Tom Clancy's Net Force 6-10 (70 page)
Spooky.
To sit alone in the Place of the Dead was definitely that.
Some of those who had left parts of themselves here had not been quite so holy as their contemporaries had thought them to be. Some of them had not advanced so far along the path as they had pretended. Their essences were strong and sinister, it was whispered, still full of unfinished business, of lusts and hatreds and fears, and woe to the initiate who sat among them unprepared. Legend had it that they would beat upon the walls of a student’s mind, clamoring to be let in, to experience once more the red pulse of life, to leach warmth from his spirit as the floor did from his body.
Saji had spoken to him of the fear Jay had felt on such occasions, especially when he had been recovering from his stroke.
“But of course you will be afraid,” she had said. “Fear is natural. Confront it often enough and it will lose its power over you. There will come a day when you will embrace fear as you would a woman, and it will serve you as well as the warmest love.”
Uh-huh. Right.
Jay realized that his breathing had become more rapid and shallow. He could feel fear rising in him like the mercury in a thermometer. He concentrated on breathing deeply and slowly, focusing his awareness on his breath.
It seemed to him that the light had grown even more wan and pallid, that the darkness was pressing in hungrily around him. He noticed the skull of some ancient monk sitting on a nearby shelf at eye level. An unnamed artisan—perhaps existing at the same time as the monk, perhaps centuries later, there was no way of knowing—had outlined the skull’s eye sockets with filigreed silver and placed within them a pair of faceted rubies, each worth a king’s ransom. The gems glittered in the weak light, seeming somehow to focus on Jay with malign intensity. . . .
Jeez, how good were you at creating a scenario when you could scare yourself with something you had made?
Jay turned his gaze from the skull, trying to still his mind, to concentrate on following the breath as it entered and left his body.
He sighed. There was no denying it—the monkey mind was in full control now. His thoughts scampered from one subject to another like primates leaping from tree to tree. Before his mental eye arose the image of his own infected computer, and of the anger he had felt at that. He wanted to hurt somebody. Oh, boy, did he.
He also wanted very much to be able to be calm, and to not let his emotions run away with him, and so he kept trying to get there. And if that had to include sitting on a frigid stone floor among human body parts, meditating and fighting off the attacks of restless spirits, then so be it. Saji could do it. He could learn how to do it, too.
Jay closed his eyes again. He blew his breath out through his left nostril, inhaled slowly through his right nostril. Once more he blanked his mind as best he could and sought the “om,” the sound of all sounds, the drone of the entire universe as it spoke with a single voice.
In the embrace of the “om,” it was said, all things were possible.
Even tracking down the lowly little hacker who’d created that virus—
He shook his head. There he went again. He was never going to get this. Never. Maybe he should—
His priority alarm chimed, kicking him abruptly out of the meditation scenario—
Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia
“What?”
“WE HAVE FOUND THE EVIL ONE,” his tracker imp said.
Jay grinned. He could get his head together later. Right now, he had a criminal to catch and a very personal score to settle.
21
Summer 1973
Disco Beat Dance Club
Disco Beat Dance Club
San Francisco, California
“Smokey Jay” Gridley leaned against the cool blue tuck-and-roll Naugahyde cushion in a back booth in the disco, doing his best to appear relaxed as he watched the drug dealer and his buddies in a booth a dozen feet away. Thick smoke drifted through the air, with much of the bluish haze coming from low-grade marijuana, to judge from the smell.
The dealer was a pig. Jay guessed he weighed three, three hundred fifty pounds at least. His bald, bullet-shaped head gleamed in the flashing lights from the dance floor. Three sets of heavy gold chains glittered on his chest in the large gap of the lime-green polyester shirt he wore unbuttoned down to his navel. He moved his hands in the air, tracing a Coke-bottle shape, and laughed.
His two friends, who looked as if they could have been cast in a
Superfly
movie, laughed uproariously at his apparently obscene comments. One man wore a black hat with big peacock feathers in the band, a poster boy for “pimp of the week,” and the other sported black leather pants and a jacket, both studded with chrome buttons. A few safety pins through his cheek and a mohawk and he’d be a punk rocker. Thankfully, they weren’t quite to that era yet.
Superfly
movie, laughed uproariously at his apparently obscene comments. One man wore a black hat with big peacock feathers in the band, a poster boy for “pimp of the week,” and the other sported black leather pants and a jacket, both studded with chrome buttons. A few safety pins through his cheek and a mohawk and he’d be a punk rocker. Thankfully, they weren’t quite to that era yet.
A few people moved on the dance floor, fairly graceful considering the platform shoes they all wore. The
chukkita-chukkita-chukkita
of the disco beat was underscored by a lot of percussion, particularly cymbals, and a nasally male singer.
chukkita-chukkita-chukkita
of the disco beat was underscored by a lot of percussion, particularly cymbals, and a nasally male singer.
What awful music.
Jay glanced around the room and caught a view of himself in one of the mirrored pillars that framed the dance floor. He wore amber-tinted horn-rimmed glasses and a brown leather jacket. A thick gold medallion with an up-raised fist lay on his chest, framed in a gap that was nearly the equal of the fat man’s, and his dark blue bell-bottomed jeans almost completely hid the snakeskin boots he was wearing.
He’d combed his hair into a huge pompadour, the front of the ridge extending a good inch out from his forehead, and held in place by the strongest hair spray you could find in 1973—which was almost shellac. You could bounce quarters off his hair, he was sure.
Jay Gridley, human chameleon.
A burst of static echoed in his right ear. He wore an earpiece there that was 1973’s version of a high-tech receiver.
Jay pushed the fist in the middle of the medallion—the microphone—and spoke: “Yeah?”
