Read Online Tom Clancy's Net Force 6-10 by Tom Clancy - Free Book Online

cleaning up dead paint, like that—and business had taken a downward turn. So late one night, the guy took a run through a fairly well-off neighborhood nearby and spray painted squiggles on fifty or sixty cars parked outside of their garages.”
    The boss nodded. “Okay.”
    “You see where this is going. Guy got an immediate influx of new business the next day—he used a kind of paint he knew he could get off without too much trouble—and he had to hire a couple of kids to help him, he had so many new customers. He didn’t get them all—some owners did their own cars, and there were other detail shops—but he got twenty-odd cars, at a hundred and fifty a pop. After paying his new helpers their minimum wage, and allowing for buffing pads and polishing compounds and all, he cleared almost three thousand dollars. Not a bad return for an investment of fifteen minutes and a can of spray paint.
    “Business tapered off again, so the guy waited a couple weeks and then did another midnight graffiti run. This time, he made almost five grand.
    “Now, if he’d quit then, he’d been ahead of the game. But it was easy money.
    “So, every couple of weeks for the next few months, the detail man would sneak through a nice neighborhood and make work for himself. The local police figured the painter was probably a teenager bent on nothing more than half-witted vandalism, and the detail guy might have kept his scam going for years, but he tripped himself up. Not wanting another shop to get too many of his customers, he tended to hit the same neighborhoods, those close to his own place of business. One of the car owners whose car had been decorated three times got pissed off enough to set up a videocam watching his driveway. The detail man had been smart enough to pull a ski mask over his head when he ran into somebody’s driveway, so nobody could see his face. And he had driven a different car each time, belonging to customers who’d left them overnight. Thing was, the cam picked up the license plate on the getaway vehicle. The cops were able to trace it to the owner, who supplied them with the information that the car had been at the detail shop on the night in question. They found the empty spray paint can in the guy’s trash bin, leaned on him, and he gave it up. End of crime spree.”
    “All right, I can see where you’re going, but I don’t see how it applies. Didn’t CyberNation’s customers have the same problems everybody else had when the net and web went wonky?”
    “Funny you should ask. I checked it out. During the outage we had, everybody who had logged on through the affected phone companies and backbone servers had the same problems. But none of CyberNation’s customers using their hardwired-direct server connections lost their links. Now maybe that doesn’t mean anything by itself, but it would be a big selling point! Hey, when all the other servers were scrambling around to figure out which way was up, we here at CyberNation had our act together!”
    “That’s a reach, Jay. Didn’t lots of folks who weren’t CyberNation customers sail along just fine?”
    “Yep, that’s true. But at least it’s a possibility. Any time a big server has problems, they lose customers. Fifty years ago, nobody had a computer at home, nobody was doing biz on the web. Now, a lot of folks make their living from it. Before telephones, people wrote letters or did things face-to-face—now, every company has a phone, and most of them with any brains have a web presence. You have to have one to compete. Shut any of that down, and they look for a fast fix. Switching servers is easy. If you can claim yours is reliable, you’ll get some of the movers.”
    Michaels nodded. “All right. What do you have in mind?”
    “I’m thinking that unless I turn up something that shows it definitely couldn’t be them, maybe I ought to keep looking at things in that direction. It’s not like we have a lot else to go on. Well, until next