Cybernation (2001)

by Clancy, Tom - Net Force 06

  Michaels blinked. The idea was something of a shock. “Uh. Um.”

  “Think about it.”

  He nodded. “Okay. I will.”

  14

  Mercy General Hospital

  Washington, D.C.

  Tyrone lay in a restless, Demerol-induced sleep. His breathing was mostly slow and heavy, but now and then he would moan softly and breathe faster, and try to turn on the bed. When he did that, Howard would reach out and put his hand on the boy’s head, speaking soft reassurances until his son calmed down.

  Nadine had gone to the cafeteria to get some sandwiches and coffee. Howard expected her back in a few minutes. She was a wreck, had seldom left this room since they’d gotten here. He had tried to send her home to rest, but she wasn’t having any of that.

  Leave her baby here, in a hospital, alone?

  Well. He was fourteen, and hardly a baby, but she had spoken with such fierceness that he hadn’t brought it up again.

  And he understood her feelings. Even though he was pretty much out of the woods, one or the other of them was going to be right here until they let Tyrone go home.

  Tyrone’s left leg was supported in a sling. A titanium pin the size of a big nail had been driven through his leg just below the knee, skewering his shin bone. The pin was connected on both ends by a looped cord to a cable, which was in turn attached to a big sandbag, supported by a pulley on the steel frame over the bed. They needed to keep things a certain way until they could do the rest of the surgery with plates and screws, an open reduction, they called it, and even then, the boy was going to wear a fiberglass cast for a couple of months, from his hip to his ankle.

  It hurt Howard to look at it. The doctor had assured him that there weren’t any nerves in the bone, and that the pain where the traction device pierced the skin was minimal. Where Tyrone hurt the most was where his muscles had been torn and bruised in his upper leg when the thigh—the femur—had snapped. This had happened when a half-ton pickup truck, driven by a forty-three-year-old construction worker, had crossed the center line and plowed head-on into the car in which Tyrone had been a passenger in the rear seat. His seat belt had held, but the car had compacted and accordioned enough so that the seat in front of him had been thrust back into his leg, breaking it just above the knee.

  Tyrone’s friend, a fourteen-year-old girl named Jessie Corvos, who had been riding in that front seat was in Intensive Care with massive internal injuries, and her prognosis was poor. The car’s driver, the girl’s older brother, Rafael, had three broken ribs, a punctured lung, shattered right arm, broken ankle, and had undergone surgery to remove a ruptured spleen, but was expected to recover.

  The man who’d been driving the truck had a tiny cut on his forehead that had taken three stitches to close; otherwise, not a mark on him. The man had been playing pool and downing pitchers of beer with friends at a bar. He had been arrested for driving under the influence and released on bail. His blood alcohol level was 0.21 percent, nearly three times the legal limit when they’d tested it.

  Howard had met Jessie and Rafael’s father, Raymond, in the ER. The older Corvos had been pale and shaking, probably in shock, but there had also been in him a tightly suppressed rage. Howard had caught only a glimpse of it. It was like seeing a nuclear fireball through a pinhole some distance away from the aperture: only a speck of intensely bright light was visible, but to move your eye closer would guarantee instant blindness. Raymond Corvos was an accountant, a slightly built, balding man, and mild-looking, save for that hint of white-hot anger.

  If Jessie or Rafael Corvos died, then Howard would not want to be the driver who had killed them—he had the impression their father would come for the killer, and Howard would not wish to be standing in his way when he did.

  As he watched his sleeping child, he could understand that. Vengeance belonged to the Lord, and Jesus had preached forgiveness for sins, no matter how heinous; but if Tyrone died as a result of some negligent idiot too plastered to be driving, he could easily see appointing himself judge, jury, and executioner, even at the risk of his own soul.

  There were some things a man had to do, no matter what the cost.

  Nadine came back into the room, carrying a plastic bag and a drink holder with four paper cups of coffee in it.

  “He wake up?”

  “No. He’s still out. Resting better, I think.”

  She handed him a cup of coffee with a corrugated cardboard sleeve on it. He pulled the lid off and blew on the hot liquid.

  “They had tuna on white, turkey on rye, and ham and cheese on whole wheat,” she said. “I got two of each. You want one?”

  “Maybe later,” he said. “Coffee’s fine for now.

  She nodded, took a cup of coffee for herself, and pulled her chair closer to his, next to the bed. She reached out with her free hand, and he took it in his.

  He knew they would get used to this. You could get used to almost anything if you had the time. One of them would eventually go home, shower, get a nap, bring back clean clothes, while the other stayed. They’d swap off. But with any luck, they’d be going home soon. There were portable traction devices they could hook up to Tyrone’s leg, once the doctors were sure he’d be okay. The surgery that would come later was relatively safe. There were some rare, but potentially dangerous complications following this kind of accident they’d told the Howards about: fat emboli, blood clots that might break loose and get into the circulatory system to cause problems. After a few days, the risk of these would be minimal.

  Tyrone was going to be okay. But—what if Howard had been off on assignment somewhere in some hellhole, doing Net Force’s business when this had happened? It was bad enough, but—what if it had been worse? If his son had been injured so badly that he didn’t make it? Died while his father was a thousand miles away, unable to get back in time?

