Cybernation nf-6

by Tom Clancy

  The music reached its peak, thundering Strauss, horns blasting their dramatic sting.

  “Anywhere, anytime, anybody you want to be — CyberNation can take you there. Come along. Join the millions of satisfied citizens of the net in mankind’s greatest experiment. The future is waiting for you.”

  The old man and dog both smiled as the music faded.

  * * *

  “What do you think?” Chance said.

  Roberto said, “An old man and a dog?”

  “Not everybody goes for the sex ads,” she said. “Dogs are always good. You know the old story about the book title?”

  ’Berto shook his head.

  “Well, the theory is, people like dogs. They also like Abraham Lincoln and they like their doctors, for the most part. So a book title that would guarantee instant sales would be Abraham Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog.”

  ’Berto smiled.

  “It’s all about demographics. We catch a lot of the young male computer geeks with the sex come-ons. But we also have specific ads tailored for generation Xers, aging baby boomers turning into AARPers, young mothers, as many large groups as we can identify and niche-market to. Net, TV, radio, print ads, movie trailers, billboards, bus benches, sports sponsorships — everything from T-shirts to signs on racing cars — high school cable ed, you name it. Since the Blue Whale scramble, we’ve picked up eighty-eight thousand new subscribers on the U.S. West Coast alone.”

  “That’s good, right?”

  “Not as good as we’d hoped. The Net Force ops got in and patched things up faster than we expected. We should have gotten twice that many new linkers.”

  He shrugged again. “So?”

  “Truth is, things aren’t moving along as quickly as we want. We are falling short of our projections. It looks as if we are going to have to… step things up.”

  “More ads? More software scrambles?”

  She looked at him. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. “Don’t pull my chain, Roberto.”

  He chuckled. “You have a new piercing you haven’t told me about, Missy?”

  “Screw you.”

  “I’m ready when you are.”

  She smiled. Well. He had his charms, even when he played at being duller than he was…

  Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia

  Dressed in Net Force sweats and cross-trainers, John Howard stood under one of the chinning bars at the obstacle course, rotating his head slowly to stretch the muscles of his neck. Physical training was another thing he’d slacked off on during his short-lived retirement. Not that he’d stopped completely — he’d kept up morning calisthenics, and he still hit the weights down in the basement a couple times a week, plus he jogged most days for a few miles; still, he hadn’t run the course in almost a month, and normally he’d do it at least twice a week.

  Probably he’d lost a couple of steps, but not that much.

  He jumped up, caught the steel bar, palms forward and slightly wider than his shoulders, and started doing chins. He knew after the first couple that his usual twelve or fifteen routine was out of the question. By the fifth one, he was straining, and it was all he could do to gut out ten.

  He was glad Julio Fernandez was not here to see this. If he had been, Howard would have had to find three or four more reps somewhere, and like as not, he’d have pulled a muscle doing ’em.

  He let himself hang for a few seconds after the tenth rep, to stretch out his lats, then dropped to the ground, disgusted with himself. Who was it — Gertrude Stein? — who’d said that after you hit forty it’s all patch, patch, patch?

  Didn’t matter who said it, it was sure true. On the one hand, he still felt like a kid of nineteen. Yeah, his hairline showed a little more face than it used to and there were little tufts of gray at the temples. But there weren’t too many wrinkles, and his general shape and weight wasn’t that different from twenty, twenty-five years ago. If anything, he’d put on some muscle since his first hitch in the regular army. But the days of partying all night and then working a full day were gone. The occasional strain or bruise took longer to heal, and if he didn’t stretch and warm up before he started working out hard, he got a lot more strains and bruises than he had as a kid. He thought he’d come to terms with getting older and slowing down, but he realized that didn’t mean he could slack off. He wasn’t going to get any younger or stronger, but if he didn’t stay on top of things, he was going to get older and weaker a lot sooner. A layoff like this just pointed out what he knew was so — you might not be able to win in the end, but you were going to get there quicker if you didn’t resist it every step of the way.

