Cyberspy Read online

  Cyberspy

  We’d like to thank the following people, without whom this book would have not been possible: Bill McCay, for help in rounding out the manuscript; Martin H. Greenberg, Larry Segriff, Denise Little, and John Heifers at Tekno Books; Mitchell Ruben-stein and Laurie Silvers at BIG Entertainment; Tom Colgan of Penguin Putnam Inc.; Robert Youdelman, Esquire; and Tom Mallon, Esquire; and Robert Gottlieb of the William Morris Agency, agent and friend. We much appreciated the help.

  TOM CLANCY’S NET FORCE CYBERSPY

  A couple of thousand bodies on hand, logging in from all over the country.

  Lots of kids he knew never missed a national meeting— you could always attend, if you had a Net-linked computer. All you needed was the time.

  That wasn’t something Leif could always afford. As the sixteen-year-old son of a mega-successful business tycoon, he had to face the demands of tough schooling as well as some business-related travel and meetings with his father, who felt that his son should know something about the family business. And then, of course, Leif had to maintain his reputation as a young playboy-in-training.

  But when he found a message from Mark Gridley in his virtmail last night, suggesting that this meeting would be out of the ordinary, Leif had immediately cleared his schedule.

  To judge by the still-growing crowd, a similar message must have gotten out to a lot of people.

  Stretching up to his full height, Leif began scanning the crowd, looking for people he knew. Usually, he was the first to be spotted. That was the advantage—or drawback—of having a head of blazing red hair.

  Even as he squinted, trying to catch a glimpse of someone, it occurred to him that he wasn’t taking full advantage of the situation. This meeting was in virtual reality, after all. A lopsided grin crossed Leif’s features as he pulled out his wallet. He flipped through credit cards and IDs until he came to the icons he’d stored in his virtual wallet. Each icon represented a potentially useful computer program that he’d created or purchased, all aimed at making his life a little easier as he surfed the Net. He selected a small lightning bolt, visualized the person he was looking for, then tossed the icon into the air. It grew in size and brilliance as it shot across the room, leaving a glowing trail behind it, and stopped over a small group of boys, pointing downward and emitting a greenish light.

  In the middle of the group a tall black kid looked up, saw the lightning bolt above his head, and visually traced the trail it had left behind to its source.

  The boy waved, and Leif could see a quick flash of teeth as the other boy grinned.

  “Come on over!” David yelled. “I’ve been wandering around, trying to collect our crew.”

  Leif grabbed the beam of light his program had created, and gave it a tug. Next thing he knew, he was standing beside his friend. He left the glowing icon in place. This wasn’t the first time he’d used this little program, so his friends knew what that bolt of lightning meant—“gather here, guys.” Already, he could spot a couple of other familiar faces homing in on them, working their way through the crowd. Andy Moore’s thatch of blond hair was almost as distinctive as Leif’s— sometimes even more distinctive, since it always seemed to need a comb and a trim. It gleamed in the flashing light from the bolt as Andy headed their way. Matt Hunter had hitched up with P. J. Farris. They both waved. Megan O’Malley didn’t bother with the niceties of virtual reality. She simply showed up by Leif’s side and pointed at the bolt.

  “I think your toy has served its purpose,” she said. “Why not put it away before we all go blind?”

  Leif shrugged and reached up for the icon. Its flashing light was distracting, he had to admit. At his touch the bolt shrank and dimmed, turning back into a wallet-sized icon. He tucked his program away, ready to be used again when he needed it.

  “Hey, guys, wait for me,” a familiar voice said.

  Leif hadn’t spotted Mark Gridley until he spoke up. He was a good three to four years younger than anyone else in the group was—and he was short for his age.

  “Oh, hi, Squirt,” Leif said.

  “So glad you could make it,” the boy said, with a touch of irony. Mark’s face, tanned tawny by the Washington sun, was burnished just now by a dull red color. He hated to be called Squirt. Everyone knew that—but nearly everyone called him that anyway. The name just fit him perfectly.

