Tom Clancy's Net Force 6-10 Read Online Free Page A

be good, but as important as that was, they also had to be believers.
    Skill without direction, without purpose, was wasted.
    It was too bad he couldn’t approach Jay Gridley. Jay was the best he’d ever known, as good in school as Keller himself had been, maybe even better. They’d been friends then, trailblazers on the web, adventurers in cyberspace. But Jay had gone over to the dark side, become a Net Force op. One of the enemy. A man whose vision now stopped at the end of his nose. He fought to preserve the status quo, he lived in a tower of decay.
    What a waste of a great talent.
    Well. He had made his choice, Jay. Now he’d have to suffer the consequences. The train was leaving the station—no, the rocket ship was lifting for the stars, that was better—and Jay hadn’t booked passage. He would be left behind. Sad.
    CyberNation was going to become reality, that Keller never doubted. How long it might take, exactly how and when it would come to pass, well, those were not things he could predict with certainty, but the end was a foregone conclusion. This was the information age, the time when knowledge and accessibility to it were the two most important things in the world. That genie wasn’t going back into the bottle, not ever. The world was going to undergo a change like nothing it had ever seen in all its history.
    Jackson Keller was the best of the best, and he was leading the way to change.
    One of the netweavers, Rynar, had just pulled his sensory gear off and was stretching when he saw Keller come in.
    “Jackson,” he said. “How are we?”
    Keller smiled. It was a running joke—Cyber-Nationalists often spoke in collective terms.
    “Why don’t you tell me?” Keller said. “What is the status on Attack Beta?”
    “Going quicker than we’d hoped,” Rynar said. “ZopeMax programming is one hundred and nine percent of goal. DHTML and GoggleEye Object Links are six by six.”
    “How is Willie’s Ourobourus?”
    “Well, the python is choking on its tail a bit, but he says he’ll have it fixed in a day or two.”
    Keller nodded. “Excellent. Anything new I should know?”
    “Well, Net Force is after us. Perhaps we should be quaking in our shoes?”
    They both chuckled.
    “Do they have anything?”
    “No. They don’t have a clue. Don’t know who they are chasing, where to look, how we did it. I think you give your old friend Gridley too much credit, Jackson.”
    “Maybe. But he’s pulled down some other big players who didn’t give him enough credit. Better safe than sorry.”
    “I hear you. We’ll keep shifting the cover.”
    Keller nodded again. He headed for his own workstation. There was much to be done yet. Best he get to it.

    Net Force Shooting Range Quantico, Virginia

    John Howard had already put half a box of ammo through his revolver waiting for Julio. It was the first time he’d been to the range in at least a month, and he felt a little rusty. He was used to stopping by once or twice a week, and since he’d been gone, making the drive from town seemed like a real chore sometimes. Just for fun, he’d been shooting 9mm. His Phillips & Rodgers K-frame revolver was unique among wheelguns, in that it would load and shoot dozens of different calibers, ranging from .380 auto to .357 Magnum, this made possible by a clever spring device built into the cylinder’s rod housing. You had to adjust the sights if you wanted to do precision work when you changed calibers—the flat-shooting nines went to a different point of aim than .38 Special wadcutters or .357 hollowpoints did—but at combat distance, it didn’t matter all that much. A couple of centimeters one way or the other, it didn’t make any tactical difference.
    He’d reset his command ring before starting—he was inactive, but still technically on call—so he was good for another thirty days before they changed the codes. So far, the smart-gun technology the FBI mandated for all its small arms had not failed any of Net