by Tom Clancy
At the entrance, more armed guards checked Chang’s identification again, and inspected his briefcase. They asked him if he had any kind of computer recording media with him. He did not. He knew that there were computers in this complex that were not connected to any network, inside or out, and that the only way material from those could be transferred was manually. He expected his case would be searched more thoroughly when he departed.
Still, the look into his case seemed cursory, and the guards did not pat him down.
He was issued an identity badge with his picture and a retinal scan pattern upon it. He guessed that if he went anywhere he was not supposed to go, an alarm keyed to his badge would trip.
An armed guard took him to an inner waiting area, where a receptionist placed a call. A few minutes later, a man arrived.
“Mr. Chang? I am Commander Thorn’s assistant, Dylan Lacey. Please come with me.”
Chang followed the man, looking around carefully as they walked. Yes, he saw carefully placed sensors mounted on the ceiling. No doubt there was some kind of reader there scanning his ID badge.
Still, they had not body-searched him, so he could have smuggled a weapon into the place. Even if there had been a hidden metal detector to ferret out guns, he might have a fiberglass or ceramic knife or pistol. Chang knew there were handguns that contained no more metal than a couple of teeth fillings, and even the cartridges were ceramic and plastic.
As if reading his mind, the assistant said, “Commander Thorn asked me to fill you in on our security systems. Aside from the guards and metal detector built into the door frame, we have IR card scanners in every and all rooms. Our house computer keeps track of everybody’s badge. If you remove the ID card and try to move around without it, a silent alarm goes off, and you will find yourself facing some edgy armed guards.”
Chang nodded.
“In addition to those, we have also installed the new Bertram Hard Object Scanners at various places—I’m not at liberty to say where.”
Chang frowned. “I had thought those were not yet in production.”
“You are correct. They are not yet commercially available. But we have a relationship with the maker—Commander Thorn is a major stockholder in Bertram Systems.”
“Ah.”>
That put a different spin on security. The HO scanners used harmless ultrasonic pulses to scan subjects, and worked on density. Anything hard enough to take an edge, or that would withstand the pressure generated by a bullet being fired, would show up, and that would include ceramic guns and plastic knives.
But it wouldn’t stop a chemical or biological attack—
“And we have also recently installed sniffers set to detect chemicals used in explosives, plus one of the new Morton bioscanners that can pick up certain substances, like, say, anthrax, down to a few parts per billion.”
Chang smiled. Ah. Better and better. Would that his government had such devices. At the offices and plant that he ran? They had some old men waving people in and out at the doors, and one old metal detector in the most sensitive areas.
Of course, terrorists had not targeted his industry in China, and anybody who wanted to steal the latest technology wouldn’t be looking for it there, either. You could pick up more advanced hard- and software in an Apple store than you could at most military computer centers in China. . . .
“Here we are, sir. Commander Thorn is expecting you.”
“Thank you,” Chang said.
Thorn was a tall, well-made fellow, dressed in a business suit that was equally well-made. He stood, came around his desk, and extended his hand for a shake. “Mr. Chang. Welcome to Net Force.”
Chang recognized the Native American aspect of him—his coloring and cheekbones, mostly.
“It is my honor to be here, Commander Thorn.”
Chang bowed slightly, and they shook hands.
“Please, call me Tom. We aren’t big on formality here.”
“Thank you. Then you must call me Han.”
“Dylan filled you in on basic security?”
“Indeed. Most impressive.”
Thorn shrugged. “Would that it was not necessary. We live in interesting times.”
Chang smiled. “One of our proverbs.”
Thorn complimented him on his English; Chang filled him in on his college, days in the U.S. They visited for a few minutes about people and places they had in common. Someone brought black tea in heavy white mugs. They engaged in small talk, polite, and as much a part of every social function in China as whatever business lay behind those.
After a few minutes, Thorn said, “I know you came here to get an idea of how we do things, and I will be happy to pass along what I can. Our governments seem to get along pretty well these days, and we are always glad to help our friends. But something has come up that we could use your help on.”
Chang kept his face impassive, though this was a surprise.
“My help?”
“Yes. Let me explain. . . .”
Chang listened while Thorn—who seemed very candid and forthcoming—laid out the problem. He did not get into deep detail, and Chang did not expect to hear those specifics, but even so, even saying this much was astounding. Attacks on a secure network? And from within China?
It was not something from which Chang could turn away. If somebody good enough to attack a closed network—Thorn had not specified what kind of network it was, but had given the impression that it was a significant system—and not be caught by Net Force actually was in China and not just spoofing? Chang needed to know who that was. And if he somehow managed to help Net Force solve its problem? They would certainly be grateful. And that gratitude could translate into all manner of things that Chang would give his back teeth to get his hands on.
When Thorn was done, he said, “I would be most happy to offer any small assistance I can.”
“We greatly appreciate it, Han. I have another appointment soon, but if I might, I’d like to have my assistant introduce you to our head of computer operations.”
“Jay Gridley?”
