State of War

21

“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.

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.

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.

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—!

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?”

“You got it. My team’s ready to rock. You just give us the location. We’ve even got a warrant waiting.”

Jay gave him the address.

On the straightaway, the Dodge started to catch up to the Caddy, and Jay pushed the accelerator down as far as it would go.

Closer… closer…

The suspect threw a small package from the car, and Jay swerved right to avoid it. Good thing he did, because it exploded as he drove past it.

He grinned. “You’ve got to do better than that, pal!”

Oh, this was fun.

And the best part was yet to come.

Because Jay already knew where the guy was going. Jay had figured the guy would probably be releasing more gunk onto the net, and probably more immunizations to his hacker buddies, so he’d set a watchdog on the hacker site’s chat room, primed to alert him about any new patches.

The dog had barked just before lunch. Jay had checked it out and saw that something new was coming in. So he’d alerted Julio and headed in for his stakeout scenario.

Since he’d already backtracked the trail of the previous antivirus shots, all he’d had to do was trace the last few steps, which he’d done after the guy had been spotted outside the club.

He’d had the address before the shooting started.

The chase was a stall. They could have picked the hacker up back at the disco club — Jay had worked hard figuring out how to stage the scene so the hacker would believe he’d really gotten away on his own — but Jay needed to track him back to his safe house, and they needed to get there before the guy either launched the new virus or destroyed it.

There were other ways he could have handled this, but he had felt this was the best way to both preserve the chain of evidence and involve the locals in a meaningful way.

Besides, he thought, grinning again, it was more fun this way.

Imagine how surprised this hacker will be when he pulls off his VR gear and finds Julio and his team standing there, machine guns pointed at him.

So when the hacker threw another bomb and Jay swerved into a light post, which stopped the chase cold, he didn’t mind.

He just hoped that Julio remembered to take a picture.

He really wanted to see the look on the guy’s face when they got him.