Net Force

of scheduled images.

Plekhanov raised his face from the Mauser. An oily wisp of smoke drifted from the muzzle, the smell of burned powder entwined with it. Below and still a hundred meters distant, the enemy soldiers milled around in panic, then dropped prone, looking for targets. Some of them returned fire, but none of the bullets came close to where he was.

Enough damage for one day. He shouldered the rifle by its sling and headed for the tower's steps.

Monday, September 27th, 8:11 cum. Quantico

Everywhere Jay Gridley drove on the net, sirens screamed. The virtual highways were full of fire engines, ambulances, police cruisers, a whole shitload of activity as people went to repair the damage and to haul away metaphorical bodies. Within a few minutes, there had been major wrecks in at least three or four supposedly secure systems internationally, maybe more.

Jay drove the Viper at speed and got to the spots as best he could, legally when they allowed it, illegally when they didn't; what he saw was not good. It was the same guy dropping sharp spikes on the roads. The pattern was there, the same blurred and unidentifiable footprints as before, leading away and quickly dead-ending. Maybe the local operators couldn't see it, but Jay was sure of it. He couldn't ID the terrorist, but he knew it was one guy.

He pulled the Viper to a halt on a long and relatively straight stretch of the new Thailand-Burma Highway. A reporter stood next to a smoldering limo with a bunch of cops, making notes on a little flatscreen. Jay knew the guy slightly; he was a distant cousin a couple of times removed.

'Hey, Chuan, how's it goin'?'

'Jay? What are you doing here? Something I ought to know about?'

'Nah, just cruising.'

The other man looked around, seeming to shift his gaze as he blinked. 'Ah, your highway metaplay. I see you're still driving that bomb on wheels. I disremember what it's called, some kind of lizard or snake?'

'Viper. It gets me there.' He looked at the limo. 'So who's the cookie in the shake-and-bake portable oven there?'

'A mess, isn't it? Behold, our beloved Prime Minister Sukho. This is what's left of his career, anyhow. Somebody got past the OS security wards on his personal system, and then became very clever with the nasty pictures hidden therein. Gave them to my bosses. My service somehow managed to accidentally send a pair of them out with the feed — or so the editors say. I know a few would have happily done it on purpose.

'So, on the sports screen, instead of the photo of the Indonesian football team winning the World Soccer Cup in Brazil, we got our beloved Prime Minister being attended to by an enthusiastic professional girl well known in Bangkok as Neena the Cleaner. And two jumps later, on the international screen, instead of Malaysian Prime Minister Mohamad doing a nice ribbon-cutting with a bunch of dignitaries for a new rec facility at Cyberjaya, we gave our viewers Sukho on a big round bed with two other very naked Bangkok working girls seeing what will go where. Bet those pix raised an eyebrow or two at the old water cooler during break.' He smiled. 'Hey, you ever been to Cyberjaya? In RW, I mean?'

His cousin was talking about a nine-mile-by-thirty-mile zone in Malaysia called the Multimedia Super Corridor. Begun in ‘97, the MSC stretched south from Kuala Lumpur, and included at the south end a new international airport and a new federal capital, Putrajaya. 'Once,' Jay said. 'I spent a few days there a year or so back, a real-time seminar on the new graphic platform. Unbelievable place.'

'They say that's where CyberNation's programmers came from.'

'Yeah? I hadn't heard that. I heard nobody knew where they came from.'

'Rumors.' He shrugged. 'So much for the sordid tale of a political career gone south. I gotta get back and file my story.'

'Not a lucky man, your Prime Minister.'

'Oh, he's real lucky — thing is, it's all bad. This ain't America where the politicians can get away with such things, you know. It don't play with the family vote over here. Plus it is well known that Sukho's wife's brother was one of the Secret Bandit Warlords before he died. Word is, the wife's still got a couple SBW nephews out in the jungle who would just as soon cut you in half as look at you. The Prime Minister's wife is in big shame over this. Some pictures were of her, taken from a hidden camera, and I bet she didn't know about ‘em.' He waved at the burned-out limo. 'I was Sukho, I'd tap my Swiss accounts and retire someplace in a galaxy far, far away. And I'd do it under another name, and with fifty grand's worth of false teeth, hair dye, and plastic surgery, while I was at it.'

'I'd have thought his computer security would have been better than normal, given what he had to hide and him being a PM and all.'

'Yeah, you'da thought so. My guess is, next guy selling a pick-proof OS around here is gonna make a fortune.'

'Here and everywhere else.'

'I scan that. See you, Jay.'

'Later, Chuanny.'

After his cousin was gone, Jay considered the situation. So Thailand was going to get a new Prime Minister. That might or might not have much effect on the world, but he had to figure that whoever was doing this rascal had picked his targets carefully. To what end, Jay didn't know, but his gut feeling was that it was a real bad end.

He better get back himself. The boss would want to know about the newest developments.

On the way, however, something else caught his attention.

Holy shit!'

* * *

'Alex? I think you better see this.'

Michaels looked up and saw Toni in his doorway.

'In the conference room,' she added.

He followed her. The big-screen viewer was on, CNN.

A newscaster was doing a voice-over as images flashed across the large screen.

'Bombay, India — known by the locals as Mumbai — is the capital of Maharashtra and the major economic power of western India. Located on the shore of the Arabian Sea, it is a city steeped in culture. From the Victorian facades of the British Raj, to the tourist ghetto of Colaba, to the pulse-of-the-city Fort, eighteen million people call Mumbai home. Most of them are dirt-poor.'

There was an aerial shot of the city. Stock footage.

Michaels glanced at Toni and raised an eyebrow. Why did she want him to see a documentary on India?

'This is the sidebar,' she said. 'Wait a second and they'll get back to the main story.' She sounded grim.

'Modernization has brought at least some of Bombay into the twenty-first century,' the newscast continued. 'And modernization has reared its ugly head here today.'

The image shifted. Two buses had crashed together in an intersection. One of the red double-deckers lay on its side; the other was tilted, resting against the back of a fruit truck. Some kind of yellow-orange melons were scattered and shattered all over the street. Bodies were laid out along the narrow street's narrower sidewalks. Rescuers ran to the buses, pulling more dead or injured from the wrecks. A man covered with blood wandered in front of the camera, yelling something over and over. A small boy sat on the curb, staring at a woman lying next to him who was obviously dead.

'All over the city, computer-controlled traffic signals apparently turned green at the same instant.'

Another image. A major intersection with at least a dozen cars melded together by impacts. The cars were on fire, and an explosion rocked the scene, knocking the cameraman down. Somebody cursed in English: 'Shit, shit, shit!'

Here was a high-angle helicopter shot — scores of cars, trucks, motor scooters and bicycles compacted into jagged masses. The voice describing the event was excited, but not overly so: 'There are at least fifty known dead in a massive traffic pile-up on Marine Drive, with hundreds more injured, and estimates of other traffic fatalities in the city go as high as six hundred—'

Again the image shifted, showing a train station. A passenger train lay crumpled like a child's toy next to a stretch of track. Freight cars were scattered among the coaches, some of them turned onto their sides.

'At Churchgate Railway station, malfunctioning train signals apparently caused the collision of a Central