Islands in the Net Page 5

  Emerson looked troubled. “The Committee has been planning this meeting for some time. These Europeans you’ve been sheltering are no ordinary bankers. They’re from the EFT Commerzbank of Luxembourg. And tomorrow night a third group arrives. The Yung Soo Chim Islamic Bank of Singapore.”

  David paused with a fork halfway to his mouth. “And they’re also—?”

  “Data pirates, yes.”

  “I see,” Laura said.… She felt a sudden surge of chilly excitement. “This is big.”

  “Very,” Emerson said. She let that sink in for a while. “We offered them any of six possible locations for the meeting. It could just as easily have been the Valenzuelas in Puerto Vallarta. Or the Warburtons in Arkansas.”

  “How long do you expect this to last?” David said.

  “Five days. Maybe a week at the outside.” She sipped her iced tea. “It’s up to us to supply airtight security once the meeting is under way. You understand? Locked doors, drawn curtains. No running in and out.”

  David frowned. “We’ll need supplies. I’ll tell Mrs. Delrosario.”

  “I can take care of supplies.”

  “Mrs. Delrosario’s very particular about where she shops,” David said.

  “Oh, dear,” said Ms. Emerson sincerely. “Well, groceries are not a major problem.” She picked carefully at the skin of her stuffed pepper. “Some of the attendees may bring their own food.”

  David was stunned. “You mean they’re afraid to eat our food? They think we’ll poison them, is that it?”

  “David, it’s a sign of their great trust in Rizome that the three banks have agreed to meet here in the first place. It’s not us that they distrust. It’s one another.”

  David was alarmed. “What exactly are we getting into? We have a small child here! Not to mention our staff.”

  Emerson looked hurt. “Would you feel better if this Lodge was full of armed guards from Rizome? Or if Rizome even had armed guards? We can’t confront these people by force, and we shouldn’t try to. That’s our strength.”

  Laura spoke up. “You’re saying that because we’re harmless, we won’t be hurt.”

  “We want to reduce tension. We don’t mean to arrest these pirates, prosecute them, crush them. We’ve decided to negotiate. That’s a modern solution. It worked for the arms race, after all. It has been working for the Third World.”

  “Except for Africa,” David said.

  Emerson shrugged. “It’s a long-term effort. The old East-West Cold War, the North-South struggle.… those were both old fights. Struggles we inherited. But now we face a truly modern challenge. This meeting is part of it.”

  David looked surprised. “Come on. These aren’t nuclear arms talks. I’ve read about these havens. They’re fleabag pirates. Sleazy rip-off artists who won’t pull their own weight in the world. So they call themselves bankers, so they wear three-piece suits. Hell, they can fly private jets and shoot boars in the forests of Tuscany. They’re still cheap rip-off bastards.”

  “That’s a very correct attitude,” Emerson said. “But don’t underestimate the havens. So far, as you say, they’re only parasites. They steal software, they bootleg records and videos, they invade people’s privacy. Those are annoyances, but it’s not yet more than the system can bear. But what about the potential? There are potential black markets for genetic engineering, organ transplants, neurochemicals … a whole galaxy of modern high-tech products. Hackers loose in the Net are trouble enough. What happens when a genetic engineer cuts one corner too many?”

  David shuddered. “Well, that can’t be allowed.”

  “But these are sovereign national governments,” said Emerson. “A small Third World nation like Grenada can profit by playing fast and loose with new technologies. They may well hope to become a center of innovation, just as the Cayman Islands and Panama became financial centers. Regulation is a burden, and multinationals are always tempted to move out from under it. What happens to Rizome if our competitors evade the rules, offshore?”

  She let them mull over that for a while. “And there are deeper questions that affect the whole structure of the modern world. What happens when tomorrow’s industries are pioneered by criminals? We live on a crowded planet, and we need controls, but they have to be tight. Otherwise corruption seeps in like black water.”

  “It’s a tough agenda,” David said, thinking it over. “In fact, it sounds hopeless.”