  He took several deep breaths and looked at the obstacle course. He had his stopwatch, an old mechanical sweep-hand job he’d picked up from a Russian surplus place. Like that shotgun he’d given the commander, the Russians still did a lot of stuff the old-fashioned way. Not necessarily because of any desire for quality, but because they didn’t have the technology to do it on the cheap. You could get a windup pocket- or stopwatch with an eighteen-jeweled movement for less than fifty bucks; a shotgun that was sturdy and well-made for maybe three, four hundred. Try that in the U.S. If you could even find such things, they’d cost an awful lot more.

  He decided to skip the stopwatch and just run the course. He didn’t really want to know how much he’d slowed down. He’d be happy just to get through without breaking something.

  He set himself, and got ready to go. He was a religious man, he believed in God, and he’d been right with Jesus for a long time. He believed he would be admitted to the Kingdom of Heaven if he led a righteous life and he worked at it. But like the old joke his father used to tell, he wasn’t ready to go now. He had a teenaged son and a loving wife, and he wanted to stick around long enough to smile at his grandchildren. Retiring had been part of that, but he realized as he gathered himself to hit the course that sitting back in a rocker on the porch and watching the world go by might not be the solution. You could get hit by a runaway bus sitting on the porch — that had happened to some guy in D.C. only a couple months back — instead of being shot by some psycho while you were leading a Net Force military team. God had His plan, and Howard’s number was gonna be up on a certain day, on a certain hour, no matter where he was or what he was doing. He’d thought that he’d been tempting fate, but after that bus had left the road and squashed a guy younger than he was who’d been sitting in a porch swing, he’d realized that death could come from anywhere at any time.

  Run, John, and worry about the meaning of life later — it won’t get you through the obstacle course, all this thinking.

  He grinned. That was true. There was a time to think and a time to move. Right now, moving was the order of the moment.

  He took a final deep breath and began his sprint.

  * * *

  Michaels looked up from his desk to see Toni, dressed in business clothes, standing in front of him.

  “Hey, babe.”

  “Commander,” she said with a short nod.

  “Uh…”

  She smiled. “If I’m going to be working here, even temporarily, we need to keep it businesslike.”

  “What, I can’t grope you in the hall?”

  “Not unless you want a sexual harassment suit.”

  They both smiled.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “So, what’s the situation?”

  “Better than we’d hoped. Jay and the gang managed to find the problem with the server pretty quick. They had help from InfraGuard and the NIPC out of the CWG.”

  “And how are the National InfraGuard Protection Center and Crime Working Group?”

  “Same as always. If they could make a wish, you and I and all of Net Force would disappear in a reeking puff of sulfur and red smoke.”

  Toni chuckled.

  “Anyway, give them credit, they pitched in and helped Jay.”

  “How’d the terrorists get in?”

  “Passwords. They had them up to the highest leve
l.”

  “Social engineering,” she said. “They bribed somebody.”

  He shook his head. “Maybe not. The VP in charge of Blue Whale’s security was killed a few days ago, along with a couple of ex-FBI bodyguards. At the time, it looked like a simple traffic accident — car ran off a cliff, no signs of anything hinky. That seems awfully coincidental.”

  “Yes.” She started to say something, then noticed the shotgun in its case, propped in the corner. “What’s that?”

  “A shotgun,” he said. “John Howard got it for me.”

  “For what?”

  He took a breath. “To keep at home.”

  He wasn’t sure exactly what he expected, but with her being a new mother and all, he was halfway thinking she’d be against the idea. Instead, she said, “Good idea. We need a gun in the house.”

  His expression must have shown his surprise. She said, “What, you thought because I like knives I have something against guns?”

  “Well…”

  “Silat teaches you to use the proper tool for the job. There are times when a gun is necessary.”

  He nodded. “How is Guru?”

  “She’s fine. Looks great, no slurring of her speech, seems to move like usual.”

  “You aren’t worried that the baby will be too much for her?”

