Islands in the Net (7 page)

David smiled. “My folks used to play them when I was a kid.”

“Oh, seen. That would be Dr. Martin Webster and Grace Webster of Galveston.”

“That's right,” David said. His smile vanished.

“You designed this Lodge,” Stubbs said. “Concretized sand, built from the beach, eh?” He looked David up and down. “Mash-it-up appropriate technology. We could use you in the islands, mon.”

“Thanks,” David said, fidgeting. “That's very flattering.”

“We could use a public relations, too,” Stubbs said, grinning crookedly at Laura. His eye whites were veined with red, like cracked marbles. “I-and-I's reputation could use an upgrade. Pressure come down on I-and-I. From Babylon Luddites.”

“Let's all gather in the conference room,” Emerson said. “It's early yet. Still time for us to talk.”

They argued for two solid days. Laura sat in on the meetings as Debra Emerson's second, and she realized quickly that Rizome was a barely tolerated middleman. The data pirates had no interest whatsoever in taking up new careers as right-thinking postindustrialists. They had met to confront a threat.

All three pirate groups were being blackmailed.

The blackmailers, whoever they were, showed a firm grasp of data-haven dynamics. They had played cleverly on the divisions and rivalries among the havens; threatening one bank, then depositing the shakedown money in another. The havens, who naturally loathed publicity, had covered up the attacks. They were deliberately vague about the nature of the depredations. They feared publicizing their weaknesses. It was clear, too, that they suspected one another.

Laura had never known the true nature and extent of haven operations, but she sat quietly, listened and watched, and learned in a hurry.

The pirates dubbed commercial videotapes by the hundreds of thousands, selling them in poorly policed Third World markets. And their teams of software cracksters found a ready market for programs stripped of their copy protection. This brand of piracy was nothing new; it dated back to the early days of the information industry.

But Laura had never realized the profit to be gained by evading the developed world's privacy laws. Thousands of legitimate companies maintained dossiers on individuals: employee records, medical histories, credit transactions. In the Net economy, business was impossible without such information. In the legitimate world, companies purged this data periodically, as required by law.

But not all of it was purged. Reams of it ended up in the data havens, passed on through bribery of clerks, through taps of datalines, and by outright commercial espionage. Straight companies operated with specialized slivers of knowledge. But the havens made a business of collecting it, offshore. Memory was cheap, and their databanks were huge, and growing.

And they had no shortage of clients. Credit companies, for instance, needed to avoid bad risks and pursue their debtors. Insurers had similar problems. Market researchers hungered after precise data on individuals. So did fund raisers. Specialized address lists found a thriving market. Journalists would pay for subscription lists, and a quick sneak call to a databank could dredge up painful rumors that governments and companies suppressed.

Private security agencies were at home in the data demimonde. Since the collapse of the Cold War intelligence apparats, there were legions of aging, demobilized spooks scrabbling out a living in the private sector. A shielded phone line to the havens was a boon for a private investigator.

Even computer-dating services kicked in their bit.

The havens were bootstrapping their way up to Big Brother status, trading for scattered bits of information, then collating it and selling it back—as a new and sinister whole.

They made a business of abstracting, condensing, indexing, and verifying—like any other modern commercial database. Except, of course, that the pirates were carnivorous. They ate other databases when they could, blithely ignoring copyrights and simply storing everything they could filch. This didn't require state-of-the-art computer expertise. Just memory by the ton, and plenty of cast-iron gall.

Unlike old-fashioned smugglers, the haven pirates never had to physically touch their booty. Data had no substance. EFT Commerzbank, for instance, was a legitimate corporation in Luxembourg. Its illegal nerve centers were safely stowed away in Turkish Cyprus. The same went for the Singaporeans; they had the dignified cover of an address in Bencoolen Street, while the machinery hummed merrily in Nauru, a sovereign Pacific Island nation with a population of 12,000. For their part, the Grenadians simply brazened it out.

All three groups were monetary banks as well. This was handy for laundering client funds, and a ready source of necessary bribes. Since the invention of electronic funds transfer, money itself had become just another form of data. Their host governments were not inclined to quibble.

