Cybernation (2001) Read online

  Garret finished his beer, put the can down, picked up the fresh one. “No more than anybody else,” he said, offering another shrug.

  “What do you hear about it?”

  “Usual stuff. Somebody seeded a whole bunch of the suckers where our ships would run into ’em. Nobody knows who, but I got a buddy in Navy Intelligence says it might have been CyberNation did it.”

  Jay was surprised to hear this. “CyberNation?”

  “What I heard.”

  Jay thought about that. Why would CyberNation want to disrupt the web? With it down, that could only hurt their business.

  Maybe not, said Jay’s little internal skeptic.

  No? Why?

  Remember the detail shop guy?

  Jay looked at the dirty mirror behind the bar, got a glimpse of himself looking thoughtful. Ah.

  Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia

  In the commander’s office, Jay sprawled on the couch, looking at the boss.

  “And what exactly does this reference mean?” Michaels said. “Detail shop?”

  “Well, if the CyberNation folks did do it, they are smarter than I would have guessed.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Last time I went home to visit my folks, there was a local scandal. A guy had gone into business detailing cars—waxing, buffing, cleaning up dead paint, like that—and business had taken a downward turn. So late one night, the guy took a run through a fairly well-off neighborhood nearby and spray painted squiggles on fifty or sixty cars parked outside of their garages.”

  The boss nodded. “Okay.”

  “You see where this is going. Guy got an immediate influx of new business the next day—he used a kind of paint he knew he could get off without too much trouble—and he had to hire a couple of kids to help him, he had so many new customers. He didn’t get them all—some owners did their own cars, and there were other detail shops—but he got twenty-odd cars, at a hundred and fifty a pop. After paying his new helpers their minimum wage, and allowing for buffing pads and polishing compounds and all, he cleared almost three thousand dollars. Not a bad return for an investment of fifteen minutes and a can of spray paint.

  “Business tapered off again, so the guy waited a couple weeks and then did another midnight graffiti run. This time, he made almost five grand.

  “Now, if he’d quit then, he’d been ahead of the game. But it was easy money.

  “So, every couple of weeks for the next few months, the detail man would sneak through a nice neighborhood and make work for himself. The local police figured the painter was probably a teenager bent on nothing more than half-witted vandalism, and the detail guy might have kept his scam going for years, but he tripped himself up. Not wanting another shop to get too many of his customers, he tended to hit the same neighborhoods, those close to his own place of business. One of the car owners whose car had been decorated three times got pissed off enough to set up a videocam watching his driveway. The detail man had been smart enough to pull a ski mask over his head when he ran into somebody’s driveway, so nobody could see his face. And he had driven a different car each time, belonging to customers who’d left them overnight. Thing was, the cam picked up the license plate on the getaway vehicle. The cops were able to trace it to the owner, who supplied them with the information that the car had been at the detail shop on the night in question. They found the empty spray paint can in the guy’s trash bin, leaned on him, and he gave it up. End of crime spree.”

  “All right, I can see where you’re going, but I don’t see how it applies. Didn’t CyberNation’s customers have the same problems everybody else had when the net and web went wonky?”

  “Funny you should ask. I checked it out. During the outage we had, everybody who had logged on through the affected phone companies and backbone servers had the same problems. But none of CyberNation’s customers using their hardwired-direct server connections lost their links. Now maybe that doesn’t mean anything by itself, but it would be a big selling point! Hey, when all the other servers were scrambling around to figure out which way was up, we here at CyberNation had our act together!”

  “That’s a reach, Jay. Didn’t lots of folks who weren’t CyberNation customers sail along just fine?”

  “Yep, that’s true. But at least it’s a possibility. Any time a big server has problems, they lose customers. Fifty years ago, nobody had a computer at home, nobody was doing biz on the web. Now, a lot of folks make their living from it. Before telephones, people wrote letters or did things face-to-face—now, every company has a phone, and most of them with any brains have a web presence. You have to have one to compete. Shut any of that down, and they look for a fast fix. Switching servers is easy. If you can claim yours is reliable, you’ll get some of the movers.”

  Michaels nodded. “All right. What do you have in mind?”

  “I’m thinking that unless I turn up something that shows it definitely couldn’t be them, maybe I ought to keep looking at things in that direction. It’s not like we have a lot else to go on. Well, until next time.”

  “You think there will be a next time?”

  “I’d bet money on it, boss. A disruption on that scale took a lot of time and money and talent. It wasn’t something a couple of high school hackers dreamed up just for the hell of it over chocolate shakes at the malt shop. We’ll see these guys again. They have something in mind, and that first time could have been a test run. Next go ’round, it could be worse.”

  “Find them before that happens, Jay.”

  “I’m working on it, believe me.”

  San Francisco, California

  The thing with professional bodyguards was that they were so predictable.

  Santos watched the pair escorting his target to a limo, and smiled. This computer guy was a low-priority item. With only two guards he was not seriously protected—somebody who was in real danger of being snatched or killed would have six or eight armed bodies working him, at a minimum, and if they were any good, you would only see the ones they wanted you to see, the others would either be out of sight or somebody you wouldn’t consider a guard or a threat: a woman pushing a baby carriage, an old man leaning on a cane, somebody who appeared to be something he or she was not.