  Toni grinned. “He woke up from his nap squalling. Didn’t want a bottle or his binky, wasn’t wet, no poop, just yelling his head off. Guru took him from me and he shut up as if she’d turned off a switch. Click! just like that, and he was cooing and grinning. I couldn’t believe it. I looked at him, said, ‘Who are you? What have you done with my baby!’ ”

  Michaels laughed. “Get her to teach you that trick. That’s worth a fortune.”

  “You’re telling me. Okay. So what do you want me to do?”

  “Same thing you used to do. I’ve talked to the director, she doesn’t have a problem with you being here instead of there. You’ll be a consultant, so we can pay you. This most recent attack on the net/web is surely the responsibility of the same group who hit it before. And if they killed the VP to get the security codes, then they’ve raised the stakes. If they are willing to murder, this is going to get uglier before it gets prettier.”

  Toni nodded. “I hear you.”

  “So let’s get to it. Your old office is yours again. It’s good to have you back, Ms. Fiorella.”

  “It’s good to be back, Commander Honey.”

  He laughed.

  12

  Quantico, Virginia

  Any amusement the FBI recruits might have felt on seeing Net Force’s Commander in a sarong over his sweatpants left at least several of those minds after Michaels slammed their owners onto the gym’s mats hard enough so they bounced. He enjoyed this way more than he should. He’d seen the grins when he and Toni walked in, heard a few chuckles from the recruits on seeing his clothes.

  They weren’t laughing now, were they?

  Toni had shown some simple self-defense moves, using Michaels as the dummy, and he’d dusted the mats pretty good himself. Then she called for volunteers and had him demonstrate the techniques so she could point out what he was doing and why.

  He had earned the right to toss these guys, he figured, aside from the sarong-inspired amusement. He’d paid his share of dues. A couple months ago, when Toni had been working with him on his sparring, she’d put on a pair of boxing gloves and had danced in and out, throwing fast punches. He’d gone after her during one attack, trying to surprise her, and he’d forgotten to cover high-line while he was busy blocking a kick. For his inattention, he’d caught a right overhand smack in the left eye. Even with the glove, he’d worn a mouse and shiner for a week after she’d punched him. Of course, he had felt a certain amount of malevolent glee when he explained the shiner: Hey, what happened to you, you run into a door?

  No, actually, my wife punched me in the face. She beats on me all the time.

  People who didn’t know about Toni and silat hadn’t believed him. Of course, they’d thought he was joking.

  “All right,” the FBI combat teacher said. “Everybody see what just happened there?”

  The recruits looked puzzled for the most part. Well, no, they hadn’t seen it.

  Duane Presser, the big Hawaiian said, “Don’t let that funny-looking sideways stance rattle you — watch his feet, how he angles in and sectors off. You concentrate on his hands, you’re gonna get tripped. You watchin’ his feet, he’s gonna whack you wid dat elbow. Watch alla him. And watch the distance — this stuff assumes a knife in hand, so you got dat extra half-step to worry about. You all see what I mean?”

  “I see it, Chief,” one of the recruits said, his voice full of confidence.

  Michaels looked at the man. He was young, maybe twenty-five, tall, and fairly muscular in his sweats and T-shirt. He had a couple inches in height and maybe fifteen, twenty pounds in weight on Michaels. He also had a buzz cut, and what was left of his hair was so still so black it looked like a raven’s wing. His skin tone and facial features indicated some Native American background in his ethnic tap. He’d been watching, not volunteering, and Michaels figured that meant he was smarter than some of the first gung ho chargers to step up. It was a good idea to see what an enemy knew before you risked an attack.

  That could be a bad sign for Michaels.

  “So, you think you can get past his defenses?” Duane asked.

  “Yes, sir, Chief, I believe so.”

  Duane nodded. “Show us.”

  When the big recruit stepped up to the mat, Michaels saw Duane flash his big grin at Toni, where Raven couldn’t see it. He wished he had Duane’s confidence.

  When Raven got closer, he said, sotto voce, “Nice skirt, sir.”

  Michaels smiled. SOP, trying to anger an opponent. He said, quietly, “Yeah. Don’t look up it while you’re down on the mat, son.”

  “Not gonna happen. Sir.”

