Cybernation

“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.

“Now, if he’d quit then, he’d been ahead of the game. But it was easy money.

“So, every couple of weeks for the next few months, the detail man would sneak through a nice neighborhood and make work for himself. The local police figured the painter was probably a teenager bent on nothing more than half-witted vandalism, and the detail guy might have kept his scam going for years, but he tripped himself up. Not wanting another shop to get too many of his customers, he tended to hit the same neighborhoods, those close to his own place of business. One of the car owners whose car had been decorated three times got pissed off enough to set up a videocam watching his driveway. The detail man had been smart enough to pull a ski mask over his head when he ran into somebody’s driveway, so nobody could see his face. And he had driven a different car each time, belonging to customers who’d left them overnight. Thing was, the cam picked up the license plate on the getaway vehicle. The cops were able to trace it to the owner, who supplied them with the information that the car had been at the detail shop on the night in question. They found the empty spray paint can in the guy’s trash bin, leaned on him, and he gave it up. End of crime spree.”

“All right, I can see where you’re going, but I don’t see how it applies. Didn’t CyberNation’s customers have the same problems everybody else had when the net and web went wonky?”

“Funny you should ask. I checked it out. During the outage we had, everybody who had logged on through the affected phone companies and backbone servers had the same problems. But none of CyberNation’s customers using their hardwired-direct server connections lost their links. Now maybe that doesn’t mean anything by itself, but it would be a big selling point! Hey, when all the other servers were scrambling around to figure out which way was up, we here at CyberNation had our act together!”

“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, until 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. With only two guards he was not seriously protected — somebody who was in real danger of being snatched or killed would have six or eight armed bodies working him, at a minimum, and if they were any good, you would only see the ones they wanted you to see, the others would either be out of sight or somebody you wouldn’t consider a guard or a threat: a woman pushing a baby carriage, an old man leaning on a cane, somebody who appeared to be something he or she was not.

Mr. Ethan Dowling, of Silicon Valley, had only the two show guards, and these would be enough to keep honest people from bothering him. They might be tough and well-trained, but they were limited because they were right out there in plain sight. If all he wanted to do was kill Mr. Dowling, that would be easy: set up a hiding spot four or five hundred meters away, line up with a rifle, wait for the right moment, then spike him, end of mission.

Santos had undergone the sniper training program from the rebel paramilitary organization Blue Star, which was almost exactly the same as the one used by the U.S. Navy SEALs. With a good bolt-action rifle, he could get off three aimed shots in less than two seconds. These days, you didn’t even have to worry about methods of estimating range. A good sniper scope would have a built-in range finder. Line it up, look at the readout, adjust your sights for elevation and windage, blam! the man was dead before the sound of the bullet reached his ears. By the time the guards pulled their heads out of their asses, you could spike both of them, too, if you felt like it.

But this was an information-gathering mission, not a simple assassination. He had to put the bodyguards out of commission, capture the target, get what he needed, then kill them all so their deaths would appear to have been an accident, which — despite what he had told Missy — was not so easy.

Still, as he watched the limo pull away from the curb, with both guards in it — one driving, the other in the front seat — he was confident he could do the job. It would require a little preparation, but he had the resources of CyberNation at his disposal, including large amounts of electronic cash, and he would have all that he needed in a few hours. Throw enough money at some problems, they got buried. Just like Mr. Dowling and his two bodyguards were going to get buried — after he had what he needed.

On the Bon Chance

Keller lay naked on his back on the bed, exhausted.

Next to him, Jasmine Chance, as naked as he was, rolled over onto her belly and smiled at him.

Keller said, “If Santos knew you were with me, what would he do?”

She shrugged. “Probably nothing. He doesn’t own me.”

“He strikes me as a man who might be prone to jealousy.”

“Are you worried?”

“Damned right. He could kill me with one hand.”

“I bet he could do it without using his hands at all,” she said.

“Great. I really need to hear this.”

“Are you unhappy with the sex, Jackson?”

“No. No, the sex is terrific. Very, uh, relaxing.”

“That’s good. I don’t want you tense. How is the next attack shaping up?”

“Almost done. A few more tweaks, some more security, we’re ready to launch.”

“Excellent.”

“That is, if Santos doesn’t come back from his mission and decide to beat my head in for sleeping with you.”

“I won’t tell him if you won’t.”