State of War

She opened a drawer, reached into it, and pulled out a device exactly like Howard remembered his grandfather wearing. As big as his thumb, it was a big, pale, fleshy-colored thing, with a clear plastic hook on the end. It looked like a little oil can.

He shook his head again. If he wore that he might as well hang a neon sign around his neck: Yell at me! I’m deaf!

“This is what we used to use,” she said. “And we still use these, for patients with major loss.”

She reached back into the drawer. This time, though, when she brought her hand out and opened it to show him, she was holding a tiny, chocolate-colored button, no bigger than the tip of his little finger.

“And here is the state of the art right now, sir. A one hundred percent digital, multichannel, multiprogrammable MC — for mini-canal — signal processing auditory enhancement device. Digital feedback reduction, noise reduction, gain processing, and compression. This little model has a preamplifier, a twenty-three- bit analog-to-digital converter with a one hundred and thirty-eight decibel dynamic range. The processor chip runs a hundred and fifty million operations per second, with all-digital output to the transducer.”

Howard just stared. He knew some of the terms, but not all of them.

“The battery is good for about a week, and it can be programmed to your specific hearing loss and crosscoupled to separate channels. What that means is that if you are in a crowded room full of people jabbering, you’ll be able to hear the guy next to you when he talks. And if you want to listen to music at home alone, you push this little button here and it will shift to a different frequency so you can hear the high notes. Watch.”

She turned away, did something he couldn’t see, then looked back at him.

“I have one in my ear. You see it?”

Howard looked. “No.”

“Right. And you’re looking for it. Nobody will know you’re wearing it unless you lean over and point it out to them. And best of all, sir, it will bring your hearing pretty close to what it was before. Not perfect, but not far off.”

“Wow,” he said.

She grinned. “Yes, sir. We squirt a little rubbery goop in your ear canal, let it set, then take a mold from that so it can be custom fitted. You’ll just tuck it in every morning — if you choose to take it out when you sleep. You don’t really have to. It’s all automatic after that. You’ll want to remove it to shower, though. These things are not really waterproof, but if you get caught in the rain, it will be okay.”

She pulled the device out of her ear. “See, here’s how you turn it off. Open the battery door like this. When you need to change the battery, you just pop it out like so. Put a new one in, close it, and it’s ready to rock.”

He had to admit, he was pretty impressed. “And do I have to sell my house to buy this technological miracle?”

“They run about twenty-eight, twenty-nine hundred retail, sir, but under the Net Force insurance you only copay ten percent. Two hundred and eighty dollars, give or take. Buy the batteries at Costco or on-line and they’ll cost about fifty cents each. It also comes with a maintenance and loss insurance plan free for two years, fifty bucks a year thereafter.”

He nodded. “And this will do the trick?”

“Yes, sir,” she said. “I believe it will.”

“Huh.”

“Yes, sir. And nobody will be yelling at you like you thought you had to do to your grampa, because they won’t know it’s there.”

He grinned. “Am I that obvious?”

“It’s a youth culture, General. Nobody wants to be thought of as old and decrepit. When that slew of baby boomers started hitting their fifties and sixties a few years back, having trouble hearing after all those years of rock and roll, the demand for things like this skyrocketed. They are working on a model now that will run off a capacitor whose power comes from normal movement. Completely sealed. Put it in and forget about it. Just take it out every three or four months to clean your ears, then pop it back in. Until then, however, this will do the job. Welcome to the future, sir.”

He smiled again. Well. It could be worse. And wearing a little electronic gizmo was better than cupping your hand around your ear and saying “Eh?” like some deaf old fart, wasn’t it?

A hearing aid. He still couldn’t believe it, though. And no matter how high-tech or marvelous they were, he certainly wasn’t happy about it.

Washington, D.C.

Jay sat behind his desk and stared at his flatscreen, thinking about how to break into a bank.

They almost hadn’t bought this desk. Moving into the new apartment had made more of a dent in their savings than he’d planned. Their furniture plans had been put on hold until one of Saji’s uncles at the wedding had suggested a money dance for the couple.

According to tradition, the newlyweds accepted dances from various members of the wedding party, who had to

“purchase” each dance with a donation. What made the money dance funny was that the payment wasn’t just given to the couple. It was pinned to them. By the time the dancing was over, he and Saji had looked like a couple of greenback-stuffed scarecrows. They had made enough from the money dance alone to furnish most of their new condo — including the huge desk in his home office.

It was funny, Jay knew he was the ultimate forward-thinker. His tastes normally ran to ultramodern, usually involving chrome and leather. This desk was different. It was enormous, for one thing, and made out of solid cherry. It was also antique, with absolutely no provisions for hiding computer peripherals and cabling.

But Jay didn’t care. He’d fallen in love with this desk the first time he’d laid eyes on it. And Saji had insisted he buy it. No matter that it took up nearly half the floor space in his home office. No matter that it wouldn’t fit into the third bedroom, so that if they ever decided to start a family the baby would end up with the smallest room in the house. No matter that the ancient grained surfaces were as un-Gridley-like as you could imagine.

He loved that desk, loved the way sitting behind it got his creative juices flowing.

Except this time it wasn’t working. He just couldn’t seem to get a handle on this bank he was trying to crack.

He’d worked late at Net Force trying to get his latest VR scenario to work. The bank account number he’d gotten in his trace of the payments from CyberNation had led him to a small branch of the Virginia National Bank out in the suburbs, but no further.

This particular branch had unfortunately kept up with the security bulletins Net Force issued to computer- intensive businesses from time to time. Their firewall was impressive.

He’d spent hours as a Swiss guide attempting to scale the Matterhorn, the VR equivalent of an attack on the bank’s firewall. He had found it was like trying to walk up a Teflon-coated slide at a ninety-degree angle. He got nowhere fast.

Jay could hack his way into most international networks before breakfast. Being shut out by a dinky little domestic bank was frustrating. More than that, it was embarrassing.

He knew he could go through Legal. There was enough to get a search warrant, but there were problems with that approach. For one thing, serving a warrant might alert the person they were after. That could give them time to prepare, to hide the money or to move it into a legitimate account.

On the other hand, if Jay could get the name on the account, Net Force would be able to do a little background research. Then they could set a trap and spring it when they were ready. One thing he did not want to do was let CyberNation get away this time, and that meant not tipping his hand too early. Once their target was ID’d, then he could request a warrant and build a chain of evidence. Putting the target under surveillance under those circumstances would probably be much more informative.

The trick was, how to do it?

He’d tried brute force, although he supposed one of the NSA supercomputers might have a little more juice than Net Force’s own. He could tap them, add them to the mix, and maybe—

“Hello? Earth to Jay?”

With a start, he realized he hadn’t heard — or seen — Saji come into his office. She had perched on one corner of his desk, and he smiled as he looked at her. All this time, and the sight of her could still make him