The zenith angle (38 page)

The Internet backbone business was never an outfit that DeFanti had taken seriously. Running the Internet was a high-tech hobby for computer geeks. It was a favor he’d done to put a nice smile on the face of the National Science Foundation. But by now, 1999, in terms of market cap, it was by far the biggest part of DeFanti’s empire. It had never, ever cleared one dime of profit, but the day-traders had it figured for the next Ford or General Motors. They were insane. The whole world had gone crazy. DeFanti owned a cable company that owned movie studios. He owned a big, solemn news magazine that could make or break presidents. But in cyberspace and according to the NASDAQ, this makeshift wad of broadband fiber optics was bigger than Godzilla. And if the market believed it, well, then such was reality.

Everything on Vandeveer’s map was piled up on DeFanti’s backbone. Even long-forgotten outfits, like Wife Number Three’s little leather-goods store, a toy he’d bought the woman to keep her out of trouble. Here was his older son’s ridiculous adventure-canoeing outfit, making some bucks off the yuppie Green idiots who loved malarial jungles in Borneo. Everything.

“This son of a bitch knows more about us than we do about ourselves! How the hell did he find the time to draw all this?”

“He didn’t draw it at all. That map graphs all those connections on the fly.”

“Nobody can do that.”

“Vandeveer does it. Van wrote that graphics program himself.”

“Who is this guy? He’s a menace! Where did you find him?”

The Dot-Commie was hurt. “We’re a gifted generation, all right? Van was my roommate once.” The Dot-Commie brandished his MIT Beaver graduation ring. “I hooked Van up with his girlfriend—his wife, that is. Mrs. Vandeveer. Dr. Vandeveer that is, because Dottie has a Ph.D., too.” The Dot-Commie smiled in the bluish light of the laptop. “They’re very sweet people.”

“Do we have anything useful on this guy? Like a leash, for instance?”

“Tom, please! Van is
on our board.
Van gets big comps and preferred stock. That’s a very sweet deal for a little guy like him. He never does board work for anyone else. He joined us as a personal favor.”

“Okay, so you kissed this hacker on the lips. And for that he gives us
this
?”

“We need this! This is what he does! Van would never cross us. Van’s a straight-arrow R&D type. He’s the classic white-hat hacker.”

DeFanti scrolled across the tangle with angry flicks of his thumb. The map was a marvel. Not a marvel for himself, though. It was a marvel for federal investigators, industrial competitors, or divorce lawyers. It had unbuckled DeFanti’s pants and dropped them round his ankles. And not just his own pants, either.

“Beelzebub.darpa.mil.” What clown was naming their servers over there?

The Dot-Commie’s sleek face took on a gloomy look of serious adult concern. “Van has done us a big favor here, Tom. With this traceroute map, we can secure our infrastructure, plug our leaks, and eliminate a host of wasteful redundancies.”

“What exactly is he trying to sell us?”

“Van’s got nothing to do with selling. His R&D lab at Mondiale has a twenty-million-dollar budget and they let him do whatever he wants. He invented this! Tom, this is a unique competitive advantage for our outfit.”

DeFanti set the laptop aside. “Okay, so give me the deliverable. What specific action are you recommending?”

“Okay then!” The Dot-Commie straightened alertly. “Cleaning up our own house, that comes first. That’s a major capital expenditure, I admit that. But we have to do that, because living that loose is risky and just bad for business.

“Once we clean up and button ourselves down with a decent security policy, then we’ve got the whip hand over all those old-school hacker slobs. We can make real money there. We’ll make our money by revealing this bad news to all these other people who were once linked to us. Their networks are buck-naked. We know that, and they don’t know that yet. How much is that worth, Tom? You tell me.”

DeFanti grunted. “That won’t make us popular.”

“I’m figuring this turns into a nice little sideline business all along our supply chain. Every outfit that you ever M&A’d or divested since the birth of the Internet. Every address squatter, every Internet freeloader

. . . They’ve gotta pay us. That’s only right. And, Tom, it’s incredible how much just plain
junk
we’re still running. Computers that we own and operate that
nobody ever looks at.
We plugged ’em in long ago and we forgot ’em. We need to yank them out of the garages and just dump them. The software they are running is years old and it’s never been patched. They’re very dangerous.”

“Without this Vandeveer guy, this so-called threat wouldn’t even exist.”

“Obscurity is never security, Tom.”

“It sure as hell is if no one ever looks.”

“Machines will look. In cyberspace, everything looks. They’ll program some net-bots to look. It’s just a matter of time, that’s all. We’re stuck now between the old crappy Internet anarchy model, and a serious, big-time commercial industry. The only responsible course is to take appropriate steps. Before it comes apart on us, right at the seams.”

DeFanti sighed. “Have you budgeted this?”

“No. I didn’t. I really wanted to. I e-mailed our CIO. With a screaming yellow zonker red alert. The CIO told me to grow up and come back in ten years. That attitude won’t do, Tom. That guy’s due for retirement right now. Not ten years from now.”

DeFanti struggled to remember the name of the Chief Information Officer. He knew the guy’s face. He had a thick brown beard and he wore bad waistcoats that his wife stitched for him. DeFanti had rescued him from the financial wreckage of a dying mainframe company, and he was very loyal. He was seasoned, reliable, and lacking in ambition, everything the Dot-Commie was not. Small wonder the kid wanted his scalp.

“So what do I do for another CIO? Are you telling me you want that job?”

“Of course I don’t want that job. But I’ll tell you another thing, Tom. Van’s connection map here is already out-of-date. Because my own network people have already cleaned house on my holding company, my Bangalore suppliers, those Chinese rocket people, and all of my e-commerce interests. Those are just baby companies, obviously. They’re fresh start-ups and they don’t have your legacy problems. But I don’t want ’em stuck in that briar patch with all those open back doors and those misconfigured routers. That is just unacceptable.”

“What is it you really want from me, kid? You want me to fire my CIO? That makes you happy?”

“No, Tom. That’s not enough. You’ve got to fire the CIO, and the system administrators, and the whole crowd of good-old-boys who make such a habit of ignoring computer security. We need to run the networks in a better, more solid way now. Vandeveer doesn’t know this, but he’s given me a new management tool. We can replace all these high-salary geeks with some young engineers from India who will follow secure procedures, and work on a B-1HB visa for one-fourth their salary. That’s what this traceroute map is telling me, Tom. Because that is this industry’s future.”

DeFanti’s laptop broke the silence with a pinging sound. “Well, here we go then,” DeFanti said.

“The Iridium flash already? That’s great.”

DeFanti glanced into his laptop and rattled off coordinates.

“How do I input those over here?” said the Dot-Commie, at his scope.

“Do it manually.”

“Do I
look
like I do things manually?”

DeFanti stepped across and aligned the bigger telescope as well as his own. The two of them pressed their heads to their cold rubber eyepieces.

“Been to Sri Lanka lately?” DeFanti said.

“Nope. Should I go there? The jet’s all warmed up.”

“I sent e-mail to Dr. Clarke there. The ‘Father of the Communications Satellite.’ ”

The Dot-Commie jerked erect from his eyescope. He was stunned. “Arthur C. Clarke?
The
Arthur C. Clarke?”

“Yes, and Dr. Clarke answered me. He was very polite.”

“Tom, that is
fantastic.
What an honor! I saw
2001
when I was three years old.”

They shut their glowing laptops to help their eyes adjust to night vision. “Are you seeing that haze up there?” DeFanti asked.

“It’s pretty clear tonight, Tom. It is truly tremendous out here. What a treat.”

“That’s wildfire smog. Two years of drought in Colorado. Fires and fire alerts everywhere. The sons of bitches lit up that public park like Coney Island. There are state and county dark-sky ordinances, but they’re feds, so they just ignore us. ‘Sue us,’ that’s their attitude. A bunch of arrogant, wise-ass, brass-bottomed jacks-in-office . . .”

“I saw a flash!” the Dot-Commie yelped.

DeFanti switched eyes at his rubber eyepiece. No use. You had to be there just at the instant.

“It was like the flash off a rearview mirror,” the Dot-Commie reported. “Metallic. Brief, yet intense.”

“Back in the good old Wild West days, the U.S. Cavalry used heliographs,” DeFanti said as he fruitlessly searched his patch of sky. There could be three, or even four flashes if the bird’s attitude-control was going. But he was seeing nothing but stars.

“The Cavalry once sent a flash of sunlight off a mirror that was visible for ninety miles. The British Army used signal mirrors in Afghanistan. Can you imagine that? An army fighting with mirrors in Afghanistan.”

“Afghanistan’s not a consumer market,” said the Dot-Commie. “Will there be more glints?”

