Cybernation (2001)

by Clancy, Tom - Net Force 06

  “Slippery slope there, Jay. Blows right past the Fourth Amendment. Fruit of the poisoned vine and all like that.”

  “Since when did you become a constitutional scholar, Lieutenant?”

  “I’m sworn to uphold and protect it. You are, too, given Net Force’s charter. Once you start breaking the rules to get to the really bad guys, how long before you bend ’em to get to the plain old bad guys? And then the ones who are maybe not so bad, but that you don’t like?”

  Jay sighed. “Yeah, well, you have a point. There is probably another way to get to the information without doing anything illegal. Be harder though. And what if while I’m doing that, they hit again, shut down a hospital and kill off a bunch of patients or something?”

  “That would suck. But still.”

  “You obey all the traffic laws, Julio, all the time?”

  “Nope. And if I get caught, I don’t kick, either, I pay the fine. But running a red light in the middle of nowhere at midnight when nobody is around is not the same thing, is it?

  “Suppose you get the stuff you need and we use the information to nail these guys. No harm, no foul, right? But then one of their lawyers finds out what we did? The bad guys, who are guilty, get off, and you wind up looking for work, or maybe spending quality time in a cell in some country club federale, doing the warden’s taxes for five years. It’s the Rule of Law, Jay. It’s what separates the good guys from the bad guys. We toss that out, we’re no different than they are.”

  “Yeah, yeah. You’re right. It was just a thought.”

  “Can’t hang you for thinking. Not yet, anyway.”

  Toni took a coffee break, but she sat at her desk, fiddling with the computer. It had been a while since she had done any serious scrimshaw work—if any of what she had done while she was housebound during her pregnancy could be called serious—and she decided to check in on Bob Hergert, whose on-line class had taught her what she knew about the art of scratching lines on ivory and then filling them with black paint.

  Bob’s method ran heavily to stippling, of putting a lot of tiny dots on the smooth surface, using very sharp needles, some of which he made himself, since ordinary needles were too dull for the microscrimshanding he liked to do. Bob could put a realistic portrait on a piece of ivory no bigger than a dime, so detailed that you could only see the thing properly under a big magnifying glass or even a stereomicroscope.

  There were folks who didn’t consider that art, but Toni wasn’t among them.

  Port Orford, Oregon

  Bob had redone his on-line shop in the past year, adding new material. Virtually everything he had produced for the last fifteen years was available for view, since he kept records of it all.

  Toni strolled down the wide aisles—floor space was cheap in VR—and looked at the various pieces set out for inspection. She had a more specific reason for dropping by than just checking. John Howard’s wife, Nadine, had bought her husband a set of faux-ivory grips for his revolver for his upcoming birthday. The newer versions of that looked so much like elephant ivory it would fool almost everybody, but cost a lot less, and didn’t require that Jumbo die for your sins. Nadine had asked Toni if she might be interested in doing some artwork on them. Toni had done a gun butt once, for one of Julio Fernandez’s buddies. The friend, an ex-green hat, had a cowboy six-shooter, and Julio had asked her to do something on one panel. She had done a simple design, with a beret over a thin scroll, with the words, “De Oppresso Liber” on the scroll. “To Free the Oppressed.” The design and motto were right out of the Special Forces T-shirt catalog, so it hadn’t been that hard. She wasn’t pleased with the way it had turned out, the lettering wasn’t perfect, and the shading was not quite right, though the recipient had seemed happy enough with it. Nadine Howard had something a little more complex in mind, and if Toni was going to do it, she needed some help.

  The store had been sorted according to her needs when she logged in, so it was easy to find the pistol grips. There were quite a few of them. There was a nice set given to a retiring sheriff by his friends, his badge and name on them. Some that had fancy lettering and geometric designs. Some with a portrait of a grandchild.

