by Tom Clancy
He shrugged, still grinning. “Why they call it ‘Blue Whale?’ ”
“Because that particular creature has the largest backbone of any animal on Earth. His company is a backbone server, and if not the largest, quickly getting there.”
“Ah.”
“It needs to look like an accident. If anybody suspects his brain has been picked, they’ll start changing codes.”
“No problem.”
“This is important, Roberto.”
His smile vanished, and for just a second she saw a feral gleam in his eyes. “This is what I do, Missy. You don’t need to tell me about it.”
She felt a chill course through her. Looking at Roberto now was like being inside a cage with a partially tamed jaguar. It could kill her with one swipe of a paw, and only its conditioning kept it from doing so. “Of course,” she said, with an offhand ease she did not feel. “That’s why I’m asking you to do it.”
Asking. Not telling. Roberto was picky about such things.
“Then you must consider it done,” he said.
She nodded. “Of course.”
Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia
Mid-morning in his office and fairly quiet, Michaels got a call.
“Aloha, bruddah,” the voice said.
The call was vox only, but even if the ID hadn’t been working, Michaels would have known who it was. The caller was Duane Presser, one of the FBI close-combat trainers, a big, broad-faced Hawaiian who’d been with the Bureau for fifteen or so years.
“Aloha,” Michaels said. “What can I do for you, Duane?”
“Make me skinny and handsome and rich.”
“You don’t want me, you want a magician. And he’d have to be the best one who ever lived.”
“You a funny man, bruddah.”
“Convince my wife.”
“Now who needs a magician?”
Presser used his island-boy talk to lull people into thinking he was maybe a little slow; anybody who thought that would, however, be making a mistake. Michaels knew the man had graduated first in his law school class, and was sharp as a room full of razors.
“Why I’m callin’, we got a new class of recruits to the point they think they each can whip a platoon of Marines. I thought maybe they tried to see how their stuff works against a fat old haole Net Force Commander and his scrawny little wife, it might make ’em think twice.”
“You want Toni to do a demo. Why include me?”
“Just bein’ polite, bruddah. ’Sides, she needs somebody to throw around. I’m too old to be hittin’ the mat dat way.”
Michaels laughed. “You and me both.”
“Think she’ll do it?”
“Probably. I’ll ask her. When?”
“Whenever she wants. Dey mine for a while yet. I don’t want to turn ’em loose stupid.”
“I’ll check with her and call you back.”
“Thanks, bruddah. Mahalo.”
Toni would probably jump at the chance. She enjoyed being a mother, and Little Alex was the light of both their lives, but she had mentioned more than once that she needed to get out once in a while. With her mother visiting from the Bronx — staying in a hotel, fortunately, because she snored like a chain saw — they had a baby-sitter they could trust, so they might as well make hay while the sun shone.
He told his phone to call home, visual on.
“Hi, Alex. What’s up?” Toni lit the comcam; she was breathing hard, in a sweatshirt. Probably just finished working out.
He explained about the call from Presser. As he figured, she was eager to play.
“When?”
“You tell me, I’ll tell him. He’ll set it up. Probably in the big gym, the new one.”
“What does he have in mind?”
“He didn’t say exactly, but probably a short demo, then some hands-on stuff. Apparently some of the recruits are starting to think they are invincible.”
“We can fix that,” she said. “How about we set it up for day after tomorrow, about ten A.M.?”
“I’ll pass it on to Duane. How’s the boy?”
“Down for a nap at the moment. He had a big yellow poo, I changed him, and he conked out, so I did djurus.”
Michaels smiled.
“What are you smiling at?”
“You. You’re so cute.” What he was thinking was, Here I am, a grown man, talking about baby poop with my wife. Isn’t life strange?
He heard a thin squawk in the background. Toni said, “Oops. Gotta go. He’s waking up. You gonna be late?”
“Nope.”
“I’ll order in Thai tonight, that okay?”
“Great.”
The baby’s I’m-awake-cry grew louder as Toni broke the connection. Michaels smiled. Whatever was going on with work, life wasn’t so bad. The first time he’d become a father, he’d spent way too much time away from home. That had cost him his marriage, but it wasn’t all bad. Susie would always be his little girl, and he’d never have gotten together with Toni if he and Megan hadn’t split. His ex had remarried, she had a new baby boy, Leonard, and her husband was a decent guy.
Sometimes, things worked out for the best, though it didn’t seem like they would at the time. He couldn’t complain.
6
Mardi Gras — Fat Tuesday 1970
New Orleans, Louisiana
The evening was warm, the smells of too many sweaty people and too many spilled beers heavy in the damp air as Jay wandered into a bar named Curly’s on Canal Street, just outside the mobbed French Quarter. The floats were still rolling, various krewes throwing beads and coins and candy to the crowds packed shoulder-to-shoulder next to the streets, and the volume was turned way up.
Not that the bar was quiet or empty, far from it — but at least the patrons weren’t throwing hurricane glasses from Pat O’Brian’s at each other, and they all had their clothes on. A fair number of them were sailors, dressed in their whites, and while the atmosphere was festive, it wasn’t quite as manic as the bars on Bourbon Street in the Quarter had been.
