Backslash: A gripping political techno-thriller by William H. Lovejoy

Author:William H. Lovejoy
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Endeavour Media
Published: 2018-06-28T05:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

DATE: MON OCT 26 09:25:43 USERID: lurus

"I don't make enough to have to worry about accounting for it," Luanne told the clerk. "It comes in, it goes out."

"I'm throwing the program in for free with the system, anyway," he told her. "Give it a try."

Free was free, right?

She watched him run her card through the magnetic strip reader and mentally crossed her fingers. The approval came almost immediately.

Wonderful! Some computer gave me the okay to go 2800 dollars in debt for another computer. They're all in this together.

She had been halfway to the Potomac River, hoping that there was going to be some positive sign from Renegade waiting on her office machine, when she happened to think that her office machine was bugged. It was strange to think of a wiretap on the FBI, but that's exactly what it was. Someone had been into their system and probably left a monitor behind. Renegade's e-mail was in PGP code, but maybe it wasn't a good enough code.

At dinner last night, Nat Gray had mentioned that the normal, non-commercial users, mostly individuals--on the Internet didn't seem to be affected by the problems plaguing the rest of the industry. That suggested the possibility of at least a couple of things: the perpetrator thought of himself as one of them, an individual in the virtual community; the perpetrator was only interested in attacking large commercial and social organizations; or the perpetrator just didn't have the resources to antagonize everyone. It might be difficult for one outlaw, or even more than one, to keep track of fifty million people, even with the help of a computer.

Most governments couldn't keep track of that many people, even when they tried hard.

Taking the first exit she came to, Russell left the highway and went in search of a shopping mall. The first one didn't work for her, but the second one had an office supplies warehouse, and armed with her MasterCard, she went in and surrendered to the first clerk she found.

She ended up with a small system for home including a low-priced printer. She managed to resist all of charming descriptions for the multimedia sound system, but she bought a good communications program, a word processor, and a spreadsheet. And a free checkbook accounting program, of course. The basic package included the operating system, a bundle of compact disks--encyclopedia, games, and some other disks she didn't pay any attention to--and programs supplied by the popular online services.

The salesman helped her load everything in her car, and she called her office to tell them she'd be in late as she drove back to her apartment. It took a couple trips to move it all from the car to her living room.

Which wasn't designed for computing, of course. Cleaning all of the knick-knacks from the top of her French Provincial desk, Luanne set up the computer, monitor, keyboard, and mouse, plugging the electrical plugs into a surge suppressor. She didn't worry about connecting the printer for now, and the

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