  When he thought about it reasonably, he knew this was an irrational argument. Tyrone could have died in the accident and Howard could have been a block away and it wouldn’t have made any difference. You couldn’t live your life looking over your child’s shoulder, worried every minute of every day about what might happen to him. The Almighty had His own plans. And if He wanted to call Tyrone—or Nadine—home? Well, that’s what would happen, and there was nothing Howard could do about it.

  Man proposes, God disposes.

  But in his heart of hearts, he felt that if he was there when the call came, Howard might be able to talk God out of it. Offer a trade, himself for his child or wife, and maybe God would go for it. There wasn’t any basis for believing that, God was not known for horse-trading souls, but on some level, he believed it might be different if he was there to make the offer. So going away and not being around to try that deal was heavy on his mind. Maybe he had made a mistake in going back to work for Net Force.

  It was something he was going to have to think about some more.

  Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia

  Toni stuck her head into Alex’s office.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “The BCIII sting is about to go down.”

  “Really? That was fast.”

  She nodded. “Turned out the ‘Chinese hackers’ were in Richmond, they didn’t have far to travel. Jay’s run the feed from a case—and a sticky-cam into the conference room’s big monitor, if you want to watch.”

  Alex glanced at his desk. “Might as well. I’m not getting much done here.”

  The two of them headed for the conference room. Toni hadn’t been here when this sting had been set up, but she’d seen others like it when she’d been working here before. It was simple enough. Certain kinds of criminal hackers into extortion had been around for years. Generally they’d break into a company’s system, steal files, crash the system, or set up a worm or virus for later, sometimes all three. Then they’d contact the company and offer their services as “computer security consultants.” If the company wasn’t interested, they would trash or steal valuable files, pu
t client lists on the net, and other manner of devilry until the company came around. A lot of mid-sized corporations found it cheaper and easier just to pay the hackers to go away, as long as they weren’t too greedy, and the RBs—that came from “rule benders,” which is what they liked to call themselves instead of “law breakers”—would take their money and move on to another victim.

  No harm, no foul, and the company eats the loss as part of doing business.

  But a few years ago, the FBI, then Net Force, began using their skills to create fake companies whose profiles were attractive to the RBs. They’d set up shop, drop fake histories and credit ratings into places where they’d be found and believed, and wait. Too confident of their abilities in the electronic world, the extortioners would never stoop to actually going to a library—using shoeware-to-treeware, they called it—that would give the lie to the fake histories posted. Only squirrels played in trees.

  You’re not an ape—use a tool!

  The RBs were always looking for fat and easy targets, and the Net Force decoys were set out like overweight turkeys too heavy to run.

  The latest version of the sting was BC Internet Industries, Inc. Called BC Three Eyes, or just Three Eyes, the company had just enough passware and fire walls to make a bent hacker have to work a little, and all kinds of apparent goodies there for the taking once they were past security. Like a brown paper bag full of unmarked twenty-dollar bills just sitting there on the sidewalk with nobody around, it was just too good for the RBs to resist. Three Eyes had gulled a dozen thieves over the last year—under different names and slightly different configurations, of course.

  “BC” stood for “Big Con,” one of Jay’s little jokes.

  Typically, hackers would attack, then demand payment. Sometimes, a company would require more proof. Sometimes, they would even hire the thieves to set up security for them, with the idea that it takes one to catch one.

  Some of the RBs actually considered breaking into a company’s system and screwing it up to be the equivalent of a job interview.

  Three Eyes had fine-tuned their process. Once they had an RB coming after them, they first sent a small amount of money, with a promise of more—providing the thief would be willing to do a hands-on, face-time demo to their own security people of how they could get past the safeguards. The pitch had been developed and honed by a brilliant shrink who had worked for State before he’d moved to the FBI. The pitch was designed to be psychologically irresistible to a hacker mentality. Hackers thought they were smarter than normal people. They were convinced of their superiority. They thought they could think circles around any company security honcho or federal agent. They wanted to show people just how smart they were. They needed the applause, and the Three Eye pitch played right into their beliefs. It did everything but bend down to kiss their feet. They ate it up.

  The RBs, once hooked, were landed almost every time.

  The big HDTV screen was lit, and several people were standing or sitting at the table, watching. The case-cam was a briefcase that belonged to one of the agents. Typically there were a pair of these, one from the regular FBI, one from Net Force, playing the parts of the CEO and security VP for Three Eyes. They would ask for a sit-down with the thieves, and the RBs could choose the time, place, whatever. Some of the thieves had been pretty clever. They had made calls from mobile coms to the agents, changed destinations at the last instant, and one guy even had the meeting take place in a house that had been made into a kind of giant Farady Cage, complete with wide-spectrum jammers to make sure the company execs couldn’t transmit their position for help.

  These guys weren’t that smart, though they were careful.

  The case-cam on the table had a small scanning unit that panned slowly back and forth almost one-eighty. The cam panned to the left.

