State of War

smile.

“Practicing your meditation, darling?” she asked.

He grinned, shook his head. Caught bringing work home. Again.

“I didn’t think so.”

She came around behind him and started rubbing his shoulders.

Jay leaned his head back against her and sighed. She had started doing this on their honeymoon. Initially, they had planned to go to Bali, but changed their minds at the last minute and ended up going to Spain instead. They had spent most of the two-week trip on Formentera, an island off the coast of Ibiza. The place they’d stayed had truly been get-away-from-it-all; no electricity, no telephone, or even net connection. He’d felt a little claustrophobic at first — had spent a lot of time with his virgil, bringing up old games he never bothered with when he had VR. Saji had started giving him massages as a way of relaxing him.

After a while the charm of the island — hot sun, the beautiful clear water, and time alone with Saji — had relaxed him more than he’d been in years. She hadn’t given him a back rub since they got back. Until now.

He wished they could go back to that island right now and forget about Net Force and CyberNation.

Hmm. Maybe he could try piggybacking a worm with a transfer, capture some keystrokes—

He became aware of Saji’s breath in his ear.

“Whoa!”

“Oh, you are still here. Good. Remember me? You know, we got married a while back?”

He laughed. “Sorry. I’m here! I’m here!”

“All right, then, Mr. I’m-Here, what did I just say a moment ago?”

“Uh—”

“I thought so.” She leaned forward to see his flatscreen. “So what’s so important that you managed to go into VR without the gear? Pretty impressive concentration, by the way. You might almost think you had studied with a brilliant Buddhist.”

“I did,” Jay said, “only he was a lot older and uglier than you.”

Now she grinned, but she also shook her head. “Uh-uh. You’re not getting off that easy, Gridley. Now give.”

Jay told her about the bank, how he couldn’t get in.

Saji listened. It occurred to Jay, and not for the first time, that he was one of the luckiest men on earth to have found her. Someone who listened to him, who cared about his problems. And he’d almost backed out and blown it.

When he finished his explanation, Saji stood there for a few seconds without speaking, her hands motionless on his shoulders. Then she said, “Okay, no problem.”

Jay tilted his head back to stare at her. Okay? No problem? Was she serious?

“What?”

“Well, I could tell you,” she said, “but do you really want me to make it easy for you? Wouldn’t you rather earn it? I know how you hate game cheats and all—”

“Saji!” he said, reaching up to grab her shoulders.

She laughed. “You know that old saw about not seeing the forest because of the trees?”

Jay nodded. Where was she going with this?

“That’s you and this bank. You’re not looking at the forest. You’re stuck on one tree.”

He shook his head. He just couldn’t see what she was talking about.

She laughed again, and then gently bit his earlobe. “You’ll get it, Jay,” she said, “when you quit trying so hard.”

He hoped so. Frustrated, he let go of her and turned his attention back to his computer.

Somewhere there was a way in. He knew it. There always was. He just had to keep looking.

9

Dutch Mall

Long Island, New York

Ames was in his clean office at the mall, listening to his hacker’s progress report.

“Are you sure this is working?” Ames asked.

The programmer, whose netnom was “Thumper,” shrugged. He was a smallish man, young, but nearly bald. He wore a black Metallica tank top and gray cord trousers, with some kind of high-tech rubbery sandals, and no socks. Brilliant in his field, but socially inept. One was probably a result of the other.

“Well, so far, yeah,” he said. He had a flat Midwestern accent, nasal and on the edge of a whine. “What I put together was a six-pack, double-threes. That’s two sets of three connected programs. The first trio I set for timed release — five, then three, then two days apart. The first one was just a filler. That’s a program that infects a system then makes copies of itself until the storage medium — hard drive on your PC, memory stick on your PDA, whatever— is full. It also attaches itself to your address book and sends copies to everybody on your list. It’s not meant to be more than a nuisance, but you have to dig it out and delete it and clean out the drive. That one was on the news already. They think some hacker did it just for the hell of it. They also think they’ll get him pretty quick, which they won’t.”

He grinned and scratched his nose. “The second wave is a blanker, and it should be hitting big this time tomorrow. It doesn’t do anything except shut off your monitor. Lots of people won’t even know what it means. They’ll spend some time jiggering with their hardware before realizing it’s a software bug. It, too, will send copies of itself to everybody in your address book. Again, this one’s no biggie, but it will be irritating.”

Ames nodded. He knew all of this, of course, knew it before Thumper wrote his first line of code. Still, plans changed, so he liked to be kept up to date.

Thumper wasn’t finished with his report yet. “The third wave will be a crasher. Once it gets into your system, it will send out copies of itself, and then it will crash your drive. At the very least, you’ll have to restart your hardware from external software and do a clean install of the entire operating system. This one will cause a lot of downtime, guaranteed. In addition, a lot of people won’t have backed up everything — most people don’t, you know — so they’ll lose tons of data. Like the others, this one will spread via e-mail. Also, like the other two, it will get around the most common blocks set up to catch it.”

Thumper grinned again and leaned forward in his chair. “Now we’re getting to the good stuff,” he said. “Five days after that last one, the second three will launch. This time they will be set five, six, and seven days apart, just to mess with everybody’s head. By then, everyone will pretty much have figured out that more attacks are coming; they just won’t have any idea when. Or what, for that matter. This series will do pretty much the same kind of things as the first three. They will be written in different codes, however, so the viral and worm software won’t be able to match them to the earlier ones.”

“And this assault is going to cause problems nationally?”

Thumper laughed. “Nationally, hell. We’re talking global repercussions here. You do have to understand, though, that the better defensive software out there has holographic system capability. That means it automatically looks for a number of things, including certain kinds of activity anywhere in the OS, self-replication, or attachments to e-mail. It flags anything the watcher program doesn’t recognize. Those systems will filter out my attacks. They won’t be able to break the code, at least not right away, but they will block it from hitting their systems. In addition, they’ll sound an alarm as soon as they detect the attacks.”

He shrugged, dismissing the idea. “The important thing to remember here is how few people run the good stuff. It’s expensive, and very complicated to install and maintain. Most businesses go with the cheap stuff, and that won’t stand a chance against my code. Even better, there are still millions of boobs out there on the net and web who don’t have firewalls or virusware at all. We’ll nail almost every one of them.”

Ames was not a computer expert by any means, which was why he’d hired this guy. “What are we talking about in terms of lost time and money?”

Thumper shrugged again. “I can’t say for sure. A triple-hit like this, followed by a second triple-hit? As far as I