State of War

24

“They can’t be serious,” Michaels said, looking at the list of requested documents. It had come via e-mail and certified letter, both. He had the e-mail open on his computer.

“They are, Commander,” Tommy said. “They are quite serious.”

Michaels shook his head. “They want copies of every e-mail sent by every operative of this agency between these two dates? We’re talking about eight or ten thousand letters, maybe more.”

“That’s correct.”

Alex pointed at a line on his screen. “And all these work files, personal notes, and official reports? If we printed them out, we’d have to rent a moving van to haul them!”

“Electronic copies are acceptable, Commander, as long as they are certified by a DOJ or GAO inspector.”

“Do you know how much time we’ll waste pulling all this up? Time that could be better spent solving crimes — or stopping new ones from happening?”

“The only option is to allow Ames or his representatives access to your computer systems, which, of course, we can’t do, in the interests of national security — unless they hire somebody with adequate clearance, and that’s not going to happen since just about anybody with that kind of clearance already works for us. You have to cough it up, Commander. It’s the rule.”

“But it’s stupid,” Alex said. “Stupid, inefficient, and wasteful.”

“I understand. And I’m sure they’ll be happy to take it in small pieces.”

Alex glared at him. “Yeah, well, you know what? That’s not how they are going to get it. I’ll wait until I have a chunk big enough for them to choke on. And you know what else? I am going to print it all out, too.”

“What about that moving van?”

“I’ll eat the cost. If we send it to them as hard copy, then they’ll have to read it all. They won’t just be able to do a nice and easy word search to find stuff they want. I don’t have to make their job easy for them, do I?”

Tommy smiled. “I believe you are finally beginning to get into the spirit of things, Commander. No, you don’t have to make it easier for them. You may, within the bounds of the law, make it as difficult as you can.” He smiled again. “Of course, we are all looking for truth and justice, but it’s up to a judge and jury to decide that part. Ames will have readers go through it, and I don’t expect they will miss much, but if it takes them longer to find it than they’d like, that is their problem. By the time this comes to trial, and that will be months from now, key witnesses might decide to come clean and tell things straight. Or they might skip town and not leave a forwarding address. Or have a heart attack and pass away. Lots of things can happen, and you can never figure on a sure win in advance. It doesn’t hurt to take all the time you can get when you’re on the receiving end of one of these suits.

“On the record, as your attorney and as an officer of the court, I must instruct you to move with all deliberate speed to comply with judicial orders. But you must be the judge of what is appropriate celerity and manner. If you can justify it to a judge — which means if I can, and I can — then you can bury them in a snowstorm of paper. They won’t like it, the judge won’t like it, but he knows how the game is played, too. Time is the plaintiff’s friend when it comes to gathering evidence, but not necessarily when it comes to being able to utilize it.”

“Thanks, Tommy.”

“Just doing my job.”

Tommy took off, and as he did, Michaels’s private line chirped. He picked it up.

“Alex? It’s Cory. How are we?”

He blinked, caught unawares by her call. How did she get this number?

“Cory. What can I do for you?” His voice was guarded, giving nothing away.

There was a part of him that couldn’t help being flattered by her apparent interest in him, even though the larger, more logical, more experienced part knew that she wasn’t really interested in him. She was just doing her job, and if her job meant appearing to be interested in him — or if, as he suspected, her job meant going farther than that, well, he suspected she was pretty good at that, too.

But he just wasn’t interested, and his job didn’t require him to give any such false impressions. Besides, the “information” she’d given him earlier turned out to be nothing he didn’t already know about CyberNation.

After a brief pause, she said, “I think I have something more useful to you this time.”

“Uh-huh,” he said.

“I had dinner with Mitchell Ames recently.”

Despite himself, he perked up at that. “Really?”

“Yes. He had a few things to say I’m sure you’d find interesting.”

“I’m sure I would. Why don’t you drop by—?”

“Can’t,” she said, cutting him off. “I have to fly to the west coast tonight, won’t be back for a couple of days, and I’ve got appointments all day. But I can make time for that drink. Meet me at the Roosevelt Hotel in the lobby at seven P.M. Bye.”

Cautious, he had drawn a breath to tell her he couldn’t make it, but she hung up before he could speak.

He frowned, then thought about it for a second. What could it hurt, to meet her in a public bar? No danger in that. And maybe she could give him something he could use against Ames, some kind of shark repellent.

Okay, he’d do it. He’d have a drink with her. But he’d do it his way.

He touched the intercom control.

“Sir?” his assistant asked.

“See if you can find Toni for me, would you please, Becky? I think she’s in the building. Ask her if she would stop by.”

His new executive assistant, a young woman from Oregon who was apparently part Indian, said, “Yes, sir.”

Jay showed up before Toni did.