  “Check it out. Metal detector built into the doorway,” Toni pointed at the screen, “to make sure our guys aren’t carrying guns or knives.”

  The camera panned back. There were two men seated at the table across from the two agents, and two more men standing behind them.

  “Who are the goons?”

  “Bodyguards, we figure.”

  “Big ones.”

  “Six four, six five. Two-seventy, two hundred eighty, easy. Not fun in close quarters.”

  PIPed in the left corner of the image was a smaller, wider-angle view that took in most of the room. That would be from the sticky-cam, about the size of a dime and almost clear and invisible, stuck on the wall near the door by one of the agents when they’d arrived. The wide-angle image gave a better view of the play, and Toni picked up a remote and switched the picture-in-a-picture around.

  Toni looked at her watch. “Right about . . . now,” she said.

  One of the agents—the regular FBI guy—removed an envelope from his jacket pocket and passed it to the two men across from him. The thief took the envelope and checked it, smiled real big, and showed it to his partner. His partner took it, riffled what was inside with his thumb, and also smiled.

  While the two extortionists were looking at the money, the agent on the left, who was in fact one Julio Fernandez of Net Force, removed something from his pocket, which he pointed at the man across from him.

  It looked kind of like a pack of white playing cards with a small handle and a circular hole near the middle through which Fernandez had stuck his finger.

  “Strange-looking weapon,” Alex said.

  “Starn pistola,” Toni said. “9mm stripper clip, five shots, all plastic and ceramic construction, including the springs, fragmenting bullets made from some kind of zinc epoxy boron ceramic. Light, but very fast, even from a snubby. Eighteen hundred, nineteen hundred feet per second. Bullet comes apart on impact, creates a nasty temporary stretch cavity.”

  The bodyguard on the left made as if to draw a gun hidden under his jacket in a shoulder holster. Julio waved the gun at him and said something. Too bad there wasn’t any sound.

  The bodyguard must have decided that Julio’s weapon wasn’t that dangerous. He pulled his own handgun, a big, black semiauto pistol.

  It wasn’t even halfway from the holster when Julio shot him. The resolution of the camera, while pretty good, wasn’t enough for Toni to see where the bullet or bullets hit, but the man dropped the gun and staggered back against the wall, then slid down into a sitting position.

  The second bodyguard evidently decided that trying to outdraw a man pointing a gun at your face was maybe not such a good idea. He raised his hands, fingers open wide.

  “My, my,” Alex said. “What’s the world coming to when hackers bring guns to the party.”

  “We live in dangerous times,” Toni said.

  15

  On the Bon Chance

  In the conference room next to the computer center, Keller called his team together.

  “Listen,” he said. “I know you are all doing outstanding work. Our projects thus far have been on target and very effective. However, due to the actions of Net Force, as well as other minor security agencies, our successes have not been as great as we’d hoped they’d be.”

  Nobody was happy to hear that, but it wasn’t telling them anything they didn’t already know.

  “There are real world contingencies; of course, those have always been in place, and those in charge of such matters will go forward as necessary. Some efforts have already been made in that direction.”

  This drew a disappointed murmur.

  He could understand that. It had been his hope all along that the programmers and weavers could do the job without resorting to cruder methods. That would be the real victory, to use the very tools of that which they sought to bring about and nothing more. The reality of it was, however, that there were still limits on what could be done electronically. The future had arrived, but there were still people out there who not only refused to log into it, they seemed to be heading back to the past. There were groups who still used typewriters, for God’s sake. Fountain pens were making a com
eback. Handwritten letters weren’t going to replace e-mail, of course, but there were people who still corresponded that way. There were even people in the United States who not only refused to have answering machines or services, they didn’t have telephones !

  You couldn’t reach people like that, couldn’t frighten them with worries of Internet problems. They didn’t care.

  Fortunately, these Luddites were in the minority; but the computer revolution was not yet complete. Some things still had to be done the old-fashioned way. That’s why men like Santos were necessary. If you were doing surgery, you needed a laser scalpel, but now and again, despite medicine’s advances, you had to have a bone saw. Or, perhaps more accurately, a leech . . .

  He was wandering. He drew himself back to the meeting at hand. “We are going to have to push up our deadline on Attack Omega,” he said.

  That drew louder grumbles.

  “I know, I know. You are already running as fast as you can. There is no help for it—the decision comes from on high. We will be coordinating with the other agents of change on this, and we can’t slip the deadline even by an hour. Whatever we have when Omega launches is what we have. I’d like for it to be as much as possible. Okay, let’s put on our question hats and get them all out in the open . . .”

  Later, after they had filed out, Keller sat at the table, idly tapping his fingertips on the wood, thinking. His team would give him all they had. And he would roll up his sleeves and help them—Jay Gridley was the linchpin around which Net Force’s security operations revolved. Throw enough sand at Jay, and he’d grind to a halt, and if Jay was stymied, much of Net Force’s interference would also be slowed, maybe stopped.

  Whatever Santos thought of him, all it would take would be for Keller to point a finger at Jay, and he’d be a dead man. That was the surest way of removing him from the picture. And probably it was safer for CyberNation to do it that way.