“You know of him?”
“Commander, everybody in the computer world knows of Mr. Gridley. He is the top dog.”
Thorn grinned. “Well. Welcome to our pack.”
Washington, D.C.
Seurat drove the Porsche—a new one, with far too many bells and whistles for a man who preferred seat-of-the-pants driving—out of the city and toward Net Force HQ. There had been some changes, or so he had heard, and maybe they could no longer help him—or maybe they wouldn’t offer their help even if they could. But he would see what he would see.
It was a beautiful country, he had to admit. So huge. The drive to Virginia was short, and traffic heavy much of the way, but there were millions of miles of road in this land, some of which ran through areas where you might not see a house or person or another car for hours. There were states here that still allowed high speeds on highways out in the middle of nowhere, where a man could open up full-throttle and roar along at velocities closer to those of an airplane than an automobile. Too bad he did not have the time to drive across this land—such would be a memorable trip, he was sure.
A slow-moving truck blocked his land, and there was just enough room to whip around it without causing a traffic accident. Seurat gunned the engine and swerved around the truck.
The car in the next lane over honked its horn, and the driver raised his hand and extended his middle finger in Seurat’s direction. One did not need to be a lip-reader to see that the man was cursing at him.
Seurat smiled. He’d had plenty of room for the maneuver—at least two or three meters away from hitting the other driver’s car. It was the other driver’s problem if he could not see that, no?
He upshifted into fifth, and even in that gear the car surged forward. Ah, the Germans. Savages, brutes, but they did know how to make fine vehicles—you had to give them that.
Looking at the tracker’s map, Locke naturally speculated on Ch
arles Seurat’s possible destinations. Where could he be going outside the city?
The map was a good one, and it wasn’t long before Locke had an excellent idea where the head of CyberNation was heading. The Marine base, the FBI, and Net Force lay only a few miles ahead.
Of course. Net Force was the world’s standard when it came to catching cyber-criminals and -terrorists. Surely the U.S. military would have consulted them about its problems, and it made perfect sense that CyberNation would, too.
Was this something about which Locke and Wu should worry?
Locke was not familiar enough with the organization to know the ins and outs of it, but it certainly bore further study.
If that was indeed where Seurat was heading.
Maybe he was just going for a ride in the country.
Locke smiled. Always assume the worst—that way, anything lesser was a gift.
He would see, soon enough.
Net Force HQ
Quantico, Virginia
Jay had a few minutes before he had to deal with the Chinese guy. And after him, the CyberNation creep.
Might as well keep busy, no point in sitting around stewing.
He reached for the colorful box on his desk, thinking that there should really be a warning on all packaging for new VR tech: Danger! Sharp edges inside!
He’d lost track of the number of times he’d crashed his systems with new gear, but playing with bleeding-edge equipment was often worth the risk. This was why he always had at least two computers in his office: one for testing new gear, and one that was a couple months behind the leading edge, but with a stable OS. Should the test box crash, he’d switch, and have one of his guys reformat the crashed one.
He grinned. There were some advantages to being in charge of things, after all.
The box showed a close-up of the head of some bird of prey with tiny ones and zeros reflected on the predator’s yellow-amber eye.
Raptor 9000X! Soar VR with the Highest Resolution Eyes in Cyberspace! read a yellow banner running diagonally across the face of the box. New LED scan technology! announced another.
Well, he’d see. He’d heard something good about this new technology from one of his techs and had arranged to get a working sample. Even though Net Force employees were not allowed to make official endorsements, VR companies back-channeled info to each other and dropped rumors for street cred.
Our gear is used by Net Force VR jockeys. What’s on your desktop?
The rest of the world wouldn’t see this gear for at least another three months—not long in the RW, but sometimes a three months lead could be a very big advantage.
He opened the box and pulled out what looked like a pair of wraparound sunglasses. A small plastic packet with a cable fell out as he removed the glasses, but he ignored it. Cables were for people who couldn’t afford wi-fi.
The glasses were much lighter than the flexscreen LCDs he currently used.
He opened them and looked at the lenses, which were brightly mirrored.
Interesting. They don’t look like thinscreens.
The inner surfaces were more curved than even flexible-screen technology was supposed to allow. Jay felt his interest sharpening. At the corners of each lens were tiny little holes. The temples of the glasses seemed slightly thick, and there was an optical output on the right earpiece.
A jack: These things need wires?
He pulled out the installation sheet. Well, not necessarily. If he had an optical repeater, which would pick up tiny infrared pulses from the front of the glasses and run them into the VR input card on his machine, he wouldn’t need wires.
Unfortunately, since he’d been using radio-based wireless for the last several months, it looked like he’d have to use the output jack on the glasses.
Crap.
He made a mental note to order a repeater if the new glasses worked, and then bent over to pick up the cable that had slipped out of the box when he opened it.
Wires. I hate wires.
He hadn’t had to use a cable to connect his VR gear since forever. Yet, at the same time that he was annoyed at having to regress to being tethered to his machine, he was intrigued. To require an optical cable, these things had to be drawing an awful lot of data to them.
He opened the cable packet and slipped one end into the right earpiece jack, then swiveled the end of the test machine around to find its VR card.
Do I even have optical in?
He searched the back of the machine, and was relieved to find one where he’d hoped on the VR card. Net Force cards were state-of-the-art with all the latest ICs and inputs. He hadn’t remembered the input, but since he hadn’t had to use it yet, there was no reason he should have.
He attached the cable to the card, snick. He spun up the odorama and pulled on some gloves. The LCD monitor tank he used when he wasn’t wearing VR gear lit up: New Hardware Detected. Updating.
Since he’d put the driver disc in his computer already, the process was fairly automatic. A calibration screen came up with another message: Please put on your new Raptor 9000X glasses!
He put on the glasses and saw his eyes reflected for a second, and then the holes in the corner of the glasses lit up and he gasped.
He flew over a huge plain. He looked down and saw the shadow of a great bird, and then looked ahead. There was movement. His vision zoomed in as he watched, and he saw a tiny field mouse scampering for safety toward a tiny hole that had to be its burrow.
The VR sim was on rails, so he couldn’t control where he was moving, but he could look around as he flew. The scene changed shockingly fast, clear colors, realistic mountains and scrub brush rising up to meet him as he landed and pounced on the mouse.
Again he soared, and a tiny translucent window appeared telling him to acquire three more targets to locate extreme eye focal points.
Fantastic.
It was like calibrating an old PDA’s stylus. He completed that stage of the calibration, and went to a testing range where his eye movement allowed him to change VR views almost instantly.
Eye movement tracking. That was brand-new. Such technology had been around for ages for helping paralyzed people, but coupled with the sharpness? It was very impressive.
Jay tilted his head slightly and moved his eyes, and the device compensated. Apparently there was some kind of tilt sensor in the glasses as well that read head inclination and mixed the data with the eye sensors.
Nice.
But best of all was the extreme resolution. VR was fairly realistic—at least his scenarios were—but this was like when his folks had gotten their first High-Definition TV set. He remembered how amazed he’d been to suddenly see how sharp TV looked—the sweat on the announcer’s head, the seams in scenery—things had reached an entirely new level of reality.
This is great.
He called up the documentation and checked his suppositions. Sure enough—there was a new Texas Instruments gyro chip that read head movement, and the tiny holes in the lens corners tracked his eye movements, then bounced three low-power laser beams off the mirrors—made by Nikon to the highest standards, if you could believe the rap—into his eye, painting directly on his retina. Things looked real, because as far as his eye was concerned, they were real.
Very clever work here.
Time to play.
He called up a favorite test scenario, a glade in Japan looking toward Mt. Fuji, cherry blossoms falling around him.
It looked . . .
It looked like crap!
Jay walked over to the cherry tree and peered at it. Had the glasses malfunctioned?
No. There was the texture he’d programmed—it had looked great on his flexscreen glasses because their resolution was so low.
Holy cow.
The resolution on these glasses was so sharp that he could see the edges of the pixels. It was like stepping into a comic book from the real world.
Hmmm, I’ve got some work to do.
It wouldn’t do to have anyon
e else seeing his VR with these glasses, that was for sure. He’d have to amp up the textures, improve the bump-mapping, and double or triple the data throughout for this scene. No way he was going to be caught looking amateurish.
No wonder these things needed optical. It was like giving somebody who had 20/60 vision a pair of glasses that corrected for near-sightedness. They could see all right before the glasses, but afterward would be ever so much better.
Which gave him an idea.
He called up a firewall he’d been trying to break, looking to find the cracks where he could drive a code-breaking spike.
On his older VR visual gear he hadn’t been able to see any difference in the smooth, black obelisklike wall. But with the Raptor’s resolution, he could suddenly see a pattern of cracks where data structures joined together and made up the firewall. Yeah, sure, it was part metaphor and part construction, but he’d take it.
Just glancing at the wall with these new glasses, and he could see exactly where to crack that wall. He was sure of it.
Now, that was cool.
Net Force was going to be outfitted with these within a few days—hours—if Jay had his way. As soon as they hit the commercial market, there was gonna be a boatload of VR reconstruction as other makers suddenly saw their constructs in a bright new light, but until then, wearing these babies would make you at least a prince in the land of the blind, if not the king.
Until these things became common, the bleeding edge of technology was gonna be something with which Jay Gridley could slice the bad guys.
He couldn’t wait to show this to somebody.
“Jay?”
The voice brought him back to the moment. He looked up and saw his assistant standing there. He blinked at her. “Huh?”
“I have Mr. Chang here to see you.”
“Oh. Oh, yeah. Sure. Send him in.”
A moment later, she was back, leading a short and definitely Chinese-looking man in a gray suit.
“Mr. Gridley. My honor to meet you.”
Jay waved that off. “Mr. Chang.” He stood. The two shook hands.