“Hey, hey, Smokey Jay, looks like the connection has done arrived.”
It was the undercover cop outside. Jay knew that he needed help on a major bust like this—not because he couldn’t handle a simple pickup like this one. No, it was more political than that. Whenever possible, Net Force tried to bring in the locals, share some of the credit as it were, especially on the big busts.
A crew of undercover officers also ringed the inside of the club. The guy in the big afro on the edge of the dance floor and the foxy chick in the bright orange micro were another pair from metro.
“I read you. Keep an eye on his ride, and leave the rest to me.”
“You got it, Smokey—and hey, uh, leave a little for us, will you?”
Gridley grinned and pressed the fist again.
“We’ll see what goes down.”
Naturally, what was going on here wasn’t really a bust in the traditional sense, but the analogy was apt enough.
What they were waiting on was the hacker who had been creating viruses.
After running the imp for about a day, Jay had gathered information on the start points for all three viruses, but the data had been inconclusive. This guy was smart. He had launched from several different places geographically, all with quick-start AOL accounts that he’d registered with cash cards, paying a full year in advance. The trail had gone cold pretty quick.
Not ready to give up, Jay had started analyzing the virus trail. And in the curious and backward non-barking-in-the-night-dog manner—and thank you kindly, Mr. Sherlock Holmes—he’d found something lacking.
Deep within some of the heaviest concentrations of the virus, he’d found a scattering of computers that hadn’t been infected. These machines weren’t just free of one or two of the viruses. They were free of all three, which seemed to Jay to stretch coincidence a bit.
There were possible explanations for such anomalies, of course. Those machines could all have great firewalls or antivirals. They could have been off-line when the viruses hit. They could be new systems that hadn’t been up until yesterday. There were a lot of reasons, and some of them were even logical.
Well,
he’d thought.
Let’s just see which it was.
he’d thought.
Let’s just see which it was.
Jay had refined another tracker, this one even more subtle, and hit the unaffected systems with it.
He found that while most of the immune systems had pretty good firewalls and bug squashers, several of them had off-the-shelf stuff that should have let at least one of the bugs past, which pretty well shot the first theory.
All of them had been on-line at the time of the general infection, which took care of the second theory.
But most interesting of all, he found that there was a fair amount of traffic between most of the unaffected machines.
Aha. That gave him an even better reason why they hadn’t been hit:
It was a hackers’ ring.
Oh, it was nothing obvious. It wasn’t like the website said anything like, “Geek Friends of Computer Viruses,” but visiting the on-line VR chat rooms where some of these SysOps hung out, it was easy to read between the lines. These were virus fan boys.
Which could only mean one thing. Someone in the network of unaffected websites, or someone close to them, had made the viruses Jay was tracking. And, like many hacker rings, these guys would send out immunizations of anything they made to everyone else in the group.
Jay had hacked one of the computer’s virus software packages and had found patches and virus definitions added just hours before the release of each of the three viruses.
Honor among thieves, and it was going to cost them. . . .
A stream of sunlight blasted into the darkened club’s interior as the door opened.
In came the connection.
He wore a white leisure suit, big collar and all, a low hat over dark sunglasses, and a big Mongol moustache flanked by bushy sideburns. Disco forever.
The hacker walked with a swagger, carrying a white plastic briefcase which matched his outfit. He made his way over to the fat man and they exchanged high fives.
Leisure Suit sat next to the Dealer and opened his briefcase so that only they could see what was inside. The fat man reached down and came back with something on his finger, a whitish powder which he touched to his tongue. He smiled and nodded.
Jay tapped the medallion.
“All units close in. We have delivery.”
There was the sound of rushing feet out of synch with the disco music, as the undercover dancers charged, whipping out hidden revolvers as they moved.
But Leisure Suit wasn’t going down easy.
“No way, pigs!!”
He leaped from the booth and pulled his own weapon, a chrome-plated .45.
The Dealer yelled, too: “It’s the fuzz! Sonny—Randy—take ’em!”
The henchmen pulled out their pieces, and lead filled the air.
Jay pulled out his own gun, a custom-tuned .44 Smith & Wesson Model 29, one of the most powerful handguns in the world, and let go a shot.
BOOM—!
He grinned again. That was
loud
—!
loud
—!
Black leather flew backward as the huge bullet took him in the chest.
Pimp Hat fired at the dancers as the hacker turned over one of the tables. Jay saw him crawling toward the back entrance of the club.
“Stop, police!” he yelled, and started crawling himself.
More cops joined the fight, pouring into the club with vests on. Within a few seconds the Dealer was down, and Pimp Hat would not be henching anymore—if that was a good term.
Jay reached the back entrance and heard a shot before he saw the hacker dive into a big Cadillac. The undercover cop was down.
“You’ll never get me!” the hacker shouted, and his car lurched forward, tires squealing.
“Man down!” Jay shouted as he ran for his own car, a huge Dodge Charger custom fitted with a 360-cubic-inch overbored engine. He hopped in and fired it up. The machine roared, the Holley carb pumping like crazy, and he took off after the fleeing hacker—
—who was cresting a hill just ahead. Jay flattened the gas pedal, enjoying the rush of acceleration and the feel of the wind blowing in through his open window.
He sailed over the steep hill in a classic car-chase maneuver and braced himself as the car hit, undercarriage tapping the pavement for a second as the shocks tried to take the dynamic load of the falling Dodge.
This was way cool.
The Caddy rolled around a corner, and Jay tore into the intersection, turning hard right as he passed the midpoint, as he’d been trained to do. His car skidded right, under the minimum control necessary for it to stick to the road, and he punched the gas again.
“Hi-ho, Silver!” he yelled.
As he did, he toggled a switch on the medallion: “Julio, you ready?”
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