So, Laura thought, the basic principles of operation were clear enough. But they created, not solidarity, but bitter rivalry.

Names were freely exchanged during the more heated moments. The ancestral lineage of the havens saddled them with an unhelpful and sometimes embarrassing heritage. During occasional bursts of frankness, whole whale-pods of these large and awkward facts surfaced and blew steam, while Laura marveled.

The EFT Commerzbank, she learned, drew its roots mainly from the old heroin networks of the south of France, and from the Corsican Black Hand. After the Abolition, these clunky gutter operations had been modernized by former French spooks from “La Piscine,” the legendary Corsican school for paramilitary saboteurs. These right-wing commandos, traditionally the rogue elephants of European espionage, drifted quite naturally into a life of crime once the French government had cut off their paychecks.

Additional muscle came from a minor galaxy of French right-wing action groups, who abandoned their old careers of bombing trains and burning synagogues, to join the data game. Further allies came from the criminal families of the European Turkish minority, accomplished heroin smugglers who maintained an unholy linkage with the Turkish fascist underground.

All this had been poured into Luxembourg and allowed to set for twenty years, like some kind of horrible aspic. By now a kind of crust of respectability had formed, and the EFT Commerzbank was making some attempt to disown its past.

The others refused to make it easy for them. Egged on by Winston Stubbs, who remembered the event, Monsieur Karageorgiu was forced to admit that a member of the Turkish “Gray Wolves” had once shot a pope.

Karageorgiu defended the Wolves by insisting that the action was “business.” He claimed it was a revenge operation, recompense for a sting by the Vatican's corrupt Banco Ambrosiano. The Ambrosiano, he explained, had been one of Europe's first truly “underground” banks, before the present system had settled. Standards had been different then—back in the rough-and-tumble glory days of Italian terrorism.

Besides, Karageorgiu pointed out smoothly, the Turkish gunman had only wounded Pope John Paul II. No worse than a kneecapping, really. Unlike the Sicilian Mafia—who were so annoyed at the Banco's misdeeds that they had poisoned Pope John Paul I stone dead.

Laura believed very little of this—she noticed Ms. Emerson smiling quietly to herself—but it was clear that the other pirates had few doubts. The story fit precisely into the folk mythos of their enterprise. They shook their heads over it with a kind of rueful nostalgia. Even Mr. Shaw looked vaguely impressed.

The Islamic Bank's antecedents were similarly mixed. Triad syndicates were a major factor. Besides being criminal brotherhoods, the Triads had always had a political side, ever since their ancient origins as anti-Manchu rebels in seventeenth-century China.

The Triads had whiled away the centuries in prostitution, gambling, and drugs, with occasional breaks for revolution, such as the Chinese Republic of 1912. But their ranks had swollen drastically after the People's Republic had absorbed Hong Kong and Taiwan. Many diehard capitalists had fled to Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, where the oil money still ran fast and deep. There they prospered, selling rifles and shoulder-launched rockets to Kurdish separatists and Afghani mujahideen, whose bloody acres abounded in poppies and cannabis. And the Triads waited, with ghastly patience, for the new Red dynasty to crack.

According to Karageorgiu, the Triad secret societies had never forgotten the Opium Wars of the 1840s, in which the British had deliberately and cynically hooked the Chinese populace on black opium. The Triads, he alleged, had deliberately promoted heroin use in the West in an attempt to rot Western morale.

Mr. Shaw acknowledged that such an action would only have been simple justice, but he denied the allegation. Besides, he pointed out, heroin was now out of favor in the West. The drug-using populace had dwindled with the aging of the population, and modern users were more sophisticated. They preferred untraceable neurochemicals to crude vegetable extracts. These very neurochemicals now boiled out of the high-tech drug vats of the Caribbean.

This accusation wounded Winston Stubbs. The Rastafarian underground had never favored “steel drugs.” The substances they made were sacramental, like communion wine, meant to assist in “i-tal meditation.”

