Cybernation (2001) Read online

  From his web research, Michaels had found that Plinck, a former Special Forces soldier, was one of the senior students of Paul de Thouars, a Dutch-Indonesian who, with his brothers Maurice, Willem, and Victor, had been among the first to bring the nasty and violent Javanese martial arts to the west. Probably the brothers all knew Toni’s teacher, the old lady Toni just called “Guru.”

  Toni could slaughter most men with what she knew, size notwithstanding.

  She hugged him. “Thank you, sweetie. This is terrific.”

  He smiled. Since Toni had been teaching him—he was up to djuru eight of eighteen—he had gotten more than a little interested in the art’s history in the U.S. One of the brothers—the youngest one, Victor—had apparently written some books on serak, and Michaels had a web search going to find those for Toni’s birthday.

  “Okay, sit right there, I’ll be right back.”

  “Going to slip into something more comfortable?”

  “No, goat-boy. I’m going to get your present. You really thought I forgot, didn’t you?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Liar.”

  He smiled, and she was back in less than a minute. “I had this hidden at the bottom of the spare Huggies pack. I knew you’d never find it there.”

  “Hey, come on! I change diapers all the time!”

  “Here.” She handed him a rectangular wooden box, hinged on one side, about the size and shape of a small hardback book.

  He undid the brass latch and opened it.

  “Whoa!”

  Inside, nestled into recesses carved out for them, were two small knives. They were kerambits, all steel, no handle scales, a quarter-inch thick, each with a short, sickle-shaped blade on one end, and a finger ring on the other. The edges were smoothed and scalloped with fancy filework. Toni had a pair—he’d used them once, against a drugged-to-the-gills psycho who’d wanted to kill him—and these looked almost identical, a little fancier with the filework. He took them out and without thinking, automatically slipped his index fingers through the rings, holding them in a reverse grip with the points curved forward and extending from the little finger edges of his hands. He regularly practiced his forms with her knives, so they felt comfortable.

  “I couldn’t find the knife maker who did Guru’s,” she said, excited for him. “But there’s this guy down in Baton Rouge, name of Shiva Ki, who specializes in custom-made stuff for martial artists, an old warrior himself. I sent him a picture and a tracing of mine, and he made these. They are nickel Damascus, almost like traditional kerises, too. I figured you should have your own.”

  He put the knives back into their case, and hugged her. “Thank you. They are beautiful.”

  “So maybe now I’ll go slip into something more comfortable,” she said.

  “Yeah, hurry, before the monster child from hell wakes up.”

  Toni left, and Michaels leaned back on the couch and looked at the little kerambits. He wondered what normal couples gave each other for anniversaries. Surely not a tape of how to stomp attackers into hamburger, or a pair of custom knives designed to fillet muggers? He laughed. What you got when you fell in love with a serious martial artist who converted you.

  “What are you laughing at in there?”

  “Nothing. Hurry up, I miss you.”

  Already his day was a thousand percent better.

  5

  On the Bon Chance

  Chance strolled through the casino, listening to the background sounds: the rumble of conversation from people playing cards, the musical tones of slot machines, the big, old-style roulette wheel with its clattering marble. Yeah, you could gamble on the web, do virtual games that looked and felt almost perfect, but there was always going to be a market for the high-end experience. Anybody could plug in and go on the web for VR; that didn’t get you bragging rights:

  “So, how was your weekend?”

  “Pretty good. Went to the Caribbean, played a little blackjack.”

  “Yeah? What program?”

  “Nah, man, no program—real world.”

  Except for the staff, none of the gamblers here had a clue as to what this ship’s main purpose was. Oh, sure, there was money to be made, and it did that, a handsome profit every month that got plowed back into the cause.

  What went on below the casino and cabins, in the electronic heart of the vessel, that was the important thing.

  This was one of the three main mobile loci for CyberNation. From here and from the other mobile and hardset locations, a virtual country was going to arise, and that was ironic, since it was going to be helped along in no small part by people who’d rather do things in RW than VR.

  “The web is the future! Information should be free! Access is all!”

  Yeah, right.

  The CyberNationals—her term for the human engines that drove the concept—really wanted this to happen. They believed the slogans. They ate, slept, and breathed the idea. And they had plenty of support, especially among kids who had grown up with computers as much a part of their lives as cars and television. Kids who figured that whatever they wanted, be it music, or vids, or books—those who could actually read—games, whatever, should be theirs for free. That some artist might spend a month or a year of his life creating something didn’t mean anything to them. Why should they pay for it? Take it, put it on the web, make it free to anybody who wanted to crank in and download it, that was how it should be, and screw anybody who didn’t like it.

  To these people, the concept of intellectual property, those who even understood it, was passé, a product of the Dark Ages, and those times were past. Extinct, like the dinosaurs, and good riddance.

  The way it should be? Well, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. They didn’t have a clue where that idea originally came from. They had no sense of history.

  Lenin must be laughing in his grave.

  Chance was a player, but she didn’t share the fanatical ideology the movers and shakers of CyberNation and their most rabid supporters embraced. It was a job. Well-paying, exciting, interesting, but a job, nonetheless. She could toe the party line, mouth the slogans, but she wanted to accomplish CyberNation’s goals for her own reasons. She was a winner. She didn’t like to lose.

  Roberto, dressed in a tuxedo, drifted over to intercept her. He looked good in the dress clothes—he looked good in any clothes, and out of them, too—though it had taken her some time to teach him the casual attitude he needed to make a tux work. Pretend you’re wearing a workshirt and blue jeans, she’d told him. Clothes don’t make the man, the man makes the clothes.

  “Missy,” he said. “How goes it?”

  “Fine. Meet me in the greenroom in ten minutes. I have a small chore for you.”

  He grinned, probably thinking it was carnal.

  Four decks down, past a heavy, locked steel door operated by a fingerprint reader, and manned by a pair of armed guards, was the greenroom. The term came from the entertainment industry: It was the traditional name of the place where actors, prepared to go on camera, waited until they were called.

  Roberto was there when Chance arrived.

  “What do you have for me?” he asked.

  She smiled. “Keep your shirt on, bucko. Don’t be so eager.”

  “That’s not what you usually tell me.”

  She allowed herself a tiny smile. “We have on board tonight Mr. Ethan Dowling, of Silicon Valley. He’s doing fairly well at the tables, up about five or six thousand dollars at the moment. He is also VP of Programming for Blue Whale Systems. We need to know everything he knows about the security codes for his company.”

  “No problem.”

  “Well, that’s not strictly true. First, we can’t do it here. You’ll have to follow him and grab him elsewhere. His chopper will ferry him to the airport in Miami, where he has a corporate jet waiting to take him to San Francisco. We want him to be on the Mainland, and preferably back on the West Coast, when this goes down.”
>
  “Still no problem.”

  She handed him a holograph of Dowling. He looked at it, nodded.

  “He has a pair of armed security guards with him. They are ex-FBI, expert shots, big, strong, and well-trained in mano a mano combat, too.” She gave him two more pictures, and he glanced at them.

  “Only two of them?” He flashed his white teeth in a big grin.

  “God, you’re an arrogant bastard, aren’t you?”

  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.

  Jay 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.