Leaning against the wall near the door, his arms crossed in front of him, Jay was grinning like a cat. “His netnom is ‘Thumper,’ ” he said, “but his real name is Robert Harvey Newman. Julio Fernandez’s report ought to be along soon with all the details of the takedown, but I can give you the gist of what we know so far.”

“Go ahead.”

“We got him by backwalking the thing and finding out there was a hacker’s group that didn’t get hit. We found one of them and squeezed him, and he gave Thumper up. Rolled over quicker than a lubed steel ball bearing.”

“Go on.”

“So once we kicked in his door — I used the royal ‘we’ here, since it was Julio and his team who did the actual kicking and collecting — Thumper was brought in. He is being, um, ‘interviewed’ as we speak.”

“Who’s got it?”

“Toni.”

“Good,” Michaels said. “And thanks, Jay. Good work.”

“How about a lawyer? Don’t I get a lawyer?”

Toni shook her head. She was alone with the hacker, but a digital camcorder recorded every word and gesture that either one of them spoke or did.

“No, Mr. Newman, you don’t get a lawyer,” she said. “You’re a terrorist, and we have different rules for dealing with people like you.”

She sat across the long table from the hacker, in the back conference room. They didn’t really have interrogation facilities here to speak of. Net Force hunted and found a lot of criminals, but didn’t normally do much in the way of actually arresting them. The way it usually worked was they’d track down a guy scamming the net and call in the regular FBI or, when it worked out that local laws were better, the local cops, to bust the perps.

Still, they were good at improvising. The back conference room was a designated safe area. If somebody dangerous somehow slipped into the building, some guy waving a gun up and blasting his way down the halls, you could come in here and deadbolt the door against him. The door was steel, and the walls had sheets of Lexan in them that would stop most small arms’ fire. It would do just fine for interrogating a white-collar crook like Newman.

“But — I’m not a terrorist! I’m a computer programmer! ”

“Not according to the law,” Toni said. “You unleashed a series of debilitating viruses upon the Internet and the web, causing millions of dollars in downtime damage. It was an attack upon America, upon the world, clearly a terrorist act, and as such, qualifies you just fine under the statutes.”

“That’s absurd!”

Toni gave him a toothy smile. “A man who calls himself ‘Thumper’ needs to watch very carefully for predators. You are a rabbit in among the wolves, Mr. Newman. What you are is lunch.”

“I’ll sue you!”

Toni let an edge creep into her voice. “What, you mean if we let you ever see daylight again? Listen, pal, I can ship you to a cell so deep it’ll take until noon Friday for Monday morning’s sunshine to get to you. By the time you come up for trial, and I think I can guarantee a military tribunal, open-and-shut and you get to go right back to your hole, you’ll look like Rip van Winkle’s clone. All alone. No contact with anybody, and no computer to play with, just you and four walls. Ten, fifteen years. That’s if they don’t decide to execute you.”

Not true, of course, almost none of it, but this guy didn’t know it. And right now, Toni’s job was to gather as much information from him as she could, not be his best friend or act as his attorney or his civil-rights activist.

“You — you can’t do that!” Thumper said. “It — it’s not fair!”

Toni gave him the big-cat-about-to-feed grin again. “Welcome to the real world, Mr. Virtual Reality. The clock is running. If I don’t hear what I want to hear starting in the next sixty seconds, I’ll have that big, mean, nasty guy with all the guns who arrested you take you for a walk to our basement elevator.”

She let him think about that for a moment, not saying anything.

Thumper sighed and sagged back in his chair. “What do you want?”

Toni looked at him. “I want to know why you did this.”

“I was paid! I got hired by a guy to do it. It wasn’t my idea!”

“And his name?”

“I–I don’t know his name.”

Toni stood up and made a point of looking at her watch.

“No, it’s true, I swear! He called me, I met him at an office, we did everything face-to-face. He paid me in cash. I never got his name.”

“Where is this office?”

“At a mall on Long Island.”

Toni shoved a small flatscreen across the table. “Key in the particulars. Name of the mall, where it is.”

He took the flatscreen.

“I want a description of the man who hired you. Height, weight, hair, eyes, everything you can remember. And when we’re finished I’ll send a technician down to work with you on an Identi-kit to come up with a picture of this guy.”

Thumper nodded, already typing.

“Are you supposed to see him again?”

“Yes, yes, for another payment, as soon as he sees evidence of the virus’s effects.”

“How do you make contact?”

“I have a secure phone, no visual, signal scrambled coming and going. He calls me.”

“Where is this phone?”

“Your people took it from me.”

“You use a vox-changer when you talk?”

“Yes.”

She nodded. “Good. Maybe you won’t have to turn into a cave fish after all, Mr. Newman.”

Toni went to the door, already planning the next step. She would have Jay put out a press release that the hacker’s next virus was out there doing damage. When the guy paying this clown called, they’d set up a meeting, nail him, and that would be that. This was no sweat, no problem.