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.
When first he had begun The Game, Santos had wanted only to know the fastest way to knock an opponent from his feet, the methods to throw a powerful fist or elbow or knee that would send a man sprawling. And he had learned those. But real mastery lay in the small details, the constant circle in and out that hypnotized opponents, whether 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 there yet. He would be, eventually.
And the money he was making as Field Operations Head 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. What more could a man ask for?
In their third meeting since the electronic attack on the net and web, Alex Michaels and his team had figured out the 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 in the conference room with Jay Gridley, Lieutenant Julio Fernandez, and Major Joseph Leffel, the acting head of the military arm, Michaels raised his eyebrows at the others. General John Howard would be arriving later in the day. It had taken some talk to get him to agree to come back, and he had to go home and tell his wife face-to- face before he would agree to it. But Michaels had had a bad feeling about this, and he wanted Howard — who had proved himself more than a few times — back on 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 flatscreen, 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,
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 slave’s hair to grow back. Then he sent the slave to his bud, who shaved his head again. Slave didn’t even know what it said. Even if he could read, he wouldn’t be able to see it.”
“Clever. But kind of a slow process,” Fernandez said. “How long it take for the hair to grow back enough to cover it? Five, six weeks?”
“Those were the good old days. Um. Anyway, you can do much the same with electronic pictures. They are made up of pixels, millions of them in some cases, and some aren’t as important as others. Without getting too technical, you can take a standard RGB — that’s red, green, 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 hidden 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.”
“Great,” Fernandez said.
“Welcome to the future, Lieutenant.
“See, if somebody sends a big bunch of encrypted material and we happen to spot it, we might get suspicious. Everybody is watching the net these days, and a lot of e-mail gets scanned by one agency or another. Even if we can’t break the code, it might alert us enough to track down who sent it and received it, maybe pay them a little visit 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 somewhere nobody is gonna look, you also encrypt it, which is double protection. Use a one-time-only code, and by the time anybody might be able to break it, whatever you were talking about is ancient history.”
“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.”
“Okay, let me lay it out for you in base ten, Jay Gridley’s quick and dirty history of computer communications.”
“Fire away.”
“Right. The original Internet was designed so it couldn’t be taken out. It was decentralized, nodes and servers all over the place, so if one went down, information flow could be rerouted. Think of it like a sixteen-lane superhighway. Block one lane, you just jump into another and keep going in the same direction. Only with the net, there are a whole bunch of superhighways going in all directions. Blow up a whole freeway, you just take an off- ramp to another one. Might have to get to San Francisco by way of Seattle and then Miami, talking a big loop, but you don’t have to pull over and stop ’cause there ain’t no more roads.”
“Okay, I can follow that much.”
“So, what this meant was, if the Soviet Union, who was our worst enemy in the bad old days, dropped a nuke on a city, it didn’t much matter in the grand cosmic scheme of things.”
“Except to the people vaporized in the aforementioned city,” Fernandez said.
“We’re talking bigger picture here, Julio. What I meant was, it wouldn’t significantly disrupt the net elsewhere. Like those giant fungus-thingees that are spread out over a thousand acres, but are still only one plant