  The ones that caught her attention were a set showing the front and back of a nude black woman, who was crouched down in an outdoor courtyard, over what looked like a tile floor, surrounded by Middle Easternlike structures. The detail work was intricate—the columns supporting the arched roof were carved, the balusters, rails, parapets of the building, all were exquisite. A domed roof showed in the distance in the back view. You could see the reflection of the woman’s foot on the tile floor. And the nude herself was gorgeous. She had short hair, almost a crew cut, a nose that looked as if it had been broken, and with five-power magnification, you could see that her eyes were light-colored.

  She looked familiar.

  Bob drifted over. “Hey, Toni,” he said. “How’s it going?”

  “Hey, Bob. I might have some gun grips to do, and I thought I’d come and get some inspiration. This is beautiful work.”

  “Thanks. That’s Dirisha. Look close at the back of her hand, right there.”

  Toni did. There was what looked like a small square with a tube sticking out of one side, extending out like a finger. She dialed up the magnification to get a better look.

  “That’s a spetsdöd,” he said. “A dart gun. She’s a character from a science fiction novel; I did this for the writer.”

  “It’s incredible work, Bob.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I should live long enough to get this good.”

  “All it takes is practice, kiddo. If I can do it, anybody can.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Well, okay, a little talent helps. But mostly it’s hard work. Oops, gotta run, customer. See you around, Toni. Let me know if I can help you.”

  “Thanks, Bob.”

  She bent to marvel at the gun grips again. Bob did his work under a stereomicroscope, and Alex, bless him, had surprised her with one. Which, as it turned out, was instrumental in solving a case he’d been working on, so it had been a pretty good investment for that alone. But if Toni was going to do work like this, it would take a lot more than a good stereoscope. Whatever Bob had to say about it, it took a lot of talent and patience to produce a work of art so detailed that under twenty-power magnification, you could count every hair on the woman’s eyebrows, and not a one was out of place.

  Lord.

  On the Bon Chance

  Jasmine Chance looked at the numbers. New memberships were up, way up, but not nearly at the levels that CyberNation wanted. It had been a good campaign, the combination pushes, but it had pretty much peaked.

  She leaned back in the chair and sighed. Well, she’d expected it to come to this. None of the governments they had lobbied were ready to step on board: There hadn’t been enough of a public clamor, and that was what it was going to take. Politicians did not venture far from their power bases, everybody knew that, and the way to get legislation passed was to get enough static from the voters so the elected officials knew which way to go. Politicians were, by their natures, followers, not leaders. They reflected public opinion more than they shaped it. That made for more longevity in their jobs, and getting re-elected was more important than any single piece of law they might sponsor.

  So, it was time to step up things enough so that an outraged public would demand that those people who did their elected bidding got off the stick and fixed things.

  Chance and her teams had to give them something to fix. Something it would take them a lot of time and money and effort to make right. And that meant taking down more than computer networks with software. It meant taking down hardware, and whether it was cutting cables or blowing up buildings, whatever it took was whatever it took.

  She looked at her watch. Keller’s team would need to be told. She’d put in a call to him to let him know the schedule was being moved up again.

  Roberto would be tickled. He coul
d cut loose, pull out all the stops, and that’s what had always attracted him about this project. That and the money, of course. He liked being with her, no question, but she wasn’t foolish enough to believe she came first.

  Well. Sometimes she came first . . .

  She grinned, and reached for her com. Things were going to get active around here.

  25

  Joe’s Diner

  Kansas City, Kansas

  June 1955

  Joe’s Diner was a classic—or it would be, if it survived to the 1980s. Shaped like a fat hot dog bun, the front was glass from waist-height up. Inside, a counter with boomerang patterns on the Formica ran the length of the place, and was utilized by sitting upon bolted-to-the floor chrome-plated stools with red Naugahyde covering the padded tops. Joe’s served burgers, fries, and toasted cheese sandwiches for lunch. For dinner, the blue plate special was sliced roast beef and mashed potatoes, both covered with thick gravy, and your choice of a vegetable—as long as it was canned green peas or diced carrots. For breakfast, you could get ham and eggs, bacon and eggs, or sausage and eggs, and they all came with hash browns. If you were looking for health food, you’d starve to death in Joe’s, and nobody would feel sorry for you. Only some kind of commie queer ate nothing but vegetables, and good riddance if he croaked.

