Cybernation nf-6

by Tom Clancy

  She was halfway through what she figured would be a forty-minute ride when the black man she’d seen on the copter ride came in. He wore an old pair of baggy shorts, no shirt, rubber sandals, a white cotton headband, and had a towel around his neck.

  The shorts had the Bon Chance logo on them. He must work here, she realized. If he was a tourist, the shorts would be new, not old and worn as they were, right?

  Toni sipped at her water. The man was well-built, all muscle, no fat on him. Not like a power lifter, but more like a boxer a few days from a championship match.

  He moved to the hanging bag, kicked off his sandals, tossed the towel next to them, and went through a series of stretches.

  He was very limber for somebody with that much muscle, she noticed. She was curious to see if he was going to work the bag, or that was just a place where he loosened up.

  It didn’t take long to satisfy her wonder.

  The man stood in front of the bag, and started slapping it. Open-handed, first with the palms, then with the backs of his hands, he developed a rhythm — palm right, backhand right, palm left, backhand left, over and over, until the sound of the strikes sounded like somebody working a speed bag, wapata, wapata, wapata, wapata.

  After a couple of minutes, with a sheen of sweat beaded on his head and body, he switched to elbows, and the rhythm was slower, but similar. Right horizontal elbow inward, then back, followed by the left, bap-bap!

  Toni kept pumping, watching the man in the mirrors rather than looking right at him.

  He switched from elbows to punches, using hammer fists in the same pattern. Then he went to his knees, and then to a series of instep-then-heel kicks. Right, left, right, left.

  He was working really hard. Most people didn’t realize how difficult it was to strike a heavy bag like that — it took a lot more energy than riding a bike or walking on a treadmill, a lot more. And not wearing bag gloves was hard on the hands, too.

  The timer on Toni’s bike cheeped. She looked down at it. The black man had been working the bag for twenty minutes, and while he was sweating profusely, he didn’t look particularly tired.

  The guy was in incredible shape. And though she couldn’t tell from the strikes what his art was, he was obviously deep into some fighting discipline. He moved in balance the whole time, and his hits, while fast, were also powerful. Interesting.

  She warmed down on the bike for another minute, gradually slowing her pedaling. She stepped off the bike, wiped her face with the towel, finished off her water, then started for the exit.

  The black man stepped back, threw a hard sidekick at the bag, and lifted it a foot into the air, to drop back on its nylon strap hard enough to shake the mirrors. He reached for his towel, wiped his face and head, slipped his feet into his sandals, and walked away.

  He was a few feet behind Toni when she stepped into the hall.

  “You a dancer?” he said. He had an accent, sounded like Spanish or Portuguese, maybe.

  Toni looked at the man. Was he hitting on her? In her guise of divorced secretary, she would probably be receptive to such things. He was a strong, good-looking man. Then again, she was supposedly from the South and might have a racial prejudice, so perhaps she ought to seem a little timid. If he worked here, maybe she could find out some things from him.

  “No,” she said. “Not really.”

  “You have the legs,” he said. He nodded at her.

  Toni gave him what she thought would pass for an embarrassed smile. “Well, I try to keep in shape. Are you a boxer?”

  He shrugged. “Kind of.”

  He moved up next to her as they walked. “Your first visit to the ship?”

  “Yes. You’ve been here before?”

  “Oh, yeah. I work here.”

  “Really? What do you do?”

  “I’m with Security,” he said.

  No surprise, but Toni raised her eyebrows. “How exciting.”

  He shrugged again. “Pretty dull, mostly. You maybe want to get a drink later?”

  Toni pretended to be more nervous than she felt. “Uh, well, maybe.”

  He grinned, showing perfect white teeth. “I don’t bite, Missy. My name is Roberto Santos.” He put out his hand.

  “I’m Mary Johnson.” She took his hand. It was damp, but warm, and she could feel the power in his grip, even though he throttled it way back. “From Falls Church, Virginia.”

  “It is my pleasure to meet you,” he said. He released her hand. “That drink?”

