“Ah. Would you give him a call?”
“Yes, sir.”
It wasn’t as if Quantico was a million miles from the District; still, making Jay drive out here wasn’t necessary. If a phone call with visuals wasn’t enough, they could log into one of the secure VR rooms Net Force maintained for more personal meetings. Jay would have his virgil; the call’s coded pipe would be more than enough protection. Thorn was comfortable with that.
He smiled. He should be. His company had developed some of the software for such chats. He had written much of the code himself.
He’d get Jay on board, maybe have him show the CyberNation guy around, what was his name? Seurat? Like the painter…?
“Excuse me?” Thorn said.
“I said, ‘Absolutely no way,’ ” Jay said.
Thorn stared at Jay as if he had suddenly grown a second head. Disagreement was something he encouraged in his people, but this was too far, even for Jay Gridley.
“Explain,” Thorn said.
The VR room was very realistic. It took real-time images from phonecams and used those, so what you saw was more or less real. It was modeled on their RW conference room, just down the hall from Thorn’s office.
Jay frowned. “Look, Commander, long before you came on board, Net Force had a major battle against CyberNation. It got real ugly. John Howard got shot because of them. We even got sued by another one of their people, a man who later fired at us himself.”
“CyberNation?” Thorn said. “The computer geeks who want to start their own on-line country?”
Jay nodded. “Yeah, that’s them. They came at us electronically, politically, and live and in person.”
“I don’t remember being briefed on this — and believe me, I would have remembered if I had ever heard a word about it.”
Jay shrugged. “It’s been a couple years and they’ve been quiet since. This was back when they were trying to get big numbers to join up, and they didn’t care how they did it. Part of their scheme was to take down a major chunk of the net, leaving themselves as the only real viable option.”
Commander Thorn shook his head. “The net was designed so that couldn’t happen.”
“The Internet was, yeah, Commander, but that was a long time ago. The World Wide Web pretty much replaced the old Internet a while back, and with the increased ease of use came increased vulnerability. These days, if you know which backbone servers to take out, you could do a whole lot of damage. The net, the web, they are more complex now than ever before, and everything is linked to everything else — communications, servers, private companies, government, military. There were some real bad apples at CyberNation, and it came down to guns and bombs. People died. The government apparently decided it was better to keep most of it hush-hush. Eventually it all got squared away, but not to my satisfaction.”
Thorn thought about that for a moment. “So why is CyberNation still around if they are such bad folks?”
Jay smiled grimly. “Good question, Boss. These guys all wear eye patches and pegs legs and carry cutlasses, as far as I am concerned. But the official tale was that a rogue splinter group was responsible for the crimes. We took them down, and nobody could prove it went beyond them, so that was the end of the story.”
Thorn shook his head. The concept of CyberNation was like that of Communism — too idealistic to work. The hope that geographical nations would cede the rights and privileges of a real country to citizens of a virtually created one? It would never happen. However much time you spent on-line, you still had to
Oh, sure, there were some poor countries that might go for it. Some Third World spots where the idea of big numbers being able to get wired and on-line was fairly unlikely, which kind of killed the point, but only a relative handful of those would take such a deal. No major country was going to buy into the idea that one of its breathing citizens living in a house on Elm Street would suddenly become a foreign national who had allegiance to a web server and was no longer subject to the local laws, like some kind of diplomat. No way, nohow.
And yet, CyberNation had convinced millions of people to join up in the hope that just such a thing was going to come to pass. In doing so, it had become bigger than AOL and able to offer some very good programs. They had the best VR scenarios available commercially, with a wide range of choices.
Still, Thorn was always amazed at how gullible some people continued to be, even in this supposedly enlightened age. A virtual country? Not on this planet.
“Listen, Jay, we have reason to believe that whoever is attacking our military is also taking potshots at CyberNation.”
“Good for them.”
Thorn shook his head. It was just the two of them, alone in a VR room. “Things change. Yesterday’s enemy is today’s friend. You know how that works. At the moment, CyberNation and Net Force seem to have a common problem. We want to solve that. We will take any help we can get.”
“It sucks.”
“Come on, Jay. That is the way of the world, and you are much too bright to not know it.”
Jay didn’t say anything.
“We’ve also got a guy coming over from China, the head of their Internet police agency.”
“Chang Han Yao?”
“You know him?”
“I know who he is. He’s got a few moves. What’s he over for?”
“Ostensibly, to talk about modernizing China’s agency, maybe to pick up some tips. The Chinese are our friends these days. Communism is on the way out, and they have become a major trading partner. Have you seen that exhibit from the Forbidden City at the Smith?”
“Yeah, VR. Very interesting. I got no grief with the Chinese.”
“And you’ll help with the man from CyberNation. A French guy.”
“Seurat. I know his work. He wrote a paper on quantum computer applications that was… passable.”
“I do seem to recall something about quantum computers and Net Force,” Thorn said.
“Yep, that was a crazy English scientist and a dotty old lord. They shot at us, too.” Jay shook his head again. “You know, for an agency that is supposed to be a bunch of desk jockeys riding expensive chairs in dark and quiet rooms, we seem to get shot at a lot.”
Thorn smiled. “Probably that won’t happen here.”
Jay didn’t smile back. “I wouldn’t bet on it, Boss. CyberNation claimed to have gotten rid of all the bad guys, but it’s hard to believe the people at the top didn’t have a clue what was going on.”
“But you’ll help me with this guy?”
Jay nodded, his face glum.
“Thanks, Jay. I appreciate it.” Thorn paused. “So, anything new on the war game hacker?”
Jay frowned again and shook his head. “I’ve been running things down, but so far, nothing. The military sysop is pretty good, and the system isn’t supposed to be reachable from outside, so it isn’t like some wahoo can just dial up and log in, even if he had the codes. We’re dealing with somebody who has been very careful.”
“But you’ll get him, eventually?”
“Oh, yeah. I always get ’em, Boss. It’s just a matter of time… ”
Chang stared through the window, but there was nothing to see save a dense layer of clouds a few thousand feet below the jetliner. Normally, he didn’t take a window seat when he flew, especially on long flights; he preferred to have the aisle, so as to be able to stretch his legs now and then, or attend to business in the toilet.
But the flight had been crowded — relations between China and the United States were at an all-time high, and even with a new airline that added several flights a day to the States, the jets were, so he had been told, usually full. Plus, this was a direct flight to Washington, D.C., and much faster than the old ones where you had to
