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 could 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
b'” Diner
i City, Karua* >. 1955
e’s Diner was a classic-or it would be, if it survived 5 1980s. Shaped like a fat hot dog bun, the front was from waist-height up. Inside, a counter with boo- patterns on the Formica ran the length of the e, and was utilized by sitting upon bolted-to-the floor ome-plated stools with red Naugahyde covering the tops. Joe’s served burgers, fries, and toasted sandwiches for lunch. For dinner, the blue plate was sliced roast beef and mashed potatoes, both with thick gravy, and your choice of a vegeta- -as long as it was canned green peas or diced carrots, breakfast, you could get ham and eggs, bacon and or sausage and eggs, and they all came with hash s. If you were looking for health food, you’d starve death in Joe’s, and nobody would feel sorry for you.
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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 passthrough. He yelled at the cook, “Four-mixedshredded-fatbackshortdollarsand-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
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saucer. Mahler spooned four teaspoons of sugar in- |lhe cup, poured a little glass bottle of cream into it, the concoction a couple of times, then sipped at it. bucks would have a field day here, zing they weren’t all diabetics, too. 3, here’s your information,” Mahler said. He slid the across the counter toward Jay. nks.”
problem. Anything I can do to keep those Red at bay, you just call.” ay smiled. The fifties were full of people worrying that
communists would be storming ashore at Palisades or Long Beach at any moment. Senator McCarthy played the country’s fears like a rock drummer on hammers his skins, at least for a while. And even
HUAC-the House Committee on UnAmerican Ac- ities-finally faded, the Red Scare lingered until the et Union broke up, almost forty years later. For a e, anybody who considered himself a patriot would do ing for any government agency who hinted it would |)p stem the Red Tide threatening to engulf the world… j^’Your government thanks you, Mr. Mahler.” Jay opened the folder. Julio Fernandez had been right. ; had been able to get to the information legally. It was long way around, but it was all public information, I if you knew what you were looking for, and you knew to look for it, it was all there to be had. He scanned : list, nodded at the names, and smiled again. The boss
gonna love this. ; Mahler’s breakfast arrived, and it was positively Rychedelic-looking. Bright yellow scrambled eggs, lish-brown strips of crisp bacon, a stack of pancakes diameter of a saucer, piled eight high, and a second ate with four pieces of toast cut in half diagonally, each with eight more pats of butter in a tiny bowl, i. Jay had done the research. They really did eat like It was a wonder any of them had lived to be thirty.
232 NET FORCE
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.”
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lay laughed. “Well, okay. So what it comes down to is tie bunch of these guys and girls who were the won- kids of their graduating classes at CIT, MIT, Zurich U of Q, and all, seemed to have taken up official resin Geneva, Switzerland. Doesn’t mean they all ; to work for CyberNation, of course, but the brightest t bunch have been spending time and money in Fort ile, Florida, for the last six months. They went to itzerland, then to Florida.” |”Which means?”
which gambling ship has half a dozen flights i its deck to Fort Lauderdale each and every day? And I can access show these folks tend to show up in i same cycle each week. I make that then- days off. They ; and work on the ship, hop the copter, and fly to town Saturday R&R.”
Michaels nodded. Circumstantial, but a really big co- nce if that’s what it was. Occam’s razor would slice : one to confetti.
“I can nail it down some more, but I think we’ve got st of programmers and weavers on that ship, and they taking some trouble to keep it quiet, if not absolutely And of course, the big question is: How come? > I think we all know the answer to that. They’ve gone Ver 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
i the deck webcam or something, but the ship’s records
en’t going out to the public. I don’t think we got enough
get a court order for a search. Not that we could get