  Since it was early, Jay was having breakfast, and the light version at that: eggs, sunnyside up, two of them. Four little sausages, Bisquick biscuits drenched in melted butter. Hash brown potatoes in a puddle of warm oil. The heart-attack special they’d have called it in the twenty-first century. Sixty years before, this was what people ate regularly and never thought twice about. And if they wanted cereal to go along with it, they had Frosted Sugar Whatevers with whole milk, and a couple heaping teaspoons of granulated sugar on top of that. And nobody here called it White Death.

  Jay glanced at his watch and then at the door just as the newspaper guy from the Kansas City Star arrived. This was a jaunty-looking bearded fellow wearing a gray fedora, a rumpled white shirt and tie, with a black sport coat slung over his shoulder, Frank Sinatra-style, and carrying a manila folder. Here was Mahler, ace reporter for the Star, a metaphor for the information transfer Jay needed.

  “Hey, Joe,” Mahler said. “Coffee and the Number Three. My Oriental friend here is buying.”

  Joe, the swarthy, heavy-set counterman in a once-white apron that would need a gallon of bleach and three turns through a washer with new, blue Cheer just to get back to gray, nodded and turned to the kitchen pass-through. He yelled at the cook, “Four-mixed-shredded-fatback-short-dollars-and-burnt!”

  Jay translated mentally: Four scrambled eggs, hash brown potatoes, bacon, a small stack of small pancakes, and white toast, well-done. Well, just “toast” was enough, since white bread was the only option in this place at this time.

  Joe poured a cup of coffee into a heavy china mug and set it down on a saucer in front of Mahler. Some of the thin brew—it looked more like weak tea—slopped into the saucer. Mahler spooned four teaspoons of sugar into the cup, poured a little glass bottle of cream into it, stirred the concoction a couple of times, then sipped at it.

  Starbucks would have a field day here.

  Amazing they weren’t all diabetics, too.

  “So, here’s your information,” Mahler said. He slid the folder across the counter toward Jay.

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem. Anything I can do to keep those Red bastards at bay, you just call.”

  Jay smiled. The fifties were full of people worrying that the communists would be storming ashore at Palisades Park or Long Beach at any moment. Senator McCarthy had played the country’s fears like a rock drummer on crank hammers his skins, at least for a while. And even after HUAC—the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities—finally faded, the Red Scare lingered until the Soviet Union broke up, almost forty years later. For a time, anybody who considered himself a patriot would do anything for any government agency who hinted it would help stem the Red Tide threatening to engulf the world . . .

  “Your government thanks you, Mr. Mahler.”

  Jay opened the folder. Julio Fernandez had been right. He had been able to get to the information legally. It was the long way around, but it was all public information, and if you knew what you were looking for, and you knew how to look for it, it was all there to be had. He scanned the list, nodded at the names, and smiled again. The boss was gonna love this.

  Mahler’s breakfast arrived, and it was positively psychedelic-looking. Bright yellow scrambled eggs, reddish-brown strips of crisp bacon, a stack of pancakes the diameter of a saucer, piled eight high, and a second plate with four pieces of toast cut in half diagonally, each buttered, with eight more pats of butter in a tiny bowl. Man. Jay had done the research. They really did eat like this. It was a wonder any of them had lived to be thirty.

  Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia

  Michaels was in his office trying to make sense of the new budget sheet his comptrollers had put together when Jay walked in. Nobody knocked around here. What did he have a secretary for? She never even tried to slow Jay down, far as he could tell.

  “Check it out, boss.” He waved his flatscreen.

  “I’m listening.”

