No signo ID, no residual DNA from the modem jack on the phone, no fingerprints.
A six-phone bank next to a coffee shop.
Phones are in a dead zone, no security cams watching “em. Records show thirty seven calls were made at those six phones between 5 p.m. and 5:20 p.m.
Good luck trying to find whoever sent it.” “Better tell your shift they won’t be partying tonight.” “Already done,” Jay said.
“We’re scanning all the major nets we can, we’ve turned all of our search engines on, have squeal bots roaming, and we’ve informed all of the big commercial services to grab anything coming in from 11:55 P.m. to 12:05 a.m. I expect we’re going to get real sick of reading “Happy New Year!” but if he posts anything on a major board or node, we should get it pretty quick.” Michaels said, “Good work. Jay. I guess I’ll be in my office.” “Happy New Year, Boss.” “Yeah. Right.”
PART TWO Secrets Made Manifest
Chapter 21
Saturday, January 1/, 2011, 12:03 a.m. Marietta, Georgia
Platt sat in the kitchen of his house, the house that had belonged to his mother before she died, his laptop computer on the wooden table next to the fridge. He took another big ole slug of the Southern Comfort and Coke over ice, and giggled.
Four minutes it had taken the Net Force pukes to snag his posting. He’d have thought they coulda done it in less, given they knew exactly when it was coming and all, but okay, cut ’em a little slack, they did have a lot of territory to cover.
He’d stuck a squealer on the note and dropped it into a public chat room on the World Online commercial service, the WOL room marked “Gay Texans.” Steers ‘n” Queers, he called that room, after an old joke his uncle had once told him about Texas. He liked to check in there once in a while and do a little VR vampire stuff on the fags, leading them on and all before he blasted them.
He had a great little piggyback virus, a Trojan horse he could embed in an e-mail.
That was a hot piece of software, infecting em ail, since you supposedly couldn’t do that. The queers’d open the mail, read a few lines of the hot sex stuff he put in, then bap! the virus would infect their computer. Unless they had the latest immune system software installed, it would eat their drive in about two days.
Served “em right for being fags.
He took another snort of the blended liquor and Coke, and laughed again.
He was remembering little Jay Gridley hopping out of that VR truck, trying to figure out why the sucker had slewed to a stop in the middle of the freeway. Time he got it, it was too late.
Haw!
Platt was on the wireless modem, had beamed a signal to a rebroadcaster, and then into a little throwaway stupe comp he’d set up in a rented room in San Diego, California. The stupe comp was set up for e-mail only, and rigged so it logged onto WOL and then sent the message and squeal at exactly 11:59: 59 Eastern Standard Time. When the squeal went off, it sent the signal back to the stupe comp, which routed it back through” the re broadcaster and to his laptop, to let him know.
Then the stupe comp wiped its hard drive and RAM disk clean, then fried the modem’s memory real good a complete wipe that nobody was going to undo and shut itself off. Probably they’d have a team of feds kicking in the room’s door in an hour or two, but that was okay. It’d give “em some thing to do, but finding the computer in San Diego wasn’t gonna do them no good, no good at all.
They couldn’t get anything off it that was gonna point them at him, three thousand miles away in Georgia laughing his ass off.
He lifted his glass, rattled the ice cubes, and held it up in a toast.
“Yo, Net Force. Happy Fucking New Year!” He drained the rest of the dark brown and slightly fizzy liquid in two big swallows, put the glass down on the table, then shut the laptop off.
The info in the squirt wasn’t much, a list of all the patients treated for STD’S sexually transmitted diseases reported to the Atlanta CDC Mednet for the last six months. By law, certain things had to be reported to the states, and eventually some of these things wound up at the Centers for Disease Control. There were a few eyebrow-raisin” names on the list, politicians, actors and actresses, some high profile big-money types, and even some visiting big shots, including a couple of sand nigrah princes. No real tactical value, the list, but it would be embarrassing as all hell trying to explain to your wife just how come you was treated for the clap.
Mainly it was some thing to rattle Net Force’s cage, to show that the little manifesto Hughes had cooked up was legit.
A throwaway, that was all.
Outside, the sounds of firecrackers and gunshots still echoed through the cold Georgia night.
“Oh, yeah, yeah–we havin’ fun now, ain’t we, boys?” Saturday, January 1/, 2011, 1 a.m.
Washington, D.c.
Hughes sat in bed, reading a recent biography of the Norwegian Vidkun Quisling.
Quisling, a career army officer whose name later came to be synonymous with “traitor,” had in the late 1930’s, formed a national socialist party in his country, the Nasjonal Samling. The party hadn’t done much, had never had any real power, but then the Germans had started a war and, in due course, had invaded Norway. Quisling tried to form his own government, which the Germans knocked down pretty quick, but since he was a home-grown national socialist who had once met with Hitler, the Nazis saw him as one of their own.
Quisling became a collaborator who was ultimately deemed responsible for sending hundreds of Jews to the death camps, along with trying to convert the schools and churches into pro-German organizations.
One of the first things the Norwegians had done after their liberation was to round up and arrest scores of known collaborators.
These were quickly tried, then quickly executed.
Quisling had been at the top of their list.
The biographer was convinced that Quisling’s policies had cost Germany the war. Had he not tried so hard to “Nazify” the country, the writer was convinced there would not have developed much of a Norwegian resistance movement. The Norwegians were from good Viking stock, not the least bit cowardly, as evidenced by the famous tale of their king and the Jewish symbol–when told that Jews must wear the Star of David sign in public to show who they were, supposedly King Haakon VII took up the symbol himself and urged all his people to do the same. That could be apocryphal, of course, but truth should never stand in the way of a good story. The Norwegians were also smart enough to figure out which way the winds of war were blowing. If things hadn’t been bad at home, they would have hunkered down and allowed the storm to blow itself out. But Quisling’s policies pissed them off.
The resistance movement was never more than a small thorn in the Nazddis’ side, but it did cause a fair amount of industrial sabotage. Foremost among the attacks was a major strike against the heavy-water production facilities in Rjukan.
The writer postulated that if the Germans had been able to speed up their atomic experiments, they would have likely developed a working atomic bomb before the United States did, and that such a weapon would have turned the tide of war in their favor. A few of those in the noses of V2 rockets launched from ships off the U.s. mainland at American cities would have done the trick.
If you accepted the theory, that was a reasonable assumption.
A mile-wide smoking crater in the middle of New York or Washington, D.c. would have given the Americans some thing to think about, all right.
Too bad for them, the Germans ran out of time.
It was left for America to build fission bombs that finished off the Japanese; atomics hadn’t even been needed to beat the Germans.
Hughes thought this Quisling-cost-the-war theory was some thing of a stretch, but the writer nonetheless echoed a valid point from all the vaults of history: For want of a nail, a war could be lost. One man, in the right place, at the right time, could alter the course of the entire world. There was a popular sci-fi plot device that frequently used this idea. What would happen if a time traveler went back and throttled Hitler as a boy? Or some Christian zealot time-traveled and rescued Jesus from the cross?
Or a tumble-footed paleontologist went back and accidentally killed the first protohuman ancestor from whom mankind would evolve?