  “So did the Abolition,” said Emerson. “But the arsenals are gone.” She smiled. The same old line, Laura thought. The old baby-boom generation had been using it for years. Maybe they thought it would help explain while they were still running everything. “But history never stops. Modern society faces a new central crisis. Are we going to control the path of development for sane, human ends? Or is it going to be laissez-faire anarchy?”

  Emerson polished off the last of her chile relleno. “These are real issues. If we want to live in a world we can recognize, we’ll have to fight for the privilege. We at Rizome have to do our part. We are doing it. Here and now.”

  “You make a pretty good case,” David said. “But I imagine the pirates see things differently.”

  “Oh, we’ll be hearing their side soon enough.” She smiled. “But we may have some surprises for them. The havens are used to multinational corporations in the old style. But an economic democracy is a different animal. We must let them see that for themselves. Even if it means some risk to us.”

  David frowned. “You don’t seriously think they’ll try anything?”

  “No, I don’t. If they do, we’ll simply call the local police. It would be scandalous for us—this is, after all, a very confidential meeting—but worse scandal, I think, for them.” She placed fork and knife neatly across her plate. “We know there’s some small risk. But Rizome has no private army. No fellows in dark glasses with briefcases full of cash and handguns. That’s out of style.” Her eyes flashed briefly. “We have to pay for that luxury of innocence, though. Because we have no one to take our risks for us. We have to spread the danger out, among Rizome associates. Now it’s your turn. You understand. Don’t you?”

  Laura thought it over, quietly. “Our number came up,” she said at last.

  “Exactly.”

  “Just one of those things,” David said. And it was.

  The negotiators should have arrived at the Lodge all at the same time, on equal terms. But they didn’t have that much sense. Instead they’d chosen to screw around and attempt to one-up each other.

  The Europeans had arrived early—it was their attempt to show the others that they were close to the Rizome referees and dealing from a position of strength. But they soon grew bored and were full of peevish suspicion.

  Emerson was still mollifying them when the Singapore contingent arrived. There were three of them as well: an ancient Chinese named Mr. Shaw and his two Malay compatriots. Mr. Shaw was a bespectacled, balding man in an oversized suit, who spoke very little. The two Malays wore black songkak hats, peaked fore and aft, with sewnon emblems of their group, the Yung Soo Chim Islamic Bank. The Malays were middle-aged men, very sober, very dignified. Not like bankers, however. Like soldiers. They walked erect, with their shoulders squared, and their eyes never stopped moving.

  They brought mounds of luggage, including their own telephones and a refrigerated chest, packed with foil-sealed trays of food.

  Emerson made introductions. Karageorgiu glared aggressively, Shaw was woodenly aloof. The escorts looked ready to arm-wrestle. Emerson took the Singaporeans upstairs to the conference room, where they could phone in and assure their home group that they had arrived in one piece.

  No one had seen the Grenadians since the day before, at the airport. They hadn’t called in, either, despite their vague promises. Time passed. The others saw this as a studied insult and fretted over their drinks. They broke at last for dinner. The Singaporeans ate their own food, in their rooms. The Europeans complained vigorously about the barbarous Tex-Mex cuisine
. Mrs. Delrosario, who had outdone herself, was almost reduced to tears.

  The Grenadians finally showed up after dusk. Like Ms. Emerson, Laura had become seriously worried. She greeted them in the front lobby. “So glad to see you. Was there any trouble?”

  “Nuh,” said Winston Stubbs, exposing his dentures in a sunny smile. “I-and-I were downtown, seen. Up-the-island.” The ancient Rastaman had perched a souvenir cowboy hat on his gray shoulder-length dreadlocks. He wore sandals and an explosive Hawaiian shirt.

  His companion, Sticky Thompson, had a new haircut. He’d chosen to dress in slacks, long-sleeved shirt, and business vest, like a Rizome associate. It didn’t quite work on him though; Sticky looked almost aggressively conventional. Carlotta, the Church girl, wore a sleeveless scarlet beach top, a short skirt, and heavy makeup. A brimming chalice was tattooed on her bare, freckled shoulder.

  Laura introduced her husband and the Lodge staff to the Grenadians. David gave the old pirate his best hostly grin: friendly and tolerant, we’re all just-folks here at Rizome. Overdoing it a bit maybe, because Winston Stubbs had the standard pirate image. Raffish. “Howdy,” David said. “Hope y’all enjoy your stay with us.”

