Cybernation nf-6 Read online

  Roberto might die young, but by God, it was not going to be from sitting in one place too long.

  He dropped to the floor next to a pedestal table and did fifty quick push-ups, flipped over onto his back, and did fifty twisting crunches, alternating from side to side, to work the obliques. That was what kept a man’s stomach pulled flat, the lateral muscles, not the abs in front.

  He snapped up to his feet with a gymnastic move, a kip-up, then headed up the aisle again.

  Jasmine was asleep in one of the recliners up front, the chair leaned back to make a bed, her seat belt fastened across her lap. Damn, but she looked good for a woman her age. Good lay, too, she knew some tricks. Maybe he should wake her up, join the mile-high club. Well. Renew their membership, anyway.

  And maybe not. She was mean as a snake if anyone woke her suddenly. Besides, they had done it on the plane before. And on trains, buses, taxicabs, and once, in a horse carriage going around Central Park in New York. Never done it on a boat, though. When they got to the gambling ship down in the Caribbean, that would be the first chance to do it there.

  He grinned at the thought. Nothing was better for a man than pussy.

  Besides pussy, Santos had but one passion, and that was The Game. Jôgo de Capoeira. It wasn’t just for fighting, though it gave you that. There was so much more — the music, the rituals, the manners, the company of fighting men. Yes, one learned the way to position oneself, the posicionamento, so that one could ataque or offer proper defesa. And all the flashy, acrobatic moves that impressed the unwary were necessary, but at the higher levels it was the subtle dance that played. The slight lean this way that told your opponent he could not touch you if he attacked. The shift that way that opened up an attacker like a blank book upon which you could write whatever you wished. It was art.

  When first he had begun The Game, Santos had wanted only to know the fastest way to knock an opponent from his feet, the methods to throw a powerful fist or elbow or knee that would send a man sprawling. And he had learned those. But real mastery lay in the small details, the constant circle in and out that hypnotized opponents, whether one or five of them, caused confusion and missteps that an expert could use to his advantage. The real experts were fifty, sixty years old, and you could not touch them no matter how fast or strong you were, because they knew what you were going to do before you could do it. He was getting closer to that, but he was not there yet. He would be, eventually.

  And the money he was making as Field Operations Head of CyberNation’s security force was very good — enough that after a couple more years, he could retire, go back to Rio, and study and teach The Game full-time. Work out all day, screw all night, sleep on the weekends. What more could a man ask for?

  Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia

  In their third meeting since the electronic attack on the net and web, Alex Michaels and his team had figured out the easy part of the Five-W-and-One-H question: They knew what, when, and how. What they didn’t know was: who, why, and where they were.

  Now in the conference room with Jay Gridley, Lieutenant Julio Fernandez, and Major Joseph Leffel, the acting head of the military arm, Michaels raised his eyebrows at the others. General John Howard would be arriving later in the day. It had taken some talk to get him to agree to come back, and he had to go home and tell his wife face-to-face before he would agree to it. But Michaels had had a bad feeling about this, and he wanted Howard — who had proved himself more than a few times — back on the team, at least until this was cleared up. He had a hunch it might come to guns, and when and if that happened, he wanted his best man leading the troops.

  “Gentlemen?”

  “Nothing new, boss,” Jay said. “My guys are back-walking every trail, but so far the pirates covered their asses pretty good. The regular feebs’ Carnivore and NSA’s snoopware have come up zip. The hackers had to be coordinating stuff on-line, there’s way too much going on, so we’re looking for ways they hid it. We’ve got random sampling of JPEGS, GIFS, TIFFS, PICTS, and all the common sound files attached to e-mail running through the stegaware plexes, but so far, nothing.”

  Fernandez said, “Somebody want to translate that for the computer illiterate among us? Meaning me.”

  Michaels grinned. “Jay is talking about steganography. Hiding things in plain sight.”

  Jay, already tapping away at the keyboard of his flatscreen, said, “Check it out.”

  A holoproj shimmered into view over the flatscreen. It was a picture of the Mona Lisa. “What do you see?”

  “A famous painting of somebody who probably didn’t want to smile too big ’cause she had bad teeth?” Fernandez said.

  “But that’s all,” Jay said. “However, we touch a button, presto! and look again.”

  The image melted, and left several words floating in the air: “Up yours, feds!”

  Fernandez looked at Jay.

  “We got this off a steganography website run by a ten-year-old kid.

  “The word means ‘covered writing.’ It goes back to the Greeks,” Jay said, “though the Chinese and the Egyptians and Native Americans all did variations of it. Since the Greeks gave us the word, here’s how an early release worked: Say Sprio wanted to send a secret message to Zorba, so what he did was, he had a slave’s head shaved, tattooed the message on the scalp, then waited for the slave’s hair to grow back. Then he sent the slave to his bud, who shaved his head again. Slave didn’t even know what it said. Even if he could read, he wouldn’t be able to see it.”

  “Clever. But kind of a slow process,” Fernandez said. “How long it take for the hair to grow back enough to cover it? Five, six weeks?”

