Up ahead he saw a large fox in the trap he’d left. It moved strangely for a fox, examining the trap, as if trying to figure out how it worked.
As he watched, it looked up and saw him coming.
It opened its delicate fox jaws and then huge teeth sprouted, like in some werewolf or vampire movie, huge,
Jay threw the tomahawk, a hard overhand toss, and watched it twirl end over end toward the fox. The hickory handle smacked into the side of the fox’s head; it yelped and fell over, stunned.
He pushed a button on the satchel and it expanded. Quickly, before it could recover, he slid the fox, trap and all, into the analyzer.
A few seconds later a chime sounded, announcing that the virus had been analyzed.
Before he’d come to CyberNation, he’d uploaded the latest virus encyclopedia from the Center for Virus Research in Beaverton, Oregon. A special tri-split screen appeared showing him in the first pane the code for the virus, broken down into segments. In the second window was a representation of an insect. The insect metaphor had become the de-facto ideogrammatic standard for depicting viruses; various parts of the insect were colored to highlight the separate codes making them up, and the body parts always represented similar abilities. The legs showed its ability to spread; pincers or mandibles its ability to attack; the overall size could indicate ease of detection, and so on.
The CyberNation virus looked like no real insect Jay had ever seen, nor would he want to. It had large wings, indicating speed, and a huge stinger plus pincers. The venom reservoir was split, indicating that it could sting for several functions — to paralyze, and replicate.
But the third pane of the split screen was what he was most interested in. The CVR had spent years tracking down viruses to their origin countries and, when they were lucky, to their earliest programmers. Since most computer attacks were based on similar methods, there was a synergistic effect to coding, where a hacker might steal an idea from another, or be inspired to create something new.
It looked as if this virus had been developed from code that had origins in Europe, with pieces of USA ancestry.
Jay tabbed a control and called up the reconstruction of the virus that had attacked the military network. Since they hadn’t caught it in its entirety, it was more of an identikit version, based on its effects. He compared the two.
They were similar. It was the delivery system that seemed to be the same — the speed, along with the venom replication. The military bug had some of the same code, but there were South American influences as well.
Interestingly, there were no influences at all from what could be called Asiatic countries. No Japan, no Taiwan, and no China.
Which by itself meant nothing, but combined with his earlier clue about China, it reminded him of his second favorite Sherlock Holmes adage. The one about the dog not barking in the night.
There were no Chinese dogs barking here.
And somehow, Jay knew that was a clue. No logic or reason to the knowledge, but a certainty nonetheless.
Which brought back a fleeting memory of an old movie farce about a superagent in the 1960’s, Derek Flint. In one of the funniest scenes in that picture, Flint walks down a hall past a couple of military guards. Suddenly Flint attacks the guards, uses his martial arts abilities to take them out, then picks up a fallen weapon and cooks them. When the head of the agency runs up behind Flint and whacks him, thinking he’s gone mad, Flint explains why he did it. They were imposters. What gave them away was, they were wearing Battle of the Bulge ribbons. Cramden, the agency head, says, “There aren’t any Battle of the Bulge ribbons.”
“Exactly,” Flint says…
If it took the rest of his life, Jay was going to get this guy. You could take that to the bank.
But it wasn’t going to happen today. He logged out.
26
The dead man’s guitar — his now, if Natadze’s dying wish was to be honored — was stowed in the luggage bin over Kent’s head. The commercial jet droned along, somewhere over the Midwest — Kansas, maybe. Once, there had been websites you could access that showed the progress of every commercial flight in the country. Log on, type in the flight number, and you’d get a nice visual of a little aircraft superimposed on a map, showing you exactly where it was, where it had been, and its projected flight path to where it was going.
Those days were long gone. After 9/11, a lot of such information had been shut down. Too risky. Even National Parks data was restricted. And if you started trying to run down where the nation’s water supplies were, or the exact geographic locations of military bases, nuclear power plants, or chemical factories, you might well hear a knock on your door with a curious federal agent behind it wanting to know just why you needed such information.
Interesting times, that was the Chinese curse, and certainly that’s what had come to pass in the United States. When he’d been a boy, you could catch a bus downtown, wander around alone all day, and your parents didn’t need to worry about you. You could walk onto a plane carrying a loaded pistol in your pocket and there weren’t any metal detectors between you and the aircraft because nobody ever considered hijacking the craft to Cuba, or flying it into a building and killing thousands. Things you might conceivably put into your mouth were not protected by security seals with instructions that, if broken, you shouldn’t eat it. Terrorists didn’t sit around planning ways to release poison gas, blow up bridges, or set off an atomic bomb in an American city, except in the movies or in books. And you didn’t need to stamp warnings on the barrels of guns that they were dangerous.
Of course, you could still get polio, and his mother had warned him against playing in ditches because she still thought that was how you caught it. The shadow of nuclear war loomed large, and they told schoolchildren to hide under their desks if the Russians dropped the bomb, as if that would help. And institutionalized racism and sexism were still the norm.
No men on the moon back in the 1950s — but also no AIDS.
A lot of things had changed during Kent’s lifetime, most for better, but some for worse. Things didn’t sit still, that was a given, and the good old days were always better in memory than they’d actually been, but still, now and then, Kent wondered if the new millennium really was much better than the one just past.
He got reflective like this after a battle. And even though it had been just him and Natadze in this one, it had ended with guns working. Yes, he had walked away, which was always better than the alternative, but he hadn’t won the victory he’d wanted. If he had been a little sharper, if he had really known what he was doing, it might have gone better.
He remembered his grandfather. Paw-Paw had been in the Second World War, had been on the islands in the South Pacific fighting against the Japanese — that’s where Kent had gotten the samurai sword and the interest in it. But Paw-Paw had also been a master craftsman when it came to building things.
When Kent had been a kid, his parents moved into the first house they ever owned. It was a small place, and his room had been converted from a den — it had no closets or shelves. His grandfather had come to the house with a yardstick — one of those cheap wooden things the paint companies used to give away if you bought a gallon of paint — and a pencil and spiral notebook.
Paw Paw talked to Kent’s mother, then went into the den and made some measurements with that old yardstick, jotted down some notes, then went back to his shop and started cutting plywood.