Even though it was 1970, there weren’t a lot of long-haired hippie types in here. The sixties came late to the South, and a sailor’s bar was probably not the best place to find the counterculture in any event.
Tomorrow was Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, and the party would be over as good Catholics gave all this up — until next year, anyway.
Jay found an empty stool at the bar and slid onto it. The bartender, a woman of maybe thirty, with dishwater blonde hair and a harried look, spotted him.
“What can I get you, mister?”
“Beer.”
She nodded, reached into the cooler, came up with a cold can of Jax, opened it, and slid it to Jay.
In his research for the scenario, Jay had learned that Jax was a local brew, and there was a rumor (which was untrue) that the water they used in making it was drawn straight out of the Mississippi River, passed through a strainer no finer than needed to keep the crawfish out, and mixed with the other ingredients just like that. Given that there was a major petrochemical complex eighty miles upriver that used and discharged a lot of the water, and this was just before the days of OSHA and the EPA looking over everybody’s shoulder, the river would have been pretty vile for a whole lot of reasons. According to the locals, it was like the old saw about only mad dogs and Englishmen going out into the noonday sun, only in this case, only mad dogs would drink the water in New Orleans. They said that fishing was easy at night up over the levee, because the fish all glowed in the dark…
The can was icy, and the beer cold enough so it didn’t have that bad a flavor. Besides, even if it was poison, it wasn’t going to kill Jay in VR.
Next to Jay, a sailor, a petty officer, held a leather cup with a pair of dice in it. “Wanna roll for drinks?” he said.
Jay shrugged. “Sure.”
The navy man shook the cup a couple times, upended it on the scarred wooden bar, and lifted it. He had a four and a two.
Ja
y took the cup, put the dice in it, rattled them around, and poured them onto the bar. Six and a two.
“You win,” the sailor said. He held up two fingers so the bartender could see them, then pointed at himself and Jay. The woman came over, put two more beers on the bar. The sailor put a couple dollar bills on the bar, the woman took them, then hustled off.
“David Garret,” the sailor said, offering his hand.
Jay shook his hand. Davy in the Navy. “Jay Gridley,” he said.
“You… Korean? Japanese?”
Jay grinned. “Part Thai,” he said. “Born here, though.”
Garrett shrugged. “No offense. I just got back from duty in Southeast Asia, off the coast of Vietnam.” He pronounced the last part of the name so it rhymed with “ma’am” and not “mom.”
“Picked a good time for shore leave.”
“Hell, yeah. I been balling chicks left, right, and center. One big party. Had to stop and top off my tanks before I get back into it.” He waved vaguely at the door.
Jay took another swig of his beer and said, “So, you being a Navy man, you probably know about all that business with the minefields.”
“Minefields” in this case was VR scenario-speak for the problems with the net and web.
Garret finished his beer, put the can down, picked up the fresh one. “No more than anybody else,” he said, offering another shrug.
“What do you hear about it?”
“Usual stuff. Somebody seeded a whole bunch of the suckers where our ships would run into ’em. Nobody knows who, but I got a buddy in Navy Intelligence says it might have been CyberNation did it.”
Jay was surprised to hear this. “CyberNation?”
“What I heard.”
Jay thought about that. Why would CyberNation want to disrupt the web? With it down, that could only hurt their business.
Maybe not, said Jay’s little internal skeptic.
No? Why?
Remember the detail shop guy?
Jay looked at the dirty mirror behind the bar, got a glimpse of himself looking thoughtful. Ah.
Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia
In the commander’s office, Jay sprawled on the couch, looking at the boss.
“And what exactly does this reference mean?” Michaels said. “Detail shop?”
“Well, if the CyberNation folks did do it, they are smarter than I would have guessed.”
“I’m listening.”
“Last time I went home to visit my folks, there was a local scandal. A guy had gone into business detailing cars — waxing, buffing, cleaning up dead paint, like that — and business had taken a downward turn. So late one night, the guy took a run through a fairly well-off neighborhood nearby and spray painted squiggles on fifty or sixty cars parked outside of their garages.”
The boss nodded. “Okay.”
“You see where this is going. Guy got an immediate influx of new business the next day — he used a kind of paint he knew he could get off without too much trouble — and he had to hire a couple of kids to help him, he had so many new customers. He didn’t get them all — some owners did their own cars, and there were other detail shops — but he got twenty-odd cars, at a hundred and fifty a pop. After paying his new helpers their minimum wage, and allowing for buffing pads and polishing compounds and all, he cleared almost three thousand dollars. Not a bad return for an investment of fifteen minutes and a can of spray paint.
“Business tapered off again, so the guy waited a couple weeks and then did another midnight graffiti run. This time, he made almost five grand.
“Now, if he’d quit then, he’d been ahead of the game. But it was easy money.