  Jay handed Michaels the flatscreen and flopped onto the couch. “They got a boatload of computer programmers on that ship. Bet your ass that’s where the attacks on the web came from.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “Well, I was gonna rascal the personnel files for CyberNation, but Julio talked me out of it. Being as how that would be illegal, immoral, and probably fattening and all. But he got me thinking, and I dug it out using public stuff, perfectly legal.”

  “Dug what out, exactly.”

  “Okay, look at the list. What I did was, I borrowed a couple hours on the BFS machine at NSA and ran a bunch of INEST records through them.”

  Michaels nodded. BFS was the Cray computer nicknamed the Big Fucking Sorter, at the National Security Agency’s newly refurbished underground complex outside Fairfax. INEST was the InterNational Education Statistics Terminal mainframe, based in D.C.

  “Okay.”

  “And what I did was, I ran the top two percent of grads from top computer schools in the U.S. and Europe for the last ten years. I found out who they were, then crossed them with public records—drivers’ licenses, property taxes, income tax, like that.”

  “I’m still listening, but I’m getting older here. We getting to a point? I’ll stipulate that you are a brilliant fellow.”

  Jay laughed. “Well, okay. So what it comes down to is a whole bunch of these guys and girls who were the wonder kids of their graduating classes at CIT, MIT, Zurich U, U of Q, and all, seemed to have taken up official residence in Geneva, Switzerland. Doesn’t mean they all went to work for CyberNation, of course, but the brightest of that bunch have been spending time and money in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for the last six months. They went to Switzerland, then to Florida.”

  “Which means?”

  “Guess which gambling ship has half a dozen flights from its deck to Fort Lauderdale each and every day? And records I can access show these folks tend to show up in the same cycle each week. I make that their days off. They live and work on the ship, hop the copter, and fly to town for Saturday R&R.”

  Michaels nodded. Circumstantial, but a really big coincidence if that’s what it was. Occam’s razor would slice that one to confetti.

  “I can nail it down some more, but I think we’ve got a nest of programmers and weavers on that ship, and they are taking some trouble to keep it quiet, if not absolutely secret. And of course, the big question is: How come? And I think we all know the answer to that. They’ve gone over to the dark side.”

  “Well. I guess we need to find out for sure, don’t we?”

  Jay shook his head. “Harder to do. We might catch one on the deck webcam or something, but the ship’s records aren’t going out to the public. I don’t think we got
enough to get a court order for a search. Not that we could get one anyway. They don’t belong to us, and I doubt Libya cares.”

  Toni appeared at the doorway. “What’s up?”

  Michaels nodded at Jay, and gave her a quick rundown.

  “Good work, Jay,” she said. “So what now?”

  “Maybe somebody ought to take a trip to the ship and look around,” Michaels said.

  “All one has to do to get on board is show up at the heliport and flash a little credit to get a ride out to the floating casino,” Jay said. “Most of the patrons come from the U.S. Mainland, a few from Cuba and the other islands.”

  “You going to ask the FBI to check it out?” Toni asked.

  “They don’t have any jurisdiction there,” Michaels said. “And between you, me, and the hidden microphone in my lamp, I don’t trust the CIA as far as I can fly by waving my arms.”

  “What are you saying here, Alex?”

  “It’s the dead of winter. A little trip to the Caribbean to gamble and take in the tropical sun would be a nice break, don’t you think?”

  “Me, me!” Jay said. “I’ll do it!”

  “Nope,” Michaels said. He looked at Toni. “What do you think, Miz Michaels? You up for a little work out of town?”

  The look on her face was priceless.

  After Jay was gone, Toni said, “You’re serious.”

  “Yes, ma’am. We need to send somebody there to get the lay of the place.”

  “And you don’t want to do it.”

  “No, my wife would kill me if I went off like that, leaving her at home with a toddler.”

  “Seriously, Alex. Why me?”

  “As I recall, the last time I tried to avoid sending you on an assignment because I was being overly protective, I got my ass handed to me. I learned my lesson.”