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
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p bartender could see them, then pointed at himself and The woman came over, put two more beers on the The sailor put a couple dollar bills on the bar, the took them, then hustled off. /id Garret,” the sailor said, offering his hand, shook his hand. Davy in the Navy. “Jay Gridley,” rsaid. |*You… Korean? Japanese?”
&y grinned. “Part Thai,” he said. “Born here, though.” jpSarrett shrugged. “No offense. I just got back from in Southeast Asia, off the coast of Vietnam.” He anced the last part of the name so it rhymed with .’am” and not “mom.” fSPfcked a good time for shore leave.”
fell, yeah. I been balling chicks left, right, and center. : big party. Had to stop and top off my tanks before I ; back into it” He waved vaguely at the door.
took another swig of his beer and said, “So, you ; a Navy man, you probably know about all that busi- , with the minefields.” ^- “Minefields” in this case was VR scenario-speak for the blems with the net and web. Garret finished his beer, put the can down, picked up .fresh one. “No more than anybody else,” he said, of- og another shrug. I “What do you hear about it?”
“;:”Usual stuff. Somebody seeded a whole bunch of the where our ships would run into ’em. Nobody vs who, but I got a buddy in Navy Intelligence says I might have been CyberNation did it.” JJay was surprised to hear this. “CyberNation?” 1 “What I heard.”
I Jay thought about that. Why would CyberNation want ^disrupt the web? With it down, that could only hurt
business.
Maybe not, said Jay’s little internal skeptic. (No? Why? Remember the detail shop guy?
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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.
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i “Now, if he’d quit then, he’d been ahead of the game. ; it was easy money.
*,’*Sp, every couple of weeks for the next few months, detail man would sneak through a nice neighborhood make work for himself. The local police figured the was probably a teenager bent on nothing more i half-witted vandalism, and the detail guy might have : his scam going for years, but he tripped himself up. : wanting another shop to get too many of his custom, he tended to hit the same neighborhoods, those close
i. his own place of business. One of the car owners whose
had been decorated three times got pissed off enough
set up a videocam watching his driveway. The detail had been smart enough to pull a ski mask over his when he ran into somebody’s driveway, so nobody 1 see his face. And he had driven a different car each belonging to customers who’d left them overnight, was, the cam picked up the license plate on the
away vehicle. The cops were able to trace it to owner, who supplied them with the information that
I car had been at the detail shop on the night in ques- They found the empty spray paint can in the guy’s bin, leaned on him, and he gave it up. End of crime
k **
“All right, I can see where you’re going, but I don’t i how it applies. Didn’t CyberNation’s customers have same problems everybody else had when the net and i went wonky?” œ”Funny you should ask. I checked it out. During the we had, everybody who had logged on through affected phone companies and backbone servers had same problems. But none of CyberNation’s customers their hardwired-direct server connections lost their Now maybe that doesn’t mean anything by itself, it would be a big selling point! Hey, when all the servers were scrambling around to figure out which was up, we here at CyberNation had our act to
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“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, untif 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.
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only two guards he was not seriously protected- who was in real danger of being snatched or would have six or eight armed bodies working him, . minimum, and if they were any good, you would only the ones they wanted you to see, the others would be out of sight or somebody you wouldn’t consider it guard or a threat: a woman pushing a baby carriage, an man leaning on a cane, somebody who appeared to something he or she was not.
||’ Mr. Ethan Dowling, of Silicon Valley, had only the two dw guards, and these would be enough to keep honest j)le from bothering him. They might be tough and 1-trained, but they were limited because they were out there hi plain sight. If all he wanted to do was . Mr. Dowling, that would be easy: set up a hiding spot or five hundred meters away, line up with a rifle, : for the right moment, then spike him, end of mission. 5 Santos had undergone the sniper training program from rebel paramilitary organization Blue Star, which was : exactly the same as the one used by the U.S. Navy s. With a good bolt-action rifle, he could get off aimed shots in less than two seconds. These days, didn’t even have to worry about methods of estimat- range. A good sniper scope would have a built-in finder. Line it up, look at the readout, adjust your its for elevation and windage, blaml the man was dead fore the sound of the bullet reached his ears. By the the guards pulled their heads out of then* asses, you Id spike both of them, too, if you felt like it. .But this was an information-gathering mission, not a pie assassination. He had to put the bodyguards out of lission, capture the target, get what he needed, then them all so their deaths would appear to have been accident, which-despite what he had told Missy- not so easy.