  The Squirt was a dangerous combination—a cocky little kid who happened to be a computer wizard. Give him a machine, and he could make it do just about anything.

  Leif wasn’t worried, though. Mark was good-natured enough about the nickname. He hadn’t retaliated … so far.

  “So what’s so cool about this meeting?” Leif asked him. “I expected something more than a bit of cyber-showboating. The expanding room is nice, but it’s not ‘drop-everything’ important.”

  “How about this?” Mark stepped into the middle of the friends’ circle, sweeping around as if he were a fashion model.

  Over his shorts and T-shirt he wore an adult-sized vest, which hung almost to the boy’s knees. But even Leif’s eyes were caught by the scintillating, swirling light show that glittered on the garment.

  It wasn’t light reflecting off beads, but rather a glow that came from within the material. Brilliant dots of gold, green, red, and blue moved in strange harmony, like traffic patterns seen from high above a city. The more Leif looked, the more colors he made out, racing around, shifting, creating kaleidoscopic patterns, then dissolving into seeming chaos.

  “What do you think?” Mark asked, taking in their stunned faces with some satisfaction.

  “Are you in a school play?” Matt asked. “That’s a real coat of many colors.”

  “No, it’s multipurpose camping gear,” Andy teased. “You can wear it as a coat during deer season, use it as a tent, and play in traffic without your mom worrying about you.”

  Mark looked around the group, outrage warring with disbelief in his expression. “You guys are kidding me, right? You have to know what this is.” He slapped the vest that hung on him. “This is the sharpest part of the cutting edge: Hardweare—the computer you wear!”

  Of course they knew. They were having a little fun with the Squirt. Hardweare was all over the media this summer—the hottest new techno-toy for the trendy rich and corporate moguls. You couldn’t see an executive on a holo-program-news, drama, or sitcom—without seeing one of the glittering vests. They were billed as the ultimate portable computer.

  Leif finally took pity on the kid. “My dad priced one of those things and thought it was too much.” Although, Leif had to admit, his father was thinking of buying into the company. “You must have really busted up the piggy bank—or was there a discount because they couldn’t get you one that fit?”

  Mark looked a little embarrassed. “Actually, it’s for my dad—he’s evaluating it.” Leif nodded. That made sense. Mark’s father was the head of Net Force. Since his job was fighting crime on the Net, he would see any new technology as a matter of course. And, equally likely, the family’s young genius would have a chance to play with it.

  “How do you input?” Megan wanted to know.

  ‘Thought is the easiest,” Mark replied. “But you can talk to it, too. This sucker works with the natural electrical conductance of your skin. The vest will even access your computer surgical implants directly, no need to line up the laser. Everything just feeds in, like you’re in a computer implant chair.”

  The kids nodded. Having computer neural circuitry implanted behind their ears was one of the milestones of growing up—it meant you were ready for school. Most computers interacted with this circuitry by lining up the implant with a laser while the user sat in a specialized computer console chair or couch. But if the Hardweare computer was already in contact with your nervous sys
tem through your skin, that whole setup wouldn’t be necessary.

  “Right now I’m using a wireless interface to be here,” Mark boasted. “I’m standing in my living room, free as a bird, making the connection to the Net without an implant chair, or a vidphone, or anything, and the Hardweare computer is linking me to the Net through my implant and bouncing the signals to a satellite.”

  “So you’re standing—where did you say? In your living room?—while you link in with us?” Megan asked.

  Mark nodded proudly.

  “So you’re just standing out there, no computer-link couch, no closed door.” Megan frowned. “Don’t you have a bunch of cats at your house? I’d expect them to love those dancing lights on your vest.”

  Mark’s eyes suddenly got a faraway look, as if he’d just caught a sound no one else could hear. “Theo!” he cried desperately, then vanished.

