Proper planning prevents piss-poor performance. Knowing as much as possible about the subject was an important part of that.
Gridley got out and walked to the door of his condo, where his wife, who taught Buddhism online, would be waiting. According to her latest medical records, she was pregnant.
Well. If Gridley did as he was told, he would live to be a father. If not…
Natadze put that thought from his mind. It was not good to dwell on failure. Yes, you did whatever was necessary to assure that such a thing did not happen, and that meant considering all the variables and planning for them, but you did not give them power. Failure was not allowed. Only success got you approval.
He looked automatically at his watch, mentally marking the time. Normally, he would follow the target for days, a week, to establish his patterns, but there was a time constraint this time and he would not be allowed that luxury on this mission. He did not like having to hurry, but it was the nature of the assignment, and one made do as best one could, given the parameters. He would do it tomorrow, when the man left work and drove home. It should not be difficult. The target was a white-collar worker, a chair-warmer who was not particularly adept physically. Natadze would use the gun, he would intimidate the man, and that would be that. Have him call his wife and tell her he would be working late. That would give him some time before he was missed at home or work, more than enough to find out what he needed to know. A piece of cake.
He drove past the target’s residence. Time to go home. To relax and to practice. The highlight of his day.
Thorn logged onto UseNet and into the newsgroup Rec.sport.fencing, where there were sometimes interesting exchanges ranging from technique to politics. Threads — follow-ups that began with a single post — tended to stay on a subject for a while, assuming they weren’t stupid to begin with or an insult to the FAQ (frequently asked questions). After twenty or fifty responses, if the original subject was sufficiently covered, then the postings in that thread tended to veer into other areas before dribbling to a stop.
In this group, people came to discuss the French versus the Italian grip; why the Spanish grip should be allowed in competition; or where to buy the best blades and furniture. Many of the people who wrote in were knowledgeable about all aspects of fencing. Some were tyros who didn’t know an épée from an elephant. And some posters were flat-out trolls.
A troll was somebody who logged into a newsgroup and posted something provocative purely for the sake of generating attention or starting an argument. The term supposedly came from fishing, wherein lines were set to troll for fish. Some said it came from those mythical beasts who lived under bridges and menaced passers-by. Either way, a troll on UseNet was a waste of time and space. They were almost always anonymous, posting insults under screen names so as to be insulated from reprisals, and sometimes they went past merely being annoying to offering libel online.
Some trolls were more clever than simply shouting obscenities into the faces of anybody around; they would pose a question or comment in such a manner as to seem serious. But clever or merely loud, trolls were an annoying fact of net life.
Sometimes very annoying.
Thorn had attracted a couple of these pests in his years on the net, both as a programmer and as a fencer, and when he opened the thread on pistol-grip handles versus straight-grips that now ran to forty-three messages, he found that one of the more irritating trolls of recent months was there, dogging him again.
Thorn had posted the question: Has anybody had problems with tendonitis using the straight grip that switching to a pistol grip has helped?
There had been several helpful replies, a few more that were interested, and, invariably, the idiot who tried to hijack the thread to serve his own ends. The troll — he had several pseudonyms he hid behind, but his current netnom was “Rapier”—had entered the building:
Tendonitis, Thorn? Must be you’re gripping your blade wrong. Or, wait. Maybe it’s just that you’re gripping the wrong blade;-)! Is that it, Thorn? So why don’t you hire somebody to give you that kind of attention? You can afford it, a rich guy like you…
Thorn gritted his teeth. What was wrong with somebody that the only way he could get attention was to jump up and down spitting and cursing at people, acting like a two-year-old? Look at me! Look at me! See how clever I am?
Unfortunately, yes, we see exactly how clever you are. Which isn’t at all.
Responding only made it worse. These fools didn’t care what you said, only that you said something—anything—thus providing the attention they craved. The best way to respond was to ignore it. “Don’t feed the trolls” was the advice that seasoned UseNetters gave to newbies. If nobody reacts, they leave.
Which, unfortunately, was not true of the really obnoxious ones. They simply changed their netnoms and came back in a new disguise, looking to get your goat.
Generally, as soon as Thorn recognized a troll, he put the name into his “kill” filter. From then on, that name would be marked and he simply didn’t open the postings. Of course, every time a troll changed names, he would slip by for a message or two.
The anonymity of the net had given rise to tens of thousands of such losers. If they said those things to a man’s face, they would be looking for their teeth, but safe in their homes at a keyboard they felt free to insult the world at large. Sad that this was all the life they had.
Thorn had a huge kill file of names, and one of the worst had used a dozen aliases in the last six months. It was the same guy. The writing style — such that it was — was easy to spot. The guy didn’t shout by using all caps, and his grammar wasn’t atrocious, but the snideness was definitive, and the speech patterns didn’t vary. And here he was yet again.
Thorn sighed, then added “Rapier” to his kill file.
Somebody ought to do something about these idiots.
Even as he thought it, he had the realization: He was now in a position where he could do something. He was running Net Force.
He smiled and shook his head. Trolls weren’t illegal. Irritating, obnoxious, sometimes even pitiful or outright psychotic, but there weren’t any laws against that. If they actually threatened or libeled you, you could do something, but the smarter ones would avoid going that far. They’d step right up to the edge, but not past it. Innuendo, yes, and thinly veiled threats, but never enough to take them into court to squash.
There were ways to backtrack e-mail and postings, perfectly legal ones to run through an Internet service provider to bring to their attention that they had people misbehaving. Some of the larger ISPs would kick an offender off if they got enough complaints. But some of the smaller ones, especially those in third-world countries, didn’t really care what their patrons did, as long as they paid their bills. Nigeria was notorious, all kinds of con-men ran schemes from there, the most famous being one about smuggling a large fortune out of the country and cutting in people who would help. A lot of folks had lost a lot of money on those schemes, even after they had been made public time and time again.
Clever trolls could hide their identities, and some of them used anonymous machines, at libraries or Internet cafes, so even if you tracked the computer down, you wouldn’t catch them. If they were dangerous, you could install key-watch software and eventually nail them, but Net Force didn’t chase trolls; if they did, they wouldn’t have time for anything else.
Well, it was what it was, and you just had to shrug it off. It was tempting to drop the posting into Jay Gridley’s lap and tell him to find the guy, though. Outing “Rapier” on the net would feel very satisfying. There were folks who, if they knew where the man lived, would drop by and have a few words with him.