Tom Clancy's Net Force 6-10 (17 page)

Read Tom Clancy's Net Force 6-10 Online

Authors: Tom Clancy

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BOOK: Tom Clancy's Net Force 6-10
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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, put 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 comeback. 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.
But . . .
Where was the honor in that? The skill? The
knowing
that he could take Jay on and beat him, using the weapons they had developed with their brains. Any thug could crack somebody over the head with a club. Beating Jay Gridley
mano a mano
, VR against VR, computer to computer,
that
was something to make a man feel good.
Kill Jay? No. Not with a gun or knife. Beating him at his own game, that was how he would do it. Defeating him intellectually, shattering his confidence, taking away what he thought he was, that was worse than death for a man like Jay Gridley.
Nothing less would do.
He took a deep breath. Well. Might as well get started. He had a couple of things he could give Jay to chew on. He smiled. Yes, indeed.

 

Santos finished his exercises. Drenched in sweat, he headed for the shower.
The workout had been good, but he was getting stale. It had been too long since he had trained against an expert. The solo dances were okay for maintaining muscle tone, to stay flexible and to keep alive the basics, but you did not learn to fight men by practicing alone. Mirror warriors were no threat. To keep a skill sharp, you had to hone it against another player of equal or better skill. Timing, distance, position, those could only be learned against dangerous opposition. The flow had to be there.
Soon, he would have to find players of enough ability to challenge him. There were none on this ship, none within easy travel range. Maybe in Cuba—he had heard there were some old-line players still there, hiding in the cane fields, practicing by moonlight, since the art was still frowned on, even after the Old Man was gone—but finding them would be the trick. There were some in the U.S., of course, even in Florida, but to get a
real
challenge, he would need to go home, that’s where the best players still were, and that was not in the cards in the near future—not until this job was finished.
He sighed. A man had to learn to put off his wants to deal with his needs.
He turned the cold water on full blast, shucked his pants, and stepped into the shower. The cold needles made him catch his breath, but it was a good feeling.
Then there was the problem of Missy Chance to consider. She was sleeping with Jackson Keller, at least, maybe others—who knew? One of the barmaids in the casino had told Santos this while she had been enjoying his body in her room, after he had returned from dispatching the vice president of the server company.
Santos soaped the long-handled and stiff-bristled brush and began to scrub his face and neck.

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