  “Oh. Okay. I want to shower and change. Can I meet you somewhere?”

  He smiled again. “How about the Lady Luck, that’s the little bar next to the dining room outside the main casino. In an hour?”

  “That would be fine,” she said.

  After he had gone on his way, Toni felt her heartbeat start to slow. It had been a long time since she had been in the field working a contact. That he was such a primal, physical man added something to her nervousness. This man was dangerous. No question of that.

  On the CyberNation Train Near Halbertstadt, Germany

  When Jay sneaked onto the train, he kept it simple. This close to Keller, he wanted to be sure he wasn’t distracted by historical details or esoteric odors in a complex scenario — Keller was, he had shown, too good to shrug off. So the train was just a train, the era was the present and real-time, and Jay’s plan was to get in and out without raising a ruckus. He hadn’t come to slap Keller’s face with a glove and challenge him to a duel, only to find out whether he was here or not.

  The duel would come later. On Jay’s terms.

  Not that even this much was easy. He made his way through the baggage car with his utmost stealth, stopping frequently to look and to listen. Cracking any of CyberNation’s secure services would be extremely difficult, if not impossible. These were people who prided themselves on their ability to program and weave, and any chinks in their armor would be microscopically small. But the train ran on public tracks, and it had a connection to the railway system’s computers, which were a lot easier to rascal. Jay wasn’t hurting anything, he wasn’t going to even peek at the rail system’s files, he was just riding their coded sig into the CyberNation train. They had to allow it access, and while it wouldn’t get him past their foot-thick firewalls, the information he wanted wasn’t behind them anyhow.

  Jay got through the baggage car. Just ahead was the conductor’s office. Jay knocked, and when nobody answered he slipped the lock with a credit card and stepped inside. If the conductor had been in his office, Jay would have offered some excuse, gone away, and created a diversion that would have drawn the man out.

  A file cabinet stood near the conductor’s desk, but it was partially open, not even locked. Jeez, Louise! Not that the lock would have stopped him, but still, they didn’t have to make it so easy. It was amazing to him how often people who should know better left their doors unlocked.

  A few minutes shuffling through papers came up with what he wanted: a passenger list. He looked at several other manifests, on the off-chance somebody might someday notice he had poked around in here. No point in being obvious about what he was looking for.

  Jay recognized several of the names on the passenger list from his own list of high-end computer program grads. And there, plain as day, was the name he had come to find.

  Jackson Keller.

  So, this was where he was, and this was where his primary team was, too.

  Jay put the list back into the drawer, went to the door, peeked out. Nobody around.

  He hurried back toward the baggage car. He had what he wanted. Time to leave.

  * * *

  “We’ve got a hacker incursion,” Taggart said.

  Keller stared at her. “Incursion? Not a failed attempt? Impossible!”

  “Not in our systems. In the train’s op comp. We got a bounce-back from Deutsche Bahn Access, said he wasn’t who he said he was. I checked it: The hit came in off the sat pipeline from EuroAlliance One, not from any registered
Deutsche Bahn connections.”

  “Let me see.” He moved to the work station where Samantha Taggart, the security monitor for this shift, sat.

  “Nothing to see,” she said. “He’s come and gone.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Nothing to speak of. He accessed several housekeeping files. Didn’t take anything, didn’t leave a worm or virus behind. Probably some kid trying out a new cracker program.”

  “Which files? Never mind—” Keller tapped in a key sequence. The file list appeared in a real-time crawl on the holoproj. Mail manifest, cargo bills of lading. Passenger list. Station stops. Who would bother? There was nothing there to see.

  “You back-walked him?”

  “Far as I could. It was an anonymous sig from somewhere in the NoAtlantic Net; it frayed eight hundred ways from Sunday past that.”

  “That would be pretty sharp for a kid hacker.”

  “I used to do it when I was a kid. You used to do it. It’s not that hard.”