“So, every couple of weeks for the next few months, the detail man would sneak through a nice neighborhood and make work for himself. The local police figured the painter was probably a teenager bent on nothing more than half-witted vandalism, and the detail guy might have kept his scam going for years, but he tripped himself up. Not wanting another shop to get too many of his customers, he tended to hit the same neighborhoods, those close to his own place of business. One of the car owners whose car had been decorated three times got pissed off enough to set up a videocam watching his driveway. The detail man had been smart enough to pull a ski mask over his head when he ran into somebody’s driveway, so nobody could see his face. And he had driven a different car each time, belonging to customers who’d left them overnight. Thing was, the cam picked up the license plate on the getaway vehicle. The cops were able to trace it to the owner, who supplied them with the information that the car had been at the detail shop on the night in question. They found the empty spray paint can in the guy’s trash bin, leaned on him, and he gave it up. End of crime spree.”
“All right, I can see where you’re going, but I don’t see how it applies. Didn’t CyberNation’s customers have the same problems everybody else had when the net and web went wonky?”
“Funny you should ask. I checked it out. During the outage we had, everybody who had logged on through the affected phone companies and backbone servers had the same problems. But none of CyberNation’s customers using their hardwired-direct server connections lost their links. Now maybe that doesn’t mean anything by itself, but it would be a big selling point! Hey, when all the other servers were scrambling around to figure out which way was up, we here at CyberNation had our act together!”
“That’s a reach, Jay. Didn’t lots of folks who weren’t CyberNation customers sail along just fine?”
“Yep, that’s true. But at least it’s a possibility. Any time a big server has problems, they lose customers. Fifty years ago, nobody had a computer at home, nobody was doing biz on the web. Now, a lot of folks make their living from it. Before telephones, people wrote letters or did things face-to-face — now, every company has a phone, and most of them with any brains have a web presence. You have to have one to compete. Shut any of that down, and they look for a fast fix. Switching servers is easy. If you can claim yours is reliable, you’ll get some of the movers.”
Michaels nodded. “All right. What do you have in mind?”
“I’m thinking that unless I turn up something that shows it definitely couldn’t be them, maybe I ought to keep looking at things in that direction. It’s not like we have a lot else to go on. Well, until next time.”
“You think there will be a next time?”
“I’d bet money on it, boss. A disruption on that scale took a lot of time and money and talent. It wasn’t something a couple of high school hackers dreamed up just for the hell of it over chocolate shakes at the malt shop. We’ll see these guys again. They have something in mind, and that first time could have been a test run. Next go ’round, it could be worse.”
“Find them before that happens, Jay.”
“I’m working on it, believe me.”
San Francisco, California
The thing with professional bodyguards was that they were so predictable.
Santos watched the pair escorting his target to a limo, and smiled. This computer guy was a low-priority item. With only two guards he was not seriously protected — somebody who was in real danger of being snatched or killed would have six or eight armed bodies working him, at a minimum, and if they were any good, you would only see the ones they wanted you to see, the others would either be out of sight or somebody you wouldn’t consider a guard or a threat: a woman pushing a baby carriage, an old man leaning on a cane, somebody who appeared to be something he or she was not.
Mr. Ethan Dowling, of Silicon Valley, had only the two show guards, and these would be enough to keep honest people from bothering him. They might be tough and well-trained, but they were limited because they were right out there in plain sight. If all he wanted to do was kill Mr. Dowling, that would be easy: set up a hiding spot four or five hundred meters away, line up with a rifle, wait for the right moment, then spike him, end of mission.
Santos had undergone the sniper training program from the rebel paramili
tary organization Blue Star, which was almost exactly the same as the one used by the U.S. Navy SEALs. With a good bolt-action rifle, he could get off three aimed shots in less than two seconds. These days, you didn’t even have to worry about methods of estimating range. A good sniper scope would have a built-in range finder. Line it up, look at the readout, adjust your sights for elevation and windage, blam! the man was dead before the sound of the bullet reached his ears. By the time the guards pulled their heads out of their asses, you could spike both of them, too, if you felt like it.
But this was an information-gathering mission, not a simple assassination. He had to put the bodyguards out of commission, capture the target, get what he needed, then kill them all so their deaths would appear to have been an accident, which — despite what he had told Missy — was not so easy.
Still, as he watched the limo pull away from the curb, with both guards in it — one driving, the other in the front seat — he was confident he could do the job. It would require a little preparation, but he had the resources of CyberNation at his disposal, including large amounts of electronic cash, and he would have all that he needed in a few hours. Throw enough money at some problems, they got buried. Just like Mr. Dowling and his two bodyguards were going to get buried — after he had what he needed.
On the Bon Chance
Keller lay naked on his back on the bed, exhausted.
Next to him, Jasmine Chance, as naked as he was, rolled over onto her belly and smiled at him.
Keller said, “If Santos knew you were with me, what would he do?”
She shrugged. “Probably nothing. He doesn’t own me.”
“He strikes me as a man who might be prone to jealousy.”
“Are you worried?”
“Damned right. He could kill me with one hand.”
“I bet he could do it without using his hands at all,” she said.
“Great. I really need to hear this.”
“Are you unhappy with the sex, Jackson?”
“No. No, the sex is terrific. Very, uh, relaxing.”
“That’s good. I don’t want you tense. How is the next attack shaping up?”