  The old man looked skeptical. David abandoned his drawl. “Cool runnings,” he said tentatively.

  “Cool runnings,” Winston Stubbs mused. “Have nah hear that in forty year. You like those old reggae albums, Mr. Webster?”

  David smiled. “My folks used to play them when I was a kid.”

  “Oh, seen. That would be Dr. Martin Webster and Grace Webster of Galveston.”

  “That’s right,” David said. His smile vanished.

  “You designed this Lodge,” Stubbs said. “Concretized sand, built from the beach, eh?” He looked David up and down. “Mash-it-up appropriate technology. We could use you in the islands, mon.”

  “Thanks,” David said, fidgeting. “That’s very flattering.”

  “We could use a public relations, too,” Stubbs said, grinning crookedly at Laura. His eye whites were veined with red, like cracked marbles. “I-and-I’s reputation could use an upgrade. Pressure come down on I-and-I. From Babylon Luddites.”

  “Let’s all gather in the conference room,” Emerson said. “It’s early yet. Still time for us to talk.”

  They argued for two solid days. Laura sat in on the meetings as Debra Emerson’s second, and she realized quickly that Rizome was a barely tolerated middleman. The data pirates had no interest whatsoever in taking up new careers as right-thinking postindustrialists. They had met to confront a threat.

  All three pirate groups were being blackmailed.

  The blackmailers, whoever they were, showed a firm grasp of data-haven dynamics. They had played cleverly on the divisions and rivalries among the havens; threatening one bank, then depositing the shakedown money in another. The havens, who naturally loathed publicity, had covered up the attacks. They were deliberately vague about the nature of the depredations. They feared publicizing their weaknesses. It was clear, too, that they suspected one another.

  Laura had never known the true nature and extent of haven operations, but she sat quietly, listened and watched, and learned in a hurry.

  The pirates dubbed commercial videotapes by the hundreds of thousands, selling them in poorly policed Third World markets. And their teams of software cracksters found a ready market for programs stripped of their copy protection. This brand of piracy was nothing new; it dated back to the early days of the information industry.

  But Laura had never realized the profit to be gained by evading the developed world’s privacy laws. Thousands of legitimate companies maintained dossiers on individuals: employee records, medical histories, credit transactions. In the Net economy, business was impossible without such information. In the legitimate world, companies purged this data periodically, as required by law.

  But not all of it was purged. Reams of it ended up in the data havens, passed on through bribery of clerks, through taps of datalines, and by outright commercial espionage. Straight companies operated with specialized slivers of knowledge. But the havens made a business of collecting it, offshore. Memory was cheap, and their databanks were huge, and growing.

  And they had no shortage of clients. Credit companies, for instance, needed to avoid bad risks and pursue their debtors. Insurers had similar problems. Market researchers hungered after precise data on individuals. So did fund raisers. Specialized address lists found a thriving market. Journalists would pay for subscription lists, and a quick sneak call to a databank could dredge up painful rumors that governments and companies suppressed.

  Private security agencies were at home in the data demimonde. Since the collapse of the Cold War intelligence apparats, there were legions of aging, demobilized spooks scrabbling out a living in the private sector. A shielded phone line to the havens was a boon for a private investigator.

  Even computer-dating services kicked in their bit.

  The havens were bootstrapping their way up to Big Brother status, trading for scattered bits of information, then collating it and selling it back—as a new and sinister whole.

  They made a business of abstracting, condensing, indexing, and verifying—like any other modern commercial database. Except, of course, that the pirates were carnivorous. They ate other databases when they could, blithely ignoring copyrights and simply storing everything they could filch. This didn’t require state-of-the-art computer expertise. Just memory by the ton, and plenty of cast-iron gall.

  Unlike old-fashioned smugglers, the haven pirates never had to physically touch their booty. Data had no substance. EFT Commerzbank, for instance, was a legitimate corporation in Luxembourg. Its illegal nerve centers were safely stowed away in Turkish Cyprus. The same went for the Singaporeans; they had the dignified cover of an address in Bencoolen Street, while the machinery hummed merrily in Nauru, a sovereign Pacific Island nation with a population of 12,000. For their part, the Grenadians simply brazened it out.

