noises. “Tell me about him.”

  The barbie needed no more prompting. “He cruises the gay scene, though he is not gay. He sometimes goes into the—the dark rooms, and lets some poor boy give him oral sex. Then he beats him. He has hurt other of my friends. He always picks big men, strong men. He is a fighter, his fists are like iron. He enjoys hitting. He laughs while he does it.”

  “Why haven’t the police arrested him? Has no one complained?”

  The barbie nodded. “Oh, yes, many have complained. The police only laugh and shake their heads when they hear his name. He is
protected. So protected that once he beat a man so bad the man died, and still the police did nothing. Santos is a devil.”

  Interesting. Jay had what he came here for. Time to move on.

  School of Business University of Hong Kong Hong Kong, China

  Professor Wang, a forty-five-ish woman with a pageboy haircut and a gray business suit so severe it made her look like a business nun, said, “Oh, yes, I remember her.”

  They were in a business library, the air conditioning blasting away. Jay nodded. “Anything you’d feel comfortable in saying about her?”

  Wang smiled. “The words comfortable and Jasmine Chance don’t belong in the same sentence. There’s a story the students and staff used to pass around. Once, Jasmine was visiting the zoo, and there was a terrible earthquake. Some of the animals got loose. A pair of man-eating tigers escaped from their cage. Free and hungry, the tigers charged a group of school children. At the last second, Jasmine Chance stepped in between the hungry tigers and their prey. The tigers took one look at her, turned tail, and ran back to their cages in terror.”

  Jay chuckled politely.

  “That’s not the good part,” Wang said. “The good part is, she charged the parents HK$400 each for saving their children.”

  “That sounds . . . harsh.”

  “Harsh? Let me tell you something I know is true. Jasmine wanted to be first in her class. But she was not doing well in one subject—and for her, not doing well was being second in her grades, only a high A instead of the highest one. So she seduced the teacher, a middle-aged man with a wife, four children, and three grandchildren. She got her first place. When the professor said he would leave his wife for her, she laughed at him. In great shame over what he had done and her refusal to accept him, he committed suicide. When somebody told Jasmine what had happened, she shrugged. ‘Too bad,’ she said. That woman is as moral as a shark. You don’t ever want to get between her and what she wants.”

  Jay nodded. Even more interesting.

  Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia

  “So there you have it, boss. CyberNation has themselves a gay basher who apparently got away with at least one murder, and a woman who will do anything to accomplish her goals. I don’t have a lot of other history on them, but Santos has been essentially a high-class knee-breaker for a couple of organizations, and Chance has risen up a couple of corporate ladders so fast she seemed to have wings. Add them into the mix, it just keeps getting thicker and thicker. Pretty soon, we have the whole cake.”

  “We’re missing a couple of ingredients yet,” Michaels said. “Your friend Keller wasn’t on the train; neither were the others you listed who were supposed to be there.”

  Jay cursed.

  “Yes, indeed. The German government is checking airports and other trains, but it appears he has flown the coop.”

  Jay cursed again.

  “I believe you said that.”

  Jay shook his head. “Yeah. So, what now?”

  “I am expecting a call from the director sometime in the next five minutes. If her clout is enough, we will be sending visitors to the Bon Chance in the very near future.”

  “I bet she named it after herself,” Jay said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The boat.” He blew out a sigh. “Where is Toni?”

  He looked at his watch. “She should be catching a helicopter from the ship about now. In fact, if you can access the passenger lists, I’d appreciate knowing which flight she is on.”

  “No problem. Mary Johnson.”

  Before Michaels could say anything else, the com chimed. His secretary said, “The director is on line one.”

  Michaels reached for the receiver, and shooed Jay out with a wave as he picked it up. Jay stood, but moved very slowly toward the door.

  “Hello?”

  “Commander. We have a ‘go.’ You better be right about this.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  Jay raised an eyebrow from the doorway. Michaels nodded at him and raised one hand in a thumb’s-up gesture.

  “Yes!” Jay said in a stage whisper. He made a fist and pumped it.

  Michaels wished he felt so positive.

  34

  On the Bon Chance

  Toni waited in line for the shuttle boat. The sky had gone gray, and while it wasn’t raining yet, the wind had picked up and the southeasterly breeze felt damp. There was a full load of departing passengers waiting. Apparently more than a few people were worried about the weather, and didn’t want to be on a ship ninety miles away from land if it got nasty.