  Keller chewed his lip. Nothing was taken. Nothing there to take, really. Who could possibly care where the train stopped, what it carried for cargo or mail, or who was on it—

  He blinked. He opened the passenger file. There they were, his team, himself, the train crew. He felt a sudden cold rush in his lower belly.

  Gridley!

  He shook his head. “Can’t be. He doesn’t even know who we are.”

  “Excuse me?”

  He looked at Taggart. “Nothing. Never mind. You’re right, it was probably some kid screwing around. No harm, no foul.”

  But as he walked away, Keller’s fluttering bowels didn’t settle down. If it wasn’t some kid trying to break into a system just for the hell of it, then who could it be? And the only answer was: somebody who wanted to know who was on the train. Maybe Gridley had figured it out. Maybe that old Thai persona Keller had used had been too good a clue. And if it was Gridley, and he knew Keller was on the train with his team, then they were in deep trouble. If the Americans thought this train had anything to do with the net and web disruptions, they would be all over the Germans to pull it to a stop and have a look-see. Somebody high up in the German government would surely owe a favor to somebody high up in the U.S. government, and even if not, there could easily be a quid pro quo offer in a big hurry: Scratch our back, Hans, and we’ll scratch yours, yah?

  And if Gridley knew about this platform, maybe he knew about the barge in Yokohama, too. It wouldn’t be safe there, either.

  He had to get off the train. Fast.

  32

  Net Force HQ

  Quantico, Virginia

  Michaels looked at Jay, then at John Howard, the other man in his office. “It’s iffy,” he said.

  Jay nodded. “Yep. I don’t have ironclad proof. But I’m positive of it. Keller is the guy leading the charge. He’s got the chops, and CyberNation is the organization that stands to gain more than anybody. Last week, he and his team were on the boat, and now they are on a big ole electric train in Deutschland. If we can grab them, I bet we can squeeze a confession out of one of ’em. And sure stop anything they are planning.”

  “There’s due process for you,” Michaels said.

  “Hey, the Germans got stung when the net went wonky, people all over the world lost money. If they don’t have Miranda warnings, that’s not our concern, is it?”

  “I think you’ve been watching too many World War Two movies, Jay. They aren’t all Nazis over there anymore. People have rights in Germany now.”

  Jay shrugged.

  “What I want to know more about is this connection among the three locations,” Howard said. “The train, the barge in Japan, the ship.”

  Jay said, “Triple redundancy. I think each of these has got identical computer systems set up. They share the information. If something happens to one, they still have two backups. That’s how I’d do it. We got at least a backup off-site ourselves now, the new substation in D.C.”

  “So it wouldn’t do us any good to take out the train by itself.”

  “Well, General, it would tell us for sure if these guys are the villains if we got a look at their hardware and software. Don’t we have any spies who can do a walk-through in RT?”

  “We’ve already got a spy on the boat,” Michaels reminded him.

  “Yeah, but she’s not supposed to poke around in the private decks, just gather info that’s public. Besides, we know that Keller is on the train now anyhow. I’m telling you, this is the real deal.”

  Michaels shook his head. “Even if I believed you — and it happens I do — we don’t have enough to start arresting people, even via another government. And if we could shut down the train and the barge at the — where was it? the shipworks? — that would still leave the gambling ship down there in the Caribbean. If they are about to do something else nasty, wouldn’t that be likely to precipitate it?”

  Jay shrugged. “I dunno. Maybe. But they might not be ready to go for it yet. Our defenses have gotten better. It’ll be harder next time. Plus if we get Keller and his big guns, that’s gonna monkey wrench it. The second team won’t be as good.”

  “If that’s all they do,” Howard said.

  Michaels looked at him.

  “Remember that cut transcontinental fiber-optic cable? Where they found the two dead militiamen? Have we considered that they might be linked?”

  Michaels shook his head. “Why would you say that?”

  “Well, sir, if it were me, I’d want a multipronged attack on something as big as the Internet. Sticking it with a knife in the hind leg will make it bleed, but that won’t kill it, or even seriously slow it down. But if you shot it in the head, maybe set off a charge of dynamite under it at the same time?”

