"Clancy, Tom - Net Force 06 - Cybernation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Clancy Tom)

Howard shook his head. He went to take the call.

3

In the Air over the Central Atlantic Ocean

Roberta Santas prowled up and down the aisles of the private jet, a stretch 737 rigged with all the comforts needed to keep a bunch of corporate fat cats happy. No gym, but at least a couple of flat spots wide enough to lie down and stretch out. That was good, 'cause sitting for a long time on a plane trip could cause blood clots in your legs. Santas had an aunt who died that way. She was taking a trip from Rio to London, and she'd been jammed into one of. those little seats between two other people for like eighteen or twenty hours. Only time she had gotten up was to go pee, and then only a couple times, 'cause she didn't want to cause the guy sitting on the aisle any problems. For being so nice, Aunt Maria had gotten a blood clot that had cramped her leg so bad she'd started screaming. They were a thousand kilometers away from anywhere, and by the time they landed, the clot had broken loose and gone to her heart or lungs or something, and she'd been dead ten minutes before they got her off the plane.


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Roberta 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. Jogo 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

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CYBERNATION


ily to know the fastest way to knock an opponent from ; feet, the methods to throw a powerful fist or elbow or that would send a man sprawling. And he had those. But real mastery lay in the small details, ; constant circle in and out that hypnotized opponents, 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 ffiwe yet. He would be, eventually. * And the money he was making as Field Operations Bead 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, v What more could a man ask for?

Net Force HQ Qaantico, Virginia

JR their third meeting since the electronic attack on the net and web, Alex Michaels and his team had figured out Ibe 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 hi the conference room with Jay Gridley, Lieu: tenant Julio Femandez, and Major Joseph Leffel, the actх log head of the military arm, Michaels raised his eyebrows *;" the others. General John Howard would be arriving later in the day. It had taken some talk to get him to agree f ;.to come back, and he had to go home and tell his wife 'iace-to-face before he would agree to it. But Michaels had a bad feeling about this, and he wanted Howard- had proved himself more than a few times-back on

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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 flat- screen, 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