Karageorgiu scoffed at this. He knew the real sources of the Grenadian syndicate and recited them with relish. Cocaine-crazed Colombians cruising the streets of Miami in armored vans crammed with Kalashnikovs. Degraded Cuban boat-lifters, speckled with prison tattoos, who would kill for a cigarette. Redneck American swindlers like “Big Bobby” Vesco, who had specialized in the sucker's shell game with a series of offshore fronts.

Winston Stubbs heard the man out peaceably, trying to defuse Laura's horror with skeptical brow wrinkling and little pitying shakes of his head. But he bristled at this last remark. Mr. Robert Vesco, he said indignantly, had at one point owned the government of Costa Rica. And in the legendary IOS scam, Vesco had liberated $60 million of illegally invested CIA retirement funds. This action showed that Vesco's heart was righteous. There was no shame in having him as forefather. The man was a duppy conqueror.

After the second day's negotiations broke up, Laura shakily joined Debra Emerson out on the seaside verandah for a private conference. “Well,” said Emerson cheerfully. “This has certainly cleared the air.”

“Like lifting the lid of a cesspool,” Laura said. A salt breeze blew in from offshore, and she shuddered. “We're getting nowhere with these negotiations. It's obvious they have no intention of reforming. They barely tolerate us. They think we're saps.”

“Oh, I think we're progressing nicely,” Emerson said. Since the talks had started, she had relaxed into a glazed professional ease. Both she and Laura had made an effort to break past their formal roles and to establish the kind of gut-level personal trust that held Rizome together as a postindustrial company. Laura was reassured that Emerson took the company's principles so seriously.

It was good, too, that the Committee had fully acknowledged Laura's need to know. For a while she had been afraid that they would try some security bullshit, and that she would have to go on the company Net and make a stink about it. Instead they had taken her into the core of negotiations. Not at all a bad thing, career-wise, for a woman still officially on infancy furlough. Laura now felt vaguely guilty about her earlier suspicions. She even wished that Emily Donato hadn't told her anything.

Emerson nibbled a praline and gazed out to sea. “It's all been skirmishing so far, just macho one-upmanship. But soon they'll be getting down to business. The critical point is their blackmailers. With our help, with a little guidance, they'll join forces in self-defense.”

A seagull noticed Emerson eating. It swooped up and hovered hopefully above the walkway's railing, its flat yellow eyes gleaming. “Join forces?” Laura said.

“It's not as bad as it sounds, Laura. It's their small scale and fast reflexes that make the data havens dangerous. A large, centralized group will become bureaucratic.”

“You think so?”

“They have weaknesses we don't,” Emerson said, settling deeper into her reclining chair. She cracked off a chip of her praline and studied the floating bird. “The major weakness of criminal groups is their innate lack of trust. That's why so many of them rely on family blood ties. Especially families from oppressed minorities—a double reason for group loyalty against the outside world. But an organization that can't rely on the free loyalty of its members is forced to rely on
gesellschaft
. On industrial methods.”

She smiled, lifting her hand. “And that means rule books, laws, stiff formal hierarchies. Violence is not Rizome's strong suit, Laura, but we do understand management structures. Centralized bureaucracies always protect the status quo. They don't innovate. And it's innovation that's the real threat. It's not so bad that they rip us off.” She tossed her chip of candy and the gull caught it instantly. “The problem comes when they outthink us.”

“The bigger, the stupider, is that the strategy?” Laura said. “What happened to good old divide and conquer?”

“This isn't politics. This is technology. It's not their power that threatens us, it's their imagination. Creativity comes from small groups. Small groups gave us the electric light, the automobile, the personal computer. Bureaucracies gave us the nuclear power plant, traffic jams, and network television. The first three changed everything. The last three are memories now.”

Three more freeloading gulls swooped up from nowhere. They jostled gracefully for space, with creaking screams of greed. Laura said, “Don't you think we ought to try something a little more vigorous? Like, say, arresting them?”

“I don't blame you for thinking that,” Emerson said. “But you don't know what these people have survived. They thrive on persecution, it unites them. It builds a class chasm between them and society, it lets them prey on the rest of us without a twinge of conscience. No, we have to let them grow, Laura, we have to give them a stake in our status quo. It's a long-term struggle. Decades long. Lifetimes. Just like the Abolition.”