  “Okay. Let’s see. Show me what you got.”

  Raven slipped into a side fighting stance, left foot forward, circled his hands over his face and groin. From the smoothness of the movement, Michaels realized the kid had brought this with him when he joined the feds — it was too slick to come from the Hawaiian’s six-week self-defense course.

  Raven said, “What I got is a black belt in tae kwon do, sir.” He sneered, bounced around a little, and edged toward Michaels. “But I won’t hurt you too bad.”

  Oh, good. A martial arts jock who wanted to prove his stuff was superior. Michaels was, he had to admit, a little nervous. He’d been studying silat pretty extensively with Toni for more than a year, working out hard, practicing pretty much seven days a week, rain or shine, and he was far from a finished student. Still, he was improving. Toni didn’t pull her punches, and she’d had a few people she knew dance with them at the gym a few times, to make sure Michaels had different-sized and skilled opponents, to help teach him distance and timing. He wasn’t great, but he was not a total dweeb anymore. He hoped.

  The kid had just made a mistake — he’d bragged about his black belt, which, like the skirt comment, had been to intimidate Michaels, to make him nervous, but he’d given too much away in doing that. If you thought you might be facing a tiger, that could be a problem. If you knew you were facing a lesser cat, that made things easier.

  TKD was mostly a sport these days, though there were some old-style guys around who were excellent fighters, according to Toni. The sport guys liked to kick, they did that to score points, and they liked to kick high, to the head. Standing sideways like that, Raven was going to have to use his front foot if he wanted any speed. A spinning or round kick from the rear leg was going to take too long to get there.

  All of this flitted through Michaels’s brain fast, a second or two, then the attack came.

  Raven danced in and threw a high roundhouse kick at Michaels’s head.

  He was limber, and he was very fast. Michaels ducked, and the kick sailed harmlessly over his head. As Rave
n came down, Michaels tapped him lightly on the ribs, no force, to see what the kid would do.

  Raven sprang back, out of range. “That punch wouldn’t have done anything,” he said.

  If he really knew how to fight, then that tap should have convinced him he’d made a mistake. If he was rattled, however, it didn’t show.

  Michaels glanced over at Toni. She shook her head. The kid didn’t have a clue.

  He came in again, twirling and throwing a quick combination of kicks — a front snap, roundhouse, and axe-kick, intending to bring his heel down on the top of Michaels’s head or shoulder with the last technique. It was a good sequence, fast and well-executed.

  He must have expected Michaels to back up and block, since that was probably what he was used to seeing, and if that happened, he would tag him.

  Michaels didn’t back up.

  Instead, he dropped low as he stepped in and caught Raven on the hamstring of his kicking leg with his right shoulder. No punches, no counterkick, no sweep, just a step and the shoulder—

  The kid flew backward, lost his balance, and fell. He managed to turn the fall into a diving half-twist and roll, and came back up. “No problem!” he said, too loud and too fast.

  Now he was rattled. A smarter, more experienced fighter would have backed up and thought about it, gotten cautious, but Raven hardly paused. He knew this stuff, he was gonna make it work!

  The third time he came in, he threw a powerful right punch and right snap-kick at the same time, and if he was pulling either, Michaels couldn’t tell. The kid wanted to whack Michaels, for embarrassing him, and he wanted it to hurt. He was extended, balanced on the ball of his left foot, his supporting left knee almost locked.

  Michaels slid in, blocked the punch with a left heel-hand to the kid’s face while scooping the kick aside with the back of his right hand. He pushed with his left hand and lifted hard with his right, palm toward the floor like he’d been taught, and Raven went back and down, stretched out horizontally. He slammed into the mat flat on his back, and the impact knocked the wind out of him. Before he could move, Michaels dropped next to him, swung his right fist up and over and down in a hammer blow that landed smack in the middle of Raven’s chest. He pulled it some, but it still hit hard enough to make a nice thwock! on the sternum. Then he opened his fist, slid his hand up to the kid’s throat, and pinched his windpipe. With any pressure, he could break Raven’s voicebox, and the kid knew it.