  Leif began to laugh. He’d visited the Gridley house, and had met Theo—a large, yowly, blue-eyed Siamese cat… who’d never been declawed.

  A very different Mark popped back into the room. His hair was tousled, his clothes rumpled, and he no longer wore the Hardweare vest. Mark’s face was flushed, as if he’d been chasing something—or as if he’d been chased. And his right arm had four thin white scratches running down his forearm from his elbow.

  “So what happened to your image here—is that another new fashion statement?” Leif asked. “A pin-striped tan?”

  Mark looked embarrassed. “Theo was hanging on to my elbow when I got back. I guess that’s how cats rappel for a quick getaway.”

  “Nice going, Squirt,” Andy said. “That’s a pretty neat trick. I take it this is your real-world appearance? How does your computer proxy reflect real-time changes in the way you look without you having to stop and program them in? I mean, I can’t believe you’d want to advertise what happened to you—not on purpose. …”

  Mark looked down at his disheveled state. “It didn’t exactly work out the way I’d planned,” he admitted. “A few months ago I programmed the house computer to continuously update my computer image based on my real appearance. We’ve got security system holo-monitors in nearly every room of the house, and they’re always getting pictures of me. If I’m at home and within range of a camera, what I look like in real life is what I look like in virtual reality. If I’m not within range of a camera, the proxy defaults to my most recent available appearance.”

  “I’m not sure I’d like that,” Megan said. “It’s rough enough to have bad hair days in the real world without dragging them into veeyar with me.”

  “If you can share the coding, I’d definitely be interested in a copy,” Leif said.

  “I won’t let you get your greedy mitts on my idea,” Mark said, with a grin on his face. “You’d pass it on to your dad to make another couple of zillions.”

  “You certainly upstaged my news,” David said. “It looks like I’m going to work for Hardweare.”

  “No way!” Matt exclaimed.

  “The guy who founded the company only just turned nineteen,” David replied. “He wants to give young programmers a chance.”

  “They’re calling it the Young Genius Corps.” Mark couldn’t hide the jealousy in his voice. “But you’ve got to be at least fifteen to be considered.”

  David shrugged in embarrassment.

  As if he weren’t the young genius he actually was, Leif thought with a smile.

  “They got on to me through the simulations of old space stuff I’ve programmed,” David went on. “Those old-time mission programmers just about had to write code on the head of a pin. The computers in their probes were—well, limited is the nicest word I can come up with.”

  “I guess the system architecture for these Hardweare computers probably needs tight coding, too,” Ivlatt said.

  “That’s great!” Leif congratulated his friend. “Now that’s a reason to attend this hoedown!”

  “That wasn’t why I messaged you, though,” Mark piped up. “There’s—”

  Before he could explain, the meeting began. A moment ago all four walls of the room had been featureless. Now one wall grew back to accommodate a small stage—and the tall, spare man standing on it at parade rest. Even in civilian clothes, Captain James Winters looked every inch the Marine officer he’d once been.

  “Welcome to the national meeting of the Net Force Explorers, August 12, 2025,” the captain intoned. That was the official opening. Everything from here on would be recorded.

  After the usual organizational stuff, the captain departed from the typical meeting agenda. ‘ ‘I have an announcement to make,” he said. “Maybe some of you have heard that Net Force has been getting a lot of corporate complaints lately about hacking.”

  “So what else is new?” Andy muttered. “The bean counters won’t shell out for security, so people get into their systerns. Then the companies come crying to the government to protect them.”

  Leif just shrugged. He agreed with Andy—corporate computers were safest when they were carefully protected. On the other hand, it was the job of Net Force to keep crime off the Net. If there was an upsurge in hacking, Net Force—and the Net Force Explorers—should take an interest.