  All three groups were monetary banks as well. This was handy for laundering client funds, and a ready source of necessary bribes. Since the invention of electronic funds transfer, money itself had become just another form of data. Their host governments were not inclined to quibble.

  So, Laura thought, the basic principles of operation were clear enough. But they created, not solidarity, but bitter rivalry.

  Names were freely exchanged during the more heated moments. The ancestral lineage of the havens saddled them with an unhelpful and sometimes embarrassing heritage. During occasional bursts of frankness, whole whale-pods of these large and awkward facts surfaced and blew steam, while Laura marveled.

  The EFT Commerzbank, she learned, drew its roots mainly from the old heroin networks of the south of France, and from the Corsican Black Hand. After the Abolition, these clunky gutter operations had been modernized by former French spooks from “La Piscine,” the legendary Corsican school for paramilitary saboteurs. These right-wing commandos, traditionally the rogue elephants of European espionage, drifted quite naturally into a life of crime once the French government had cut off their paychecks.

  Additional muscle came from a minor galaxy of French right-wing action groups, who abandoned their old careers of bombing trains and burning synagogues, to join the data game. Further allies came from the criminal families of the European Turkish minority, accomplished heroin smugglers who maintained an unholy linkage with the Turkish fascist underground.

  All this had been poured into Luxembourg and allowed to set for twenty years, like some kind of horrible aspic. By now a kind of crust of respectability had formed, and the EFT Commerzbank was making some attempt to disown its past.

  The others refused to make it easy for them. Egged on by Winston Stubbs, who remembered the event, Monsieur Karageorgiu was forced to admit that a member of the Turkish “Gray Wolves” had once shot a pope.

  Karageorgiu defended the Wolves by insisting that the action was “business.” He claimed it was a rev
enge operation, recompense for a sting by the Vatican’s corrupt Banco Ambrosiano. The Ambrosiano, he explained, had been one of Europe’s first truly “underground” banks, before the present system had settled. Standards had been different then—back in the rough-and-tumble glory days of Italian terrorism.

  Besides, Karageorgiu pointed out smoothly, the Turkish gunman had only wounded Pope John Paul II. No worse than a kneecapping, really. Unlike the Sicilian Mafia—who were so annoyed at the Banco’s misdeeds that they had poisoned Pope John Paul I stone dead.

  Laura believed very little of this—she noticed Ms. Emerson smiling quietly to herself—but it was clear that the other pirates had few doubts. The story fit precisely into the folk mythos of their enterprise. They shook their heads over it with a kind of rueful nostalgia. Even Mr. Shaw looked vaguely impressed.

  The Islamic Bank’s antecedents were similarly mixed. Triad syndicates were a major factor. Besides being criminal brotherhoods, the Triads had always had a political side, ever since their ancient origins as anti-Manchu rebels in seventeenth-century China.

  The Triads had whiled away the centuries in prostitution, gambling, and drugs, with occasional breaks for revolution, such as the Chinese Republic of 1912. But their ranks had swollen drastically after the People’s Republic had absorbed Hong Kong and Taiwan. Many diehard capitalists had fled to Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, where the oil money still ran fast and deep. There they prospered, selling rifles and shoulder-launched rockets to Kurdish separatists and Afghani mujahideen, whose bloody acres abounded in poppies and cannabis. And the Triads waited, with ghastly patience, for the new Red dynasty to crack.

  According to Karageorgiu, the Triad secret societies had never forgotten the Opium Wars of the 1840s, in which the British had deliberately and cynically hooked the Chinese populace on black opium. The Triads, he alleged, had deliberately promoted heroin use in the West in an attempt to rot Western morale.

  Mr. Shaw acknowledged that such an action would only have been simple justice, but he denied the allegation. Besides, he pointed out, heroin was now out of favor in the West. The drug-using populace had dwindled with the aging of the population, and modern users were more sophisticated. They preferred untraceable neurochemicals to crude vegetable extracts. These very neurochemicals now boiled out of the high-tech drug vats of the Caribbean.