You’re not an ape — use a tool!
The RBs were always looking for fat and easy targets, and the Net Force decoys were set out like overweight turkeys too heavy to run.
The latest version of the sting was BC Internet Industries, Inc. Called BC Three Eyes, or just Three Eyes, the company had just enough passware and fire walls to make a bent hacker have to work a little, and all kinds of apparent goodies there for the taking once they were past security. Like a brown paper bag full of unmarked twenty-dollar bills just sitting there on the sidewalk with nobody around, it was just too good for the RBs to resist. Three Eyes had gulled a dozen thieves over the last year — under different names and slightly different configurations, of course.
“BC” stood for “Big Con,” one of Jay’s little jokes.
Typically, hackers would attack, then demand payment. Sometimes, a company would require more proof. Sometimes, they would even hire the thieves to set up security for them, with the idea that it takes one to catch one.
Some of the RBs actually considered breaking into a company’s system and screwing it up to be the equivalent of a job interview.
Three Eyes had fine-tuned their process. Once they had an RB coming after them, they first sent a small amount of money, with a promise of more — providing the thief would be willing to do a hands-on, face-time demo to their own security people of how they could get past the safeguards. The pitch had been developed and honed by a brilliant shrink who had worked for State before he’d moved to the FBI. The pitch was designed to be psychologically irresistible to a hacker mentality. Hackers thought they were smarter than normal people. They were convinced of their superiority. They thought they could think circles around any company security honcho or federal agent. They wanted to show people just how smart they were. They needed the applause, and the Three Eye pitch played right into their beliefs. It did everything but bend down to kiss their feet. They ate it up.
The RBs, once hooked, were landed almost every time.
The big HDTV screen was lit, and several people were standing or sitting at the table, watching. The case-cam was a briefcase that belonged to one of the agents. Typically there were a pair of these, one from the regular FBI, one from Net Force, playing the parts of the CEO and security VP for Three Eyes. They would ask for a sit-down with the thieves, and the RBs could choose the time, place, whatever. Some of the thieves had been pretty clever. They had made calls from mobile coms to the agents, changed destinations at the last instant, and one guy even had the meeting take place in a house that had been made into a kind of giant Farady Cage, complete with wide-spectrum jammers to make sure the company execs couldn’t transmit their position for help.
These guys weren’t that smart, though they were careful.
The case-cam on the table had a small scanning unit that panned slowly back and forth almost one-eighty. The cam panned to the left.
“Check it out. Metal detector built into the doorway,” Toni pointed at the screen, “to make sure our guys aren’t carrying guns or knives.”
The camera panned back. There were two men seated at the table across from the two agents, and two more men standing behind them.
“Who are the goons?”
“Bodyguards, we figure.”
“Big ones.”
“Six four, six five. Two-seventy, two hundred eighty, easy. Not fun in close quarters.”
PIPed in the left corner of the image was a smaller, wider-angle view that took in most of the room. That would be from the sticky-cam, about the size of a dime and almost clear and invisible, stuck on the wall near the door by one of the agents when they’d arrived. The wide-angle image gave a better view of the play, and Toni picked up a remote and switched the picture-in-a-picture around.
Toni looked at her watch. “Right about… now,” she said.
One of the agents — the regular FBI guy — removed an envelope from his jacket pocket and passed it to the two men across from him. The thief took the envelope and checked it, smiled real big, and showed it to his partner. His partner took it, riffled what was inside with his thumb, and also smiled.
While the two extortionists were looking at the money, the agent on the left, who was in fact one Julio Fernandez of Net Force, removed something from his pocket, which he pointed at the man across from him.
It looked kind of like a pack of white playing cards with a small handle and a circular hole near the middle through which Fernandez had stuck his finger.
“Strange-looking weapon,” Alex said.
“Starn pistola,” Toni said. “9mm stripper clip, five shots, all plastic and ceramic construction, including the springs, fragmenting bullets made from some kind of zinc epoxy boron ceramic. Light, but very fast, even from a snubby. Eighteen hundred, nineteen hundred feet per second. Bullet comes apart on impact, creates a nasty temporary stretch cavity.”
The bodyguard on the left made as if to draw a gun hidden under his jacket in a shoulder holster. Julio waved the gun at him and said something. Too bad there wasn’t any sound.
The bodyguard must have decided that Julio’s weapon wasn’t that dangerous. He pulled his own handgun, a big, black semiauto pistol.
It wasn’t even halfway from the holster when Julio shot him. The resolution of the camera, while pretty good, wasn’t enough for Toni to see where the bullet or bullets hit, but the man dropped the gun and staggered back against the wall, then slid down into a sitting position.
The second bodyguard evidently decided that trying to outdraw a man pointing a gun at your face was maybe not such a good idea. He raised his hands, fingers open wide.
“My, my,” Alex said. “What’s the world coming to when hackers bring guns to the party.”
“We live in dangerous times,” Toni said.
15
In the conference room next to the computer center, Keller called his team together.
“Listen,” he said. “I know you are all doing outstanding work. Our projects thus far have been on target and very effective. However, due to the actions of Net Force, as well as other minor security agencies, our successes have not been as great as we’d hoped they’d be.”
Nobody was happy to hear that, but it wasn’t telling them anything they didn’t already know.
“There are real world contingencies; of course, those have always been in place, and those in charge of such matters will go forward as necessary. Some efforts have already been made in that direction.”
This drew a disappointed murmur.
He could understand that. It had been his hope all along that the programmers and weavers could do the job without resorting to cruder methods. That would be the real victory, to use the very tools of that which they sought to bring about and nothing more. The reality of it was, however, that there were still limits on what could be done electronically. The future had arrived, but there were still people out there who not only refused to log into it, they seemed to be heading back to the past. There were groups who still used typewriters, for God’s sake. Fountain pens were making a comeback. Handwritten letters weren’t going to replace e-mail, of course, but there were people who still corresponded that way. There were even people in the United States who not only refused to have answering machines or services, they didn’t have telephones!
You couldn’t reach people like that, couldn’t frighten them with worries of Internet problems. They didn’t care.
Fortunately, these Luddites were in the minority; but the computer revolution was not yet complete. Some things still had to be done the old-fashioned way. That’s why men like Santos were necessary. If you were doing surgery, you needed a laser scalpel, but now and again, despite medicine’s advances, you had to have a bone saw. Or, perhaps more accurately, a leech…