  Mr. Ethan Dowling, of Silicon Valley, had only the two show guards, and these would be enough to keep honest people from bothering him. They might be tough and well-trained, but they were limited because they were right out there in plain sight. If all he wanted to do was kill Mr. Dowling, that would be easy: set up a hiding spot four or five hundred meters away, line up with a rifle, wait for the right moment, then spike him, end of mission.

  Santos had undergone the sniper training program from the rebel paramilitary organization Blue Star, which was almost exactly the same as the one used by the U.S. Navy SEALs. With a good bolt-action rifle, he could get off three aimed shots in less than two seconds. These days, you didn’t even have to worry about methods of estimating range. A good sniper scope would have a built-in range finder. Line it up, look at the readout, adjust your sights for elevation and windage, blam! the man was dead before the sound of the bullet reached his ears. By the time the guards pulled their heads out of their asses, you could spike both of them, too, if you felt like it.

  But this was an information-gathering mission, not a simple assassination. He had to put the bodyguards out of commission, capture the target, get what he needed, then kill them all so their deaths would appear to have been an accident, which—despite what he had told Missy—was not so easy.

  Still, as he watched the limo pull away from the curb, with both guards in it—one driving, the other in the front seat—he was confident he could do the job. It would require a little preparation, but he had the resources of CyberNation at his disposal, including large amounts of electronic cash, and he would have all that he needed in a few hours. Throw enough money at some problems, they got buried. Just like Mr. Dowling and his two bodyguards were going to get buried—after he had
what he needed.

  On the Bon Chance

  Keller lay naked on his back on the bed, exhausted.

  Next to him, Jasmine Chance, as naked as he was, rolled over onto her belly and smiled at him.

  Keller said, “If Santos knew you were with me, what would he do?”

  She shrugged. “Probably nothing. He doesn’t own me.”

  “He strikes me as a man who might be prone to jealousy.”

  “Are you worried?”

  “Damned right. He could kill me with one hand.”

  “I bet he could do it without using his hands at all,” she said.

  “Great. I really need to hear this.”

  “Are you unhappy with the sex, Jackson?”

  “No. No, the sex is terrific. Very, uh, relaxing.”

  “That’s good. I don’t want you tense. How is the next attack shaping up?”

  “Almost done. A few more tweaks, some more security, we’re ready to launch.”

  “Excellent.”

  “That is, if Santos doesn’t come back from his mission and decide to beat my head in for sleeping with you.”

  “I won’t tell him if you won’t.”

  “We aren’t the only two people on the boat.”

  “Leave Roberto to me. I have ways of calming him down.”

  “That I believe.”

  “Come, I’ll show you something new.”

  “I can’t. The beast is in a coma, sorry.”

  “Want to bet your next month’s pay against a dollar on that? Have you ever heard of the Viennese Oyster?”

  “Can’t say as I have.”

  “Watch.”

  She rolled over onto her back and did something with her legs he wouldn’t have thought she was nearly flexible enough to do. Both feet behind her head. Damn.

  A good thing he didn’t take the bet.

  7

  Washington, D.C.

  Another day had passed without any major assaults on his domain, and Michaels was careful not to allow himself to feel too good about that. He didn’t want to incur the wrath of a bored angel. He had finished his workout, and was looking forward to a beer and a quiet evening, maybe turn on the TV to watch some mindless sitcom, no heavy lifting.

  He had just gotten dry from his shower and was reaching for his bathrobe when Toni told him to hold it—then told him why.

  “Excuse me? You want me to try on a dress?”

  “Not a dress, Alex—”

  “Okay, fine, a skirt.”

  “A sarong. Some places they call it a wrap. Half the men in the tropical Third World wear them every day of life.”

  “Not this man. That’s why God made short pants.”

  “Think of it as a kilt.”

  “A kilt, a sarong, a sixty-three Chevy Impala, it doesn’t matter what you call it, it’s a skirt!”

  Toni laughed.

  “I won’t wear it.”

  “Oh, yes, you will. You volunteered us for this demo, remember? And when we do formal demonstrations of Pukulan Pentjak Silat Serak, we wear formal clothes. You saw that Plinck videotape. You bought it for me.”

  “They were wearing sweatpants underneath,” he said.

  “Fine, you can wear sweatpants under yours if it makes you happy.”

  “It will make me less unhappy.”

  “Come on, Alex! You can’t have any doubts about your masculinity. The baby looks just like you.”

  “No, he doesn’t. He looks like you.” He tried to keep a straight face, but finally gave it up and laughed.

  “That’s what I thought,” she said.

  “Admit it, I had you going for a minute there,” he said.

  “Did not.”

  “Did too.”

  He followed her into the bedroom. She opened her closet and came out holding two hangers. “Okay, which do you want, the celestial or the bamboo?” She held up two squares of brightly colored cloth. “Genuine handmade Indonesian batik from Bali, the finest one hundred percent rayon.”