  “The reason I’m mentioning this in an open meeting is the kind of hacking we’ve been getting complaints about,” Winters went on. “The targets seem to be company secrets. Today we got a call from a soda company … which will remain nameless. They found the formula for their biggest-selling soft drink—a secret for more than 130 years—plastered around the Net. Not to mention the fast-food company who found the ingredients for their secret sauce posted worldwide.”

  The Explorers laughed, but the captain didn’t join in. “More seriously, information leaked from an investment bank blew up a major takeover attempt, and several people in the insurance business may end up going to jail because certain supposedly secret files got out. These files show that some companies have been cheating the public.”

  He looked across the room full of young people. “Does anybody see a connection, other than the obvious one of secrets being revealed?”

  There was a buzz of quiet discussion, but none of the Net Force Explorers offered a suggestion. Captain Winters nodded. “To me, the very randomness of the revelations makes for a pattern. This isn’t journalism, consumerism, or any kind of political-ism at work. It’s not targeted at all. It’s somebody digging up stuff that’s hard to get, then flinging it around to show how smart he or she is. Maybe it comes from the kind of people I’ve been working with over the past few years”— Winters cast a stern eye over the kids in the room—“but I have come to identify behavior like that.”

  He paused for a moment. “It seems to me that we’re not dealing with an adult here. I’m convinced this is a kid hacker—some kind of young genius who doesn’t necessarily care what he turns up, as long as it shows off his or her cleverness.”

  Leif couldn’t help it. He glanced over at Mark Gridley. But the Squirt was standing on tiptoe, trying to get a look at Captain Winters, eagerly following every word.

  “Because I suspect this hacker is a young person, I asked for permission to notify the Net Force Explorers and ask for your help in developing leads.” Captain Winters’s face grew grim. “Whoever is pulling this isn’t just in trouble with the law. They could be in physical danger. Those insurance executives facing fraud charges would gladly have killed the person who gave them away. There are lots of other companies with equally dirty secrets—and they’d silence potential whistle-blowers the way you would squash a bug.”

  He looked around the suddenly silent group. “I don’t need to remind you that the Explorers is an educational group— you have no police powers.”

  Leif grinned. In spite of the fact that they weren’t actual agents, he and his friends had occasionally become involved— very involved, in fact—in active cases.

  “What I’m asking for is information only— no investigations, please! What you don’t know could kill you
.”

  Was it Leif’s imagination, or was the captain looking over at his little group? Something told him he wasn’t just making up Winters’s interest. The last time they’d gotten involved in an active case, it nearly had cost them their lives to get a patent and giving away so much that anybody with a set of the schematics could make the finished product perfectly. These days a clever inventor always withheld a few things that contributed to the finished product when applying for a patent. Of course, any features that weren’t covered in the patent application were also not covered by the resulting patent—but sometimes being effective at business was all about taking risks. Luddie MacPherson’s patent applications gave him a square lock on his technology and, at least so far, had left any would-be copycats scratching their heads.

  At the age of seventeen and a half MacPherson had shown himself to be an incredibly sharp businessman as well as a techno-wiz. And in less than two years he’d become a major player in the computer world.

  That was about all that David had found on the Net about his prospective employer. He felt a little nervous entering this final interview with so little to go on.

  But he had to hand it to Luddie MacPherson. How many companies sent chauffeured limousines out to pick up job seekers for their final interviews?

  The initial weeding-out stages had been handled by Hard-weare executives—guys in their twenties who’d impressed David with their technical know-how and their almost fanatical dedication to the company and their boss. As usual nowadays, those contacts had taken place over the Net. Apparently, however, Luddie MacPherson liked personal contact during the last stages.

  From hints dropped by the executive assistant making his arrangements, David must have been an easy job. Most of the other aspirants were flying in for their interviews.

  David leaned back against upholstery that felt too plush against his back. Maybe Leif Anderson could take this in stride. But for David, a cop’s kid from downtown D.C., the level of luxury was a little too much. But it seemed that nothing was too good for Luddie MacPherson’s Young Genius Corps.