Read Online Advanced Mythology by Jody Lynn Nye - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Jody Lynn Nye
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remarkably consistent in kind. A few contained transliterations of what they had heard. Beach had put a couple of his linguists on the job. His first thought was that the subjects had overheard isolated spy installations, but they couldn’t find a correlation with any language they knew, nor did the spoken transliteration appear to coincide meaningfully with the written documents.
Stefan had also produced Maria and her psychic gifts. Dowsing with a pendulum was her specialty, alongside occasional clairvoyance. She’d done a reading for Beach that impressed him enough to commit resources, at least for now. They had never convinced the skeptical Everette that they weren’t chasing rainbows, but that wasn’t his problem. If it was enough to get him to his goal, that was all that mattered.
One might say he was a spy, but he was a sincere spy. Human nature being what it was, he assumed that everyone else was committed to the cause partly out of naked self-interest. He was taking a fee from Stefan’s bosses for a share in the results, true, but it was a tiny fraction of what he could earn doing corporate espionage for any of the enormous international corporations that were large enough to be considered countries in their own right without worrying about such artificial boundaries as borders. They did battle without armies, in the media, in the boardrooms and on the stock exchanges, destroying lives and depleting resources with the stroke of a pen or a computer key. He especially hated advertising. It was the devil. It told lies about inferior products to sell them to the hordes of feebleminded, hypocritical people who cared about nothing further than instant gratification, the satisfaction of the moment. Bleat, bleat, bleat about human rights, until you asked capitalists to pay more for a pair of designer sneakers because the underage, foreign child worker that made them only earned fourteen cents an hour, then they shut up quickly, not liking to be held accountable for their choices. Why with all its resources the United States, for example, didn’t have colonies in space at that very moment was that they couldn’t focus on the future because the pretty baubles of the present were too enticing to ignore, and their weak-spined government didn’t want to risk getting tossed out of office to pursue the issue.
Everette pushed his idealism back. He was there to get whatever it was they were chasing, or destroy it so it couldn’t be used by the powers that be. The West didn’t need any more advantages than it already had.
But Beach wasn’t relying solely upon the powers of one unreliable psychic. He had a team of other operatives in this country. Some had been here for years, like his chief communications operative, just waiting to be activated. Ming Na-seh hailed from Sydney. She was now a naturalized citizen and a highly placed executive within one of the telephone companies. Others, such as most of his enforcers, had to rely upon tourist visas. Lying about seeking employment while within the borders of the United States, Beach chided them in his mind. Tch tch. Beach hoped that he could accomplish his mission before their visas ran out. He didn’t want to have to activate another shift.
In the meantime, Ming was proving invaluable. She had provided the latest piece of evidence that brought Beach to the United States.
Most of the newspaper-reading public had by now heard about a computer program being run by the Central Intelligence Agency called Carnivore. It scanned millions of e-mail messages and other electronic communications every day. It was supposed to be used only to inform the C.I.A. about drug-runners and other criminals, but self-interest being what it was, Beach doubted that they stopped there. With a combination of favors and cash, he’d staked a couple of young hackers to create a better program than theirs, which he nicknamed “Omnivore.” Capable of worldwide infiltration of the Internet, it
Stefan had also produced Maria and her psychic gifts. Dowsing with a pendulum was her specialty, alongside occasional clairvoyance. She’d done a reading for Beach that impressed him enough to commit resources, at least for now. They had never convinced the skeptical Everette that they weren’t chasing rainbows, but that wasn’t his problem. If it was enough to get him to his goal, that was all that mattered.
One might say he was a spy, but he was a sincere spy. Human nature being what it was, he assumed that everyone else was committed to the cause partly out of naked self-interest. He was taking a fee from Stefan’s bosses for a share in the results, true, but it was a tiny fraction of what he could earn doing corporate espionage for any of the enormous international corporations that were large enough to be considered countries in their own right without worrying about such artificial boundaries as borders. They did battle without armies, in the media, in the boardrooms and on the stock exchanges, destroying lives and depleting resources with the stroke of a pen or a computer key. He especially hated advertising. It was the devil. It told lies about inferior products to sell them to the hordes of feebleminded, hypocritical people who cared about nothing further than instant gratification, the satisfaction of the moment. Bleat, bleat, bleat about human rights, until you asked capitalists to pay more for a pair of designer sneakers because the underage, foreign child worker that made them only earned fourteen cents an hour, then they shut up quickly, not liking to be held accountable for their choices. Why with all its resources the United States, for example, didn’t have colonies in space at that very moment was that they couldn’t focus on the future because the pretty baubles of the present were too enticing to ignore, and their weak-spined government didn’t want to risk getting tossed out of office to pursue the issue.
Everette pushed his idealism back. He was there to get whatever it was they were chasing, or destroy it so it couldn’t be used by the powers that be. The West didn’t need any more advantages than it already had.
But Beach wasn’t relying solely upon the powers of one unreliable psychic. He had a team of other operatives in this country. Some had been here for years, like his chief communications operative, just waiting to be activated. Ming Na-seh hailed from Sydney. She was now a naturalized citizen and a highly placed executive within one of the telephone companies. Others, such as most of his enforcers, had to rely upon tourist visas. Lying about seeking employment while within the borders of the United States, Beach chided them in his mind. Tch tch. Beach hoped that he could accomplish his mission before their visas ran out. He didn’t want to have to activate another shift.
In the meantime, Ming was proving invaluable. She had provided the latest piece of evidence that brought Beach to the United States.
Most of the newspaper-reading public had by now heard about a computer program being run by the Central Intelligence Agency called Carnivore. It scanned millions of e-mail messages and other electronic communications every day. It was supposed to be used only to inform the C.I.A. about drug-runners and other criminals, but self-interest being what it was, Beach doubted that they stopped there. With a combination of favors and cash, he’d staked a couple of young hackers to create a better program than theirs, which he nicknamed “Omnivore.” Capable of worldwide infiltration of the Internet, it
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