  “Those were the good old days. Um. Anyway, you can do much the same with electronic pictures. They are made up of pixels, millions of them in some cases, and some aren’t as important as others. Without getting too technical, you can take a standard RGB — that’s red, green, blue — image and, with a little manipulation, hide all kinds of information bits in it without affecting what a human eye can see. If you run it through the right program, the hidden stuff shows up.

  “So, you send an e-mail addressed to your mother with a picture of your beautiful two-year-old boy, and right there in the middle of his face can be the specs for how to build a nuclear bomb.”

  “Great,” Fernandez said.

  “Welcome to the future, Lieutenant.

  “See, if somebody sends a big bunch of encrypted material and we happen to spot it, we might get suspicious. Everybody is watching the net these days, and a lot of e-mail gets scanned by one agency or another. Even if we can’t break the code, it might alert us enough to track down who sent it and received it, maybe pay them a little visit to see what they look like. But a picture of a little kid sent to his grandma? Who’d suspect that?”

  “Some paranoid Net Force op who couldn’t find anything else?” Fernandez said.

  “Right. And if you really want to make our jobs hard, not only do you hide the sucker in the middle of somewhere nobody is gonna look, you also encrypt it, which is double protection. Use a one-time-only code, and by the time anybody might be able to break it, whatever you were talking about is ancient history.”

  “All of which is fascinating but not helping us find the bad guys,” Michaels said. “All right, let’s break this up. We’ll meet again in the morning, call if you get anything useful before then.”

  Jay nodded.

  * * *

  Jay watched the others leave, until only he and Fernandez were left in the conference room. He said, “So, you up to speed on all this, Julio?”

  “Might as well have been speaking Swahili far as I’m concerned.”

  Jay laughed. “Maybe I can translate. How much do you know about the net and the web?”

  Fernandez shrugged. “There’s a difference between the net and the web? I dunno if you remember or not, but it took me six months to figure out where the on/off button was on my issue computer. I got a few things from Joanna since then, but
I’m basically an analog kind of guy. I figure if God had wanted us to count higher than twenty, He’d have given us more fingers and toes.”

  “Okay, let me lay it out for you in base ten, Jay Gridley’s quick and dirty history of computer communications.”

  “Fire away.”

  “Right. The original Internet was designed so it couldn’t be taken out. It was decentralized, nodes and servers all over the place, so if one went down, information flow could be rerouted. Think of it like a sixteen-lane superhighway. Block one lane, you just jump into another and keep going in the same direction. Only with the net, there are a whole bunch of superhighways going in all directions. Blow up a whole freeway, you just take an off-ramp to another one. Might have to get to San Francisco by way of Seattle and then Miami, talking a big loop, but you don’t have to pull over and stop ’cause there ain’t no more roads.”

  “Okay, I can follow that much.”

  “So, what this meant was, if the Soviet Union, who was our worst enemy in the bad old days, dropped a nuke on a city, it didn’t much matter in the grand cosmic scheme of things.”

  “Except to the people vaporized in the aforementioned city,” Fernandez said.

  “We’re talking bigger picture here, Julio. What I meant was, it wouldn’t significantly disrupt the net elsewhere. Like those giant fungus-thingees that are spread out over a thousand acres, but are still only one plant — cut a chunk out here or there, it doesn’t matter. The beat goes on.”

  “I got you, babe.”

  “Funny. Thing is, as the world wide web came into being and expanded, with everybody and his kid sister logging on, a lot more information started going back and forth, a whole lot more than the original guys ever figured on. This was set up pre-WWW, remember. Anyhow, along the way, things wound up getting more clumped together than the net founders intended. Everything started getting run by computers. In the beginning, when most everything in the phone company — and there was only one big phone company back then — was mechanical, you couldn’t really hack into much because there wasn’t anything much to hack into.

  “Now, the phone companies are like everybody else, slaves to the computer, and what one programmer can make, another one can screw up. Shut down any substantial amount of phone service to a big city, and that city is whacko. Sure, some of the big companies have landlines to other cities that don’t run through MCI, AT&T, Sprint, and so on, but the little guys who use dial-up or T1 or DSLs and such — and there are an awful lot of little guys — they’re screwed, because no matter how good their ISP’s securityware might be, bottom line is, you can’t spike paper without a paper spike.”

  “No shirt, no shoes, no service?”

  “Exactly. Even if the phones work, there are ways to bollix things. The web itself these days, there are a dozen main DNS servers, or name servers — these are the ones that map from domain names, like www-dot-whoever-dot-com, or dot-org, or dot-biz, or dot-whatever. Then the raw Internet Protocol addresses, those are the IP numbers, one-eight-four-dot-two-dot-three-dot-blah-blah-blah. They all have backups, of course, but there are ways to get into them electronically and rascal ’em. So that can mess things up real good by itself.”

  “Sounds just swell, Jay.”

  “Hey, we aren’t even talking social engineering yet. Bribing a guy who’s got the password is a real easy way to save yourself a lot of trouble.

  “The big multinational corps all have their own servers, of course, and even if you manage to throw a monkey wrench into the big DNS guys, the pool of corp info and connections won’t be affected right away — this gets kinda technical here, but let’s just say it’s kind of like shutting off a big power grid. Some houses will go dark, but a lot of folks have personal generators at home they can crank up, and they’ll work fine until they run out of gas.”

