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Roberta might die young, but by God, it was not going to be from sitting in one place too long.
He dropped to the floor next to a pedestal table and did fifty quick push-ups, flipped over onto his back, and did fifty twisting crunches, alternating from side to side, to work the obliques. That was what kept a man’s stomach pulled flat, the lateral muscles, not the abs in front.
He snapped up to his feet with a gymnastic move, a kip-up, then headed up the aisle again.
Jasmine was asleep in one of the recliners up front, the chair leaned back to make a bed, her seat belt fastened across her lap. Damn, but she looked good for a woman her age. Good lay, too, she knew some tricks. Maybe he should wake her up, join the mile-high club. Well. Renew their membership, anyway.
And maybe not. She was mean as a snake if anyone woke her suddenly. Besides, they had done it on the plane before. And on trains, buses, taxicabs, and once, in a horse carriage going around Central Park in New York. Never done it on a boat, though. When they got to the gambling ship down in the Caribbean, that would be the first chance to do it there.
He grinned at the thought. Nothing was better for a man than pussy.
Besides pussy, Santos had but one passion, and that was The Game. Jogo de Capoeira. It wasn’t just for fighting, though it gave you that. There was so much more-the music, the rituals, the manners, the company of fighting men. Yes, one learned the way to position oneself, the posicionamento, so that one could ataque or offer proper defesa. And all the flashy, acrobatic moves that impressed the unwary were necessary, but at the higher levels it was the subtle dance that played. The slight lean this way that told your opponent he could not touch you if he attacked. The shift that way that opened up an attacker like a blank book upon which you could write whatever you wished. It was art.
When first he had begun The Game, Santos had wanted
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ily to know the fastest way to knock an opponent from ; feet, the methods to throw a powerful fist or elbow or that would send a man sprawling. And he had those. But real mastery lay in the small details, ; constant circle in and out that hypnotized opponents, one or five of them, caused confusion and missteps that an expert could use to his advantage. The real experts were fifty, sixty years old, and you could not touch them no matter how fast or strong you were, because they knew what you were going to do before you Could do it. He was getting closer to that, but he was not ffiwe yet. He would be, eventually. * And the money he was making as Field Operations Bead of CyberNation’s security force was very good- enough that after a couple more years, he could retire, go , back to Rio, and study and teach The Game full-time. Work out all day, screw all night, sleep on the weekends, v What more could a man ask for?
Net Force HQ Qaantico, Virginia
JR their third meeting since the electronic attack on the net and web, Alex Michaels and his team had figured out Ibe easy part of the Five-W-and-One-H question: They knew what, when, and how. What they didn’t know was: who, why, and where they were.
|| Now hi the conference room with Jay Gridley, Lieu: tenant Julio Femandez, and Major Joseph Leffel, the actõ log head of the military arm, Michaels raised his eyebrows *;” the others. General John Howard would be arriving later in the day. It had taken some talk to get him to agree f ;.to come back, and he had to go home and tell his wife ‘iace-to-face before he would agree to it. But Michaels had a bad feeling about this, and he wanted Howard- had proved himself more than a few times-back on
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the team, at least until this was cleared up. He had a hunch it might come to guns, and when and if that happened, he wanted his best man leading the troops.
“Gentlemen?”
“Nothing new, boss,” Jay said. “My guys are back- walking every trail, but so far the pirates covered their asses pretty good. The regular feebs’ Carnivore and NSA’s snoopware have come up zip. The hackers had to be coordinating stuff on-line, there’s way too much going on, so we’re looking for ways they hid it. We’ve got random sampling of JPEGS, GIFS, TIFFS, PICTS, and all the common sound files attached to e-mail running through the stegaware plexes, but so far, nothing.”
Fernandez said, “Somebody want to translate that for the computer illiterate among us? Meaning me.”
Michaels grinned. “Jay is talking about steganography. Hiding things in plain sight.”
Jay, already tapping away at the keyboard of his flat- screen, said, “Check it out.”
A holoproj shimmered into view over the flatscreen. It was a picture of the Mona Lisa. “What do you see?”
“A famous painting of somebody who probably didn’t want to smile too big ’cause she had bad teeth?” Fernandez said.
“But that’s all,” Jay said. “However, we touch a button, presto! and look again.”
The image melted, and left several words floating in the air: “Up yours, feds!”
Fernandez looked at Jay.
“We got this off a steganography website run by a ten- year-old kid.
“The word means ‘covered writing.’ It goes back to the Greeks,” Jay said, “though the Chinese and the Egyptians and Native Americans all did variations of it. Since the Greeks gave us the word, here’s how an early release worked: Say Sprio wanted to send a secret message to Zorba, so what he did was, he had a slave’s head shaved, tattooed the message on the scalp, then waited for the
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e’s hair to grow back. Then he sent the slave to his w__, who shaved his head again. Slave didn’t even know llAhat it said. Even if he could read, he wouldn’t be able see it.”
“Clever. But kind of a slow process,” Fernandez said. jplow long it take for the hair to grow back enough to *” >ver it? Five, six weeks?”
“Those were the good old days. Um. Anyway, you can tffio much the same with electronic pictures. They are made pi> of pixels, millions of mem in some cases, and some jfiren’t as important as others. Without getting too technifial, you can take a standard RGB-that’s red, green, I blue-image and, with a little manipulation, hide all kinds of information bits in it without affecting what a human eye can see. If you run it through the right program, the bidden stuff shows up.
“So, you send an e-mail addressed to your mother with a picture of your beautiful two-year-old boy, and right ‘there in the middle of his face can be the specs for how to build a nuclear bomb.” k “Great,” Fernandez said. s “Welcome to the future, Lieutenant. u “See, if somebody sends a big bunch of encrypted ma- Sterial and we happen to spot it, we might get suspicious. UpSverybody is watching me net these days, and a lot of e’iifttoail gets scanned by one agency or another. Even if we ||<6an't break the code, it might alert us enough to track ||f jdown who sent it and received it, maybe pay them a little ?œvisit to see what they look like. But a picture of a little kid sent to his grandma? Who'd suspect that?" "Some paranoid Net Force op who couldn't find anything else?" Fernandez said. | "Right. And if you really want to make our jobs hard, % not only do you hide the sucker in the middle of some- :v where nobody is gonna look, you also encrypt it, which ||-is double protection. Use a one-time-only code, and by Ijjfehe time anybody might be able to break it, whatever you Ipvere talking about is ancient history." 30 NET FORCE "All of which is fascinating but not helping us find the bad guys," Michaels said. "All right, let's break this up. We'll meet again in the morning, call if you get anything useful before then." Jay nodded. Jay watched the others leave, until only he and Fernandez were left in the conference room. He said, "So, you up to speed on all this, Julio?" "Might as well have been speaking Swahili far as I'm concerned." Jay laughed. "Maybe I can translate. How much do you know about the net and the web?" Fernandez shrugged. "There's a difference between the net and the web? I dunno if you remember or not, but it took me six months to figure out where the on/off button was on my issue computer. I got a few things from Joanna since then, but I'm basically an analog kind of guy. I figure if God had wanted us to count higher than twenty, He'd have given us more fingers and toes."