  The boat from the helicopter barge arrived and tied up at the base of the ramp, and after a few seconds, new arrivals climbed the stairs or wheelchair ramp onto the ship.

  She hoped they had all come to gamble, because they surely weren’t going to get much sun—

  Hold on—

  Coming up the ramp was a face she recognized. It took a second for her to realize why.

  Keller. From the picture she’d seen. This was Jay’s guy!

  What was he doing here? He was supposed to be in Germany, wasn’t he? This must mean something.

  As soon as he’d passed, Toni left the shuttle boat line, as if she had suddenly remembered that she had forgotten something. The gap she left filled instantly. She glanced at her watch. The comsat wasn’t due for another forty-five minutes. Could she risk calling Alex on the ship’s phones? She could keep it innocuous—Hey, you know that picture you gave me? Well, I thought I had lost it, but I found it after all, right here on the ship.

  Anybody who didn’t know who she was could hardly tell what she was talking about from that, could they?

  Not likely. But if the ship’s phones were tapped, and that would be easy enough to do since they were owned and maintained by CyberNation, they might wonder why a secretary from Falls Church was calling somebody at Net Force headquarters. Or maybe they might be even able to recognize Alex’s name on the home phone or his virgil. And even if her scrambler kept them from hearing anything other than noise, maybe they would wonder what a secretary was doing with a scrambled phone.

  Any of those would be bad.

  No, she would wait until the next footprint so she could call on the secure line. There were still a dozen more copters leaving this evening, and she needed to get a better look at this guy, maybe even see where he went or who he might talk to—

  As if some bored deity had been listening, Toni suddenly saw Jasmine Chance, now dressed in a black jump-suit and sandals, step into view ahead. Toni turned away and put a hand up to block her face from view.

  Keller went straight to her, and while she couldn’t overhear his conversation, he was obviously pretty excited from the way he waved his hands around.

  Well, well. What did this mean?

  Alex would surely want to know about this. Yes, she could call him from the Mainland, or even from the shuttle copter, but there was no hurry, was there? Maybe she could find out something more before she had to leave.

  In the Air near Fort Lauderdale, Florida

  The old 727’s rebuilt engines were reassuring in their smooth, dependable drone. They were only a few minutes out now, and Julio was going over the checklist a final time as they began their descent into Fort Lauderdale.

  “Our boy Mr. Gridley here came through.” Julio smiled at Jay, who sat across the aisle. “First squad and half of second squad will be on Bird A; third squad and the other half of second on Bird B.”

  Howard nodded. Next to him sat Commander Michaels. Michaels hadn’t planned to come along at all, even to sit onshore, but he hadn’t heard from Toni, who was supposed to have left the ship by now. According to Jay, Mary Johnson had not gotten on any of the shuttle copters for the Mainland yet. Maybe the weather had more people leaving than normal, delaying the flights, but Michaels was worried enough to go along. Howard didn’t blame him. He knew how he’d feel if it was his wife there.

  “Weather radar shows an ugly set of heavy showers moving from the
southeast toward the target, the main body of which will have arrived by 2100—we’re gonna get wet.”

  “I’ll be sure to bring my umbrella,” Howard said.

  “Wind’ll just turn it inside out, sir. Steady breeze will be almost thirty knots, gusting to forty.”

  “Go on.”

  “Troops all have Class III spider silk vests for armor—that’s the best we can do, given the scenario—so nobody is real bulletproof. Augmented-LOSIR coms will be set on opchan Gamma, and we carry sidearms and subguns, plus the usual assortment of puke gas, flashbangs, and all like that, packed away in our luggage. Everybody knows what he or she is supposed to do.”

  Howard nodded.

  The seat belt light and audible warning went on.

  Julio said, “So, to condense things a little, we get there, take over before anybody knows what is going on, and capture the computers before they can trash ’em. Then our computer wizard here waltzes in and collects the evidence, the bad guys all go to prison, and everybody lives happily ever after.”

  It won’t be that easy, Howard knew. It never is.

  The jet started to descend; he could feel the pressure in his ears change.

  “No word from Toni yet?” he said.

  Michaels looked worried. “No. She should have called by now.”