  “I’m still with you.”

  “But if you know what you are doing, you can maybe time things so that the big blackout hits long enough to make folks kick on their little generators, then it seems to ease a little. About the time the little generators are running out of gas, another big blackout hits. It’s tricky, but not impossible.”

  “Okay. Blackout.”

  “All right. But to complicate things further, there are some new, big, centralized broadband backbone switchers that serve a lot of traffic. And while a bunch of the traffic is encrypted or stegawared, especially in the military and banking areas, there are servers that have those encryption sequences or picture decoders who serve a whole lot of folks. Rascal those, and you get another kind of shutdown. Think of it like somebody not only shut off the power, they stopped the natural gas flow, or maybe flattened the tires of the heating oil trucks so they can’t deliver, and turned off the water while they were at it.”

  “This all sounds complicated,” Fernandez said.

  “Boy, howdy, is it complicated. There are so many triple fail-safes built into the system that making a major dent in the web, much less the entire net, is almost impossible without a multipronged attack perfectly timed. I wouldn’t want to try it without a herd of expert hackers and programmers, and even then, it’d be iffy at best. Before this happened, I’d have said it couldn’t be done.”

  “Except that somebody did it.”

  “No way around that, somebody did — unless it’s the biggest coincidence of all time, and I don’t believe that for a second. I’d sure like to know who ran the teams. He’s good. Real good.”

  Better than I am, Jay thought, but he kept that to himself.

  “Sounds like it would be easier just to go to the servers and cut the wires.”

  “If you knew where they were. These places are kept out of public view, and even if you knew where to find ’em, you’d still have to get past rabid armed guards who’d just as soon shoot you as look at you.”

  “Now we’re talking my language.”

  “There are a couple of major switchers that carry a substantial portion of net traffic now, more than they should, some fiber-optic, some wireless, and if you blew ’em up, it would be like stopping up all the toilets at a championship football game at once — civilization wouldn’t exactly grind to a halt, but you’d be knee-deep in feces in a hurry. We’re talking billions of dollars in downtime, so you can’t just waltz in and snip a few light cables with your handy-dandy wire cutters; it would be more like breaking into Fort Knox.”

  “But it’s possible.”

  “Sure. And you could do it other ways, too, and never have to get in the building. FCGs, MHGs, or HPMs.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Electromagnetic pulse bombs.”

  “Ah, yeah, EMP I’ve heard of. Nukes.”

  “Oh, that’s last century’s news, Lieutenant. EMPs come in a rainbow of flavors these days, non-nuclear, no messy radiation to deal with. Got your Flux Compression Generators, MagnetoHydrodynamic Generators, and the dreaded Virtual Cathode Oscillators, aka Vircators. These babies are packed into conventional bombs, use easy-to-find high-speed explosives and off-the-shelf electronics, and can be shoved out the back door of your basic twin-engine FedEx delivery plane for an air burst high enough so the ka-blooey doesn’t even scorch the building’s paint. But even hardened electronic components will shimmy if a big one of those suckers goes off directly overhead, and all the nonhardened stuff gets turned into chicken soup.”

  “My God, you computer geeks are a dangerous lot.”

  “Nah, computer geeks don’t do things like that, Julio. We sit in our offices and push buttons and talk about it. You ain’t gonna see a bunch of guys with pocket-protectors storming a backbone server, shooting it out with guards, and throwing hand grenades, dropping bombs, that’s… not cool. Not to mention most geeks I know outside the intelligence community would collapse under the weight of a flak vest, and probably pull half the muscles in their body trying to toss a baseball, much less a grenade.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Jeez, don’t be so quick to say that when you’re lo
oking right at me, dude.”

  “I’ve heard about your field exploits, Jay.”

  “And this is why I get paid the big bucks to sit in my office and do what I do. Let guys like you do my heavy lifting, thank you very much.”

  “You’re welcome. I’d rather be throwing grenades than pushing buttons any day.”

  “Yeah. So anyway, how they did it was as computer geeks and not commandos. They electronically attacked the phone companies, the big servers, the backbone routers, the comsats, they bought some passwords and strolled right on in, and probably stuff I haven’t even thought about, the whole enchilada, they did it in very precise stages, and they were good enough to cause the snafu they caused. Numbers aren’t in, but if they managed no more than a fifteen-percent disruption, even twelve-percent, they burned up billions and billions of dollars, reals, pesos, or whatever in downtime.

  “The real question is, why did they do it? What did they hope to gain?”

  Fernandez shrugged. “That’s for you and the other Net Force computer ops to figure out. Me, I just go and shoot who they tell me to shoot.”

  “Must be nice.”

  “Yes. It is, actually. Much easier.”

  The two smiled at each other. Everybody had to be somewhere, Jay figured, and if he ever wound up in a dark alley in RT, he’d want Julio Fernandez watching his back. And his front, too…

  4

  Alex Michaels leaned back in his chair and stared at his monitor’s splash screen.