The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [96]
“Who the hell do you think you’re talking to? Of course I would have known!”
“Nobody ever looks inside their keyboards,” said Wimberley with a sneer. He was very young. “Not even you, Professor. I know who I’m talking to here, okay? If I hadn’t pled out, you would have testified at my trial!”
Van stared at him. Wimberley looked vaguely familiar, but only vaguely. “So what was your handle?”
“Bionic Ninja of 214.”
An anklebiter. “What, you were like fifteen back then?”
“Sixteen,” Wimberley said. “The Secret Service broke into my parents’ house. My mom never got over that. She still takes Prozac. All just because I borrowed a little long distance from your sad-ass phone company that just lost forty-five billion dollars!”
Van took a sorrowful breath. “The Air Force didn’t mind your rap sheet?”
“The modern United States military loves troubled, aggressive young men with high IQs,” Wimberley told him. He had a settled voice and a lethal stare.
With an effort, Van stopped his knees from shaking. The hell of it was that Wimberley’s bug would have worked. Of course Van would never have looked inside his own keyboard, and the tiny device would have been silently beaming every keystroke he made to some monitoring station blocks away.
“Look, I’m NSC, and I know something about your so-called outfit. The U.S. Space Force can’t just start up a ‘Cyberspace Force’ on its own get-go. They’ve got no policy guidance from the top.”
Gonzales weighed in suddenly. “The Space Force are the only service branch that can run mil-spec cyber-security,” he recited. “No other military outfit has the extensive computer networks or the time-tested technical skills.”
“Are you nuts?” said Van. “The Space Force is supposed to run satellites! That’s got nothing to do with viruses or DOS attacks! The guys tasked with defending military systems are the Computer Network Defense Joint Task Force over at DISA.”
“Who’s Deeza?” said Wimberley. “I never heard of ’em.”
“They’ve been at the job since 1998!”
Hickok was even more skeptical. “Look here, kid, there ain’t no such thing as ‘cyberspace’!”
“There is if we say there is,” insisted Wimberley.
“But why did you come here to my place?” Van said. He was genuinely baffled.
“I hate to break the news to you, Professor, but information warfare happens inside people’s computers! And you, you’re trying to sabotage a mission-critical eighteen-billion-dollar satellite project! You don’t think important people are gonna notice about that? We know what you’re up to.”
Alarmed, Van turned to Hickok. Hickok just shrugged. “‘Important people,’ he says.”
“You’re a left-wing professor from Stanford,” Wimberley amplified. “You’re a peacenik.”
“‘Left-wing’?” said Van, stunned. “‘Peacenik’? I just had lunch with Paul Wolfowitz!”
“Your wife is in the antiwar movement,” said Wimberley. “She was Eastern Seaboard Coordinator for Physicists for Social Responsibility!”
“Dottie is from Massachusetts!” Van said, outraged. “They’re all like that up there!”
Wimberley stared back at him. “Don’t you ever Google yourself? It’s written all over you. Look at that hair and those clothes.”
“And that’s supposed to give you some kind of right to Watergate my apartment?” Van blurted.
“Oh, yeah,” said Wimberley. “It generally does.”
“Nobody ever catches us,” said Gonzales, shifting his shining handgun and looking at his wristwatch. “You’re supposed to be way off in another state. We’re supposed to be long gone from here by now.”
“Yeah,” said Wimberley, hefting his case. “We kinda need to be going right now.”
“Hold on,” said Van. “I just happen to be the Deputy Technical Director of the CCIAB.”
“So what?” said Wimberley. “I never heard of them either.”
“So I built you that burglar case, you sorry little punk! There’s no way you’re just walking out of here when you just broke into my own house and tapped my own computer with my own hardware!”
Wimberley set the heavy plastic case by his feet and folded his long, wiry arms. “What are you gonna do about it, Dr. Superspy? Call the