  “You don’t think I’m gonna wear a girl’s sarong?”

  “Give it up, Alex. They’re unisex and one size fits all.” She pulled the garments off the hangers and unfolded them in a cascade of patterned azure. One, with what looked like stars drawn by somebody tanked up on psychedelic drugs, was dark, mostly indigo; the other was also blue, but lighter, with bamboo plants done in blues and whites.

  “Maybe the bamboo. Jeez, it’s as big as a tablecloth!”

  “Come here, I’ll show you how to put it on.”

  “Hey, I can wrap a towel around my waist, thank you.”

  “And it would fall off the first time I threw you.”

  “You’d do it on purpose.”

  “Damned straight.”

  He smiled. She handed him the bamboo-patterned cloth, which was as big as a tablecloth, had to be seven or eight feet long by maybe four feet wide.

  “Watch me.”

  She demonstrated the way to put it on. “Okay, you wrap it around, like so, then fold it on your left side, and back upon itself, this way. Traditionally, it’ll stay in place with just folding it, but since we are going to be more active, we’ll use a safety pin for the demo, one here, then fold it back to the right, another pin there, then fan-fold it back and forth narrowing it each time, like this, then roll it down in folds to make a waistline, and shorten it at the bottom, see? It should hang to your knees.”

  “You wish.”

  “Not as much as you do,” she said.

  He watched, tried to duplicate her moves. When he was done it looked pretty good—until he let go and it fell down in a pool around his bare ankles.

  “Great. Won’t that look good in front of the FBI students. The Hawaiian will laugh himself silly. Two pins, you said?”

  “Yes. In your case, I think diaper pins would be best.”

  “Ha, ha. You are so funny.”

  “Yes, I am, aren’t I? Try again. Keep tension on it with your elbow, here, then here, until you get the waist rolled down to lock it into place.”

  He did what she said, and this time when he let go, the sarong stayed in position.

  “Well?”

  “Have to admit, it’s comfortable.”

  “No worse than wearing a towel wrapped around you when you get out of the shower.”

  “Except I wouldn’t wear a towel in front of a bunch of people in public.”

  “You do it at the gym, don’t you?”

  “That’s different. It’s just the guys.”

  “Ah, now we get to it. You’re worried that some strange woman might see your wee-wee?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you should be. I don’t want you showing that to other women. Small as it is.”

  He laughed. “I just don’t want to feel like some kind of weird pervert is all. Men don’t wear skirts in this country.”

  “As opposed to a nonweird pervert?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “So the half-billion men who wear these are perverted?”

  “I didn’t say that. Speaking of which.”

  “Of which?”

  “Perverts. I had an interesting visit with Jay today.”

  “Nice segue there. I’m sure Jay will love the transition. What about?”

  “You aren’t gonna believe it. But given the direction of the conversational road you’re dragging me down . . .”

  “Me? I’m not the low-self-esteem-I-can’t-wear-a-sarong-because-people-will-think-I’m-funny-looking guy here.”

  He shook his head.

  “Okay, so what about Jay?”

  “You’re kidding,” Toni said.

  Alex shook his head. “Not according to Jay.”

  “And how would Jay know?”

  “That was my first question, too.” He grinned. “He said a good computer op has to do enough research to know the field.”

  “And how does his fiancée feel about this research?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  They had
moved into the kitchen, Alex still in the sarong. It was very thin cloth, and he looked sexy in it. She glanced at the carrot she was about to slice. She held it up, then used the Japanese chef’s knife to lop the ends off.

  “Is that an editorial comment?”

  “Make of it what you will.”

  He laughed.

  She went back to dicing the carrot for their salad. With her mother watching the baby at her hotel, they had the place to themselves. Well, for a couple more hours, at least.

  Alex said, “It doesn’t really surprise me, when I stop and think about it. There has always been a certain amount of porn on the net, even back in the very early days. Newsgroups dedicated to various perversions, web pages where you could download pictures or movies, even some chat-room interactive stuff. And with scenarios in VR getting better and better, it was only a matter of time.”

  “But fully interactive internet sex? That seems so-so—”

  “Weird?”

  “That’ll do for a start, yeah. You wouldn’t think it would be possible.”

  “Well, according to Jay, it’s been possible since before the turn of the century. In the early days, you could buy things like full-sized silicone dolls, with functional, uh, apertures, complete with vibrators. Plug ’er in, and go to town. But that was just high-tech masturbation. Now, you can connect yourself to various, ah, machines, dial up a friend, log into a joint VR sex feelie, and what you see is what you feel. Jay says the machines started out as things like phone pagers, but got a lot more sophisticated pretty quick. Some of them can mimic a penis or a vagina, either with expandable silicone rods, or as many as sixteen sequentially motor-driven, heated silicone undulant pads.”

  “Do I want to hear this?”

  “I dunno, do you?”

  Toni thought about it for a second. “Sure. Never let it be said that after I got married and had a child I automatically turned into an old stick-in-the-mud.”

  “The folks who are really into this call the sex devices McCleans.”

  Toni finished the carrot, reached for another, and raised one eyebrow.