He chambered a round, and lined the scope up on a rather fat American officer who looked like a caricature of a Wall Street stockbroker, despite the military uniform. Even with the optics, the target was still somewhat small at the distance — nearly two hundred meters, he judged. The scope was zeroed in at one hundred meters, so he aimed a bit high, for the head, to allow for a little extra drop. He took a deep breath, held it, squeezed the trigger…
In New York City, a currency tasking computer subcontracted to the Federal Reserve sent copies of all user ID codes admitted to every connected terminal—
Even as the fat American collapsed with a bullet buried in his chest, Plekhanov worked the bolt and shifted his aim. Ah. There was the White Russian, saber in hand, leading his men. Plekhanov put the crosshairs on the man's throat, held his breath again, fired—
In Moscow, the computer interlink responsible for balance-of-trade statistics with the European Commonwealth scrambled and went down—
There was the Korean officer, trying to get his troops to duck and cover. Plekhanov worked the rifle's bolt, ejected another spent shell and chambered a fresh round. Goodbye, Mr. Kim—
A small setting inside the fabber making the new PowerExtreme mainframe computer chips at the Kim Electronics plant in Seoul altered, not enough to be noticed by the operators, but enough to change certain pathways in the chips' silicon circuitry. The virus had a time limit, so the settings would revert, but a thousand chips would be affected before that happened, turning the high-end systems they would eventually control into electronic time bombs waiting to go off—
And here on the muddy French field was an Indian looking for a place to hide. Sorry, Punjab, old Wog, there's no cover there—
The newly installed computer traffic system in Bombay blew its triple-redundancy circuits. All two hundred main traffic signals under its direct control turned green. All passenger-and freight-train track signals turned green. So did all light-rail crossing signals—
One unfired bullet remained. He had to use it before they got too close. He already knew his target. Plekhanov swung the rifle's barrel to the right. The Siamese commander held a pistol; he fired it wildly. He would not be able to hit Plekhanov at this distance, save by accident, even if he could see him, which he could not. Still, it paid to be cautious. Plekhanov recalled the last words of the American General John Sedgwick, speaking of the Confederate sharpshooters during the Civil War Battle of Spotsylvania: "They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance—"
Plekhanov grinned.
Aim. Squeeze—
The Thai Prime Minister's collection of personal pornography, most of which showed recognizable images of him in sexual congress with women not his wife — and some of which showed him in such congress with her, too — somehow uploaded itself from his home computer and into the mainframe of the Southeast Asian News Service. Then, two of these pictures went into the hourly edition of SEANS NetNews in place of scheduled images.
Plekhanov raised his face from the Mauser. An oily wisp of smoke drifted from the muzzle, the smell of burned powder entwined with it. Below and still a hundred meters distant, the enemy soldiers milled around in panic, then dropped prone, looking for targets. Some of them returned fire, but none of the bullets came close to where he was.
Enough damage for one day. He shouldered the rifle by its sling and headed for the tower's steps.
Everywhere Jay Gridley drove on the net, sirens screamed. The virtual highways were full of fire engines, ambulances, police cruisers, a whole shitload of activity as people went to repair the damage and to haul away metaphorical bodies. Within a few minutes, there had been major wrecks in at least three or four supposedly secure systems internationally, maybe more.
Jay drove the Viper at speed and got to the spots as best he could, legally when they allowed it, illegally when they didn't; what he saw was not good. It was the same guy dropping sharp spikes on the roads. The pattern was there, the same blurred and unidentifiable footprints as before, leading away and quickly dead-ending. Maybe the local operators couldn't see it, but Jay was sure of it. He couldn't ID the terrorist, but he knew it was one guy.
He pulled the Viper to a halt on a long and relatively straight stretch of the new Thailand-Burma Highway. A reporter stood next to a smoldering limo with a bunch of cops, making notes on a little flatscreen. Jay knew the guy slightly; he was a distant cousin a couple of times removed.
"Hey, Chuan, how's it goin'?"
"Jay? What are you doing here? Something I ought to know about?"
"Nah, just cruising."
The other man looked around, seeming to shift his gaze as he blinked. "Ah, your highway metaplay. I see you're still driving that bomb on wheels. I disremember what it's called, some kind of lizard or snake?"
"Viper. It gets me there." He looked at the limo. "So who's the cookie in the shake-and-bake portable oven there?"
"A mess, isn't it? Behold, our beloved Prime Minister Sukho. This is what's left of his career, anyhow. Somebody got past the OS security wards on his personal system, and then became very clever with the nasty pictures hidden therein. Gave them to my bosses. My service somehow managed to accidentally send a pair of them out with the feed — or so the editors say. I know a few would have happily done it on purpose.
"So, on the sports screen, instead of the photo of the Indonesian football team winning the World Soccer Cup in Brazil, we got our beloved Prime Minister being attended to by an enthusiastic professional girl well known in Bangkok as Neena the Cleaner. And two jumps later, on the international screen, instead of Malaysian Prime Minister Mohamad doing a nice ribbon-cutting with a bunch of dignitaries for a new rec facility at Cyberjaya, we gave our viewers Sukho on a big round bed with two other very naked Bangkok working girls seeing what will go where. Bet those pix raised an eyebrow or two at the old water cooler during break." He smiled. "Hey, you ever been to Cyberjaya? In RW, I mean?"
His cousin was talking about a nine-mile-by-thirty-mile zone in Malaysia called the Multimedia Super Corridor. Begun in ‘97, the MSC stretched south from Kuala Lumpur, and included at the south end a new international airport and a new federal capital, Putrajaya. "Once," Jay said. "I spent a few days there a year or so back, a real-time seminar on the new graphic platform. Unbelievable place."
"They say that's where CyberNation's programmers came from."
"Yeah? I hadn't heard that. I heard nobody knew where they came from."
"Rumors." He shrugged. "So much for the sordid tale of a political career gone south. I gotta get back and file my story."
"Not a lucky man, your Prime Minister."
"Oh, he's real lucky — thing is, it's all bad. This ain't America where the politicians can get away with such things, you know. It don't play with the family vote over here. Plus it is well known that Sukho's wife's brother was one of the Secret Bandit Warlords before he died. Word is, the wife's still got a couple SBW nephews out in the jungle who would just as soon cut you in half as look at you. The Prime Minister's wife is in big shame over this. Some pictures were of her, taken from a hidden camera, and I bet she didn't know about ‘em." He waved at the burned-out limo. "I was Sukho, I'd tap my Swiss accounts and retire someplace in a galaxy far, far away. And I'd do it under another name, and with fifty grand's worth of false teeth, hair dye, and plastic surgery, while I was at it."