“Maybe,” said DeFanti. They waited. “No,” he said finally. He straightened his aching back. The Dot-Commie opened his laptop, woke the screen, and punched at keys. “So what do you make of our problem, Tom? I know it’s a lot of money. But we can do that. We’ve got loads of market money now. Buckets.”

“Okay, straight from the gut, kid. Here’s the deal. You can’t turn an enterprise around on the word of one guy from R&D. It doesn’t matter if he’s brilliant or even if he’s technically correct. The middle-level people just won’t go for that politically.”

“Truth and technology will win over bull and bureaucracy, Tom. That’s the story of the New Economy.”

“No, kid, the truth does not win. For a couple of quarters the truth gets somewhere maybe. If everybody’s real excited. But never in the long run, never.” DeFanti shrugged. “The common wisdom always wins. Consensus, perception management, and the word on The Street. The markets, kid, the machine. The markets will go ape if we get all sweaty about some obscure security problem and start firing our established personnel. That move is panicky. It’s just not professional.”

“You’re not Getting It here, Tom.”

“Kid, I knew you would tell me that. I’m not so old that I’m blind and deaf yet. I know that it’s a dangerous situation. It’s dangerous like mixing Deep Black intelligence and also owning the media. But I do that anyway, because dangerous is what pays. Dangerous has got a high rate of return. Robert Maxwell mixed spies and media just like I did, and he jumped off his own yacht and he drowned. I knew that guy, Robert Maxwell. I knew him personally. I even knew his yacht.”

“So we just drown our problem, that’s your solution? What about Vandeveer? He’s on the board.”

“I’ve got nothing against Vandeveer. I’m glad that guy’s inside our tent. You keep him in the dark and feed him lots of gold. I want him kept real happy. Him and the wife—Ditsy?”

“Dottie.”

“Right. Nice, sweet, technical-weirdo people. I’ll give ’em the personal gold star. The big chairman pat on the back. Very appreciative. All the proper steps. All expenses paid trip to Finland for him and the missus and kids. We need some guy like him to go winkle out those little Finnish cell phone sons of bitches—what was their name again?”

“Nokia.”

“Yeah, them. Nokia. God, I hate those people. A full report to the board about those instant-messaging apps. Six months, eight months, whatever. Keep him busy for us.”

The Dot-Commie rustled in the darkness turning back to his telescope. “Van is plenty busy already. He’s a VP for Mondiale. Van hates junkets, he only likes big toys. Fancy router hardware for his lab, that’s what Van wants out of his life. I can shut Vandeveer up and I can sit on him if you want, there’s no problem there. But I’ve got to tell you something, Tom: you’re making a major mistake. We’re in a high-tech revolution right now, the biggest thing since the invention of fire. If it’s even halfway possible, then it’s gonna happen.”

“I know that you think that. But you’re wrong.”

“Okay,” said the Dot-Commie. “If that’s your full, considered judgment, I guess that’s it, then.”

“That’s it, kid. So give me your fallback position.”

The Dot-Commie pulled the thin plastic hood from his head. A dark night wind had come up and he smelled of hair gel and sweat. “Okay. Vandeveer wants to install some honeypot sites for network intruders. That way, if we are penetrated, at least we can trap the hackers.”

“It’s good to hear he’s got some common sense. And that costs us?”

“Not much. Peanuts. He’d do it for us as a favor. He builds them for the FBI all the time.”

DeFanti rubbed his stubbled chin. “This guy is a Bureau consultant, too?”

“Van lives on Internet time. He’s thirty years old and he’s got
students
who are in the FBI.” The Dot-Commie abandoned his telescope and turned his pale face to the zenith. “Well, I’m glad we hashed that issue out, at least. It’s a load off my mind. My God, Tom, just look at all those stars. They’ve got
colors.
Look at that detail. You never see that near a city anymore. Nowhere in this world.”

“This is the last place in the continental USA where a man can see truly black skies.”

“You ever get the aurora borealis down here? I see them on over-the-pole flights. I see fantastic things, unbelievable.”

“No. I don’t.” DeFanti paused. “What the hell is all that?”

“What? Point.”

DeFanti raised his arm.

“I’d be guessing Cassiopeia, right?”

“No, I mean that flickering up there. That flickering looks auroral.”

The Dot-Commie’s voice dropped an octave. “You say, there’s some ‘flickering,’ Tom?”