  “The general has a point, boss. There is more than one way to shut off a node. Doesn’t have to be with software, could be with hardware. My programmers can’t fix that.”

  “Great. I need to hear this.”

  He leaned back in his chair and thought about it for a second. “All right. I’m going to present this to the director and get her thoughts about it. Meanwhile, General, you might want to fine-tune your ship-boarding scenarios. I’m expecting an update from Toni soon, so you can add that into your data files.”

  “Yes, sir.” He grinned.

  “You really like the idea of storming a ship at sea and taking it over, don’t you?”

  “Yes, sir. I know I shouldn’t, it’s dangerous, but it’s what I’m trained to do. Every now and then, you like to see if your tools still work.”

  “Go sharpen them, John. I’m going over to see the director. Jay, you get back on-line and get me something, anything, I can use to convince the director we aren’t grabbing at straws here.”

  “On my way, boss.”

  On the Bon Chance

  The bar was relatively quiet, but the muted sound of bells going off in the casino filtered through the walls. People were smoking as well as drinking, there being no laws against it here. Even though there were apparently vacuum ashtrays on the tables and bar that sucked a lot of the smoke away, it still smelled like cigarettes, with a cigar or pipe thrown in to add their heavier scents. Cigarettes were nasty, but Toni had to confess that she kind of liked the smell of cigars and pipe tobacco.

  Toni, dressed now in jeans, running shoes, and a dark blouse, arrived ten minutes early and looked around. She noted the exits, then found a small table next to the wall in the corner. She sat with her back against the wall. A row of curtained portholes ran along the wall at head level, but she arranged her chair so she wasn’t sitting in front of one.

  A young and pretty waitress in a short black skirt and white shirt was at the table fifteen seconds later.

  Toni ordered, and it was only another minute or two before the waitress returned with a tall glass of tomato juice with a celery stick in it. Quick service.

  Roberto Santos arrived exactly on the hour. He wore a dark suit, Armani if she was any judge, a black silk scoop-ne
cked T-shirt, and alligator loafers. The shoes alone probably cost more than all the clothes she had packed. He also wore that gold watch, ring, and bracelet she had seen before. A walking Fort Knox.

  He walked straight toward her table, as if he had known where she would be.

  “Miss Johnson. Good to see you again.”

  “Mr. Santos.”

  “Roberto, please. Mr. Santos is my father.”

  They exchanged smiles.

  The waitress was there before Santos settled fully in his chair, and she had a drink on her tray. It was mostly white, with streaks of brown in it. He smiled at the young woman and took the drink. “Thank you, Betty.”

  The waitress dimpled and almost curtsied, then moved away. Toni had the impression that if Santos said “Jump,” Betty would be in the air in a heartbeat, and naked before she came back down.

  Santos sipped at the drink. “Ah,” he said. He looked at her and answered what he thought was her unasked question: “Coconut milk and Cuban rum,” he said. “Very fattening. I have to work extra hard after I have one of these.” He raised his glass to her and she held up her tomato juice. It looked like a Bloody Mary. Let him think so.

  “To new friends,” he said.

  “Why not?” she said.

  They clinked glasses.

  * * *

  She nursed her juice while he finished his rum and coconut milk and started a second one. He was very smooth, this Santos, not glib, but totally focused on her, appearing entranced by her every word or look, as if she were the most fascinating woman in the world. Which, in her fake identity, she certainly was not. It didn’t take a genius to realize he was hoping to get laid.

  Well, he was going to be disappointed, unless he could talk Betty the waitress into it, which didn’t seem like much of a chore.

  When she asked questions about his work, he managed to slip them, like a good boxer does punches, giving her almost no information. He walked around, he said. He watched for trouble. From time to time, he ran errands. Nothing special. Just a job.

  Toni smiled and nodded and pretended to be impressed anyhow. He wasn’t telling the truth. If something was going on upon this ship, Santos here was a part of it, she was sure of that. But — short of blowing in his ear and going off to his cabin with him — how was she going to find out what he knew?