net.bandits

This is for kids from 7 to 70.  

 

Copyright John fisher 2015

Chapter 1 - Sweet dreams Mr President

         A loud burst of machine-gun fire heralded their arrival as they materialised from the computer, which was perched on a beautifully inlaid walnut period desk and set off by a matching high-backed chair. Tony Simms and his two accomplices, Twitter and Text, quickly took up their pre-planned positions and fired indiscriminately as they stood back to back in a tight triangle in the Oval Office of The White House.  

Yes, the Oval Office of The White House. Impossible?  Well, no in fact.  And actually, “No” to just about anywhere else being out of bounds.

The net.bandits used soft rubber bullets, because in the Oval Office real metal would have caused some potentially nasty damage.  Mostly to them, because of the rather thick steel panel reinforcement in the Oval Room.  Even so, they still found themselves dodging one or two of their own missiles as they cut pretty shapes on the delicately patterned wall covering, shattered centuries-old glass, caused the flower petals to float down from the vase to the impeccable carpet and generally made the sort of mess that vandals are renowned for.  Nothing too serious, but bad enough to upset someone. For example, the President of the United States and probably the whole of America.

Pausing only to pull impertinent and somewhat childish faces at the ever-blinking lenses of the security cameras, they surveyed the damage they had inflicted. A lot of holes and rubbery splats on the expensive and rather traditional wall coverings. And very very nasty burn-type marks on the plush carpet.  Plus, of course, irreparable damage to the rich drapes made from the finest cotton that the USA could produce, along with the smart, highly polished mahogany desk with its formerly 

clean blotter, pen holder and freshly picked flowers standing in an expensive cut-glass vase. All now very unrecognisable.

        A single photograph adorned the wall, showing the President as a family man with family values, while his wife and offspring proffered smiles with toothpaste grins. 

Text raised his gun and wiped the smiles off the faces of the President and his family. A particularly offensive thing to do, knowing it would infuriate America’s top man, a whole load of senators and the President's millions of supporters.  Not forgetting his loyal wife.

“How long we got?” asked Twitter, named after his obsession with social networking.

“I told you, no talking,” his boss replied through clenched teeth, pointing upwards

to one of the blinking cameras with its very obvious microphone. “They record voices and use the patterns later with listening devices.”

In fact, the net.bandits would be in the Oval Office for just thirty seconds, because Tony Simms had done his homework and knew that the security men needed forty-five seconds to respond to the alarm bells that were now going off in the security nerve centre.

Controllers would be shouting orders and dozens of highly trained agents would be making a bee line alongside well-practised routes to the Oval Office; a somewhat impossible move because the corridors of power were always busy day and night with important people doing important work, like carrying piles of vital reports just waiting to be scattered on the floor.  

Which is exactly what was happening, as agents who had never heard of anyone illegally entering The Oval Room, let alone even going there without permission and without being seen, for once in their lives.....panicked. There was pandemonium as everyone made a headlong rush towards The Oval Room. Not because The President was in imminent danger, as he was in slumber in his well guarded quarters; but because the unbreachable had been breached. The 

net.bandits simply didn’t show up on any security surrounding the White House and this was worrying to put it extremely mildly.

Agent Kurt Burnett reported later to a sleepy boss, Donald Klwaski: "We don't know what the hell is going on.  We saw four intruders in The Oval Room, but we don't know how they got there or how they left.  That room is more secure than Fort Knox."

      In fact, the net.bandits had done dummy runs four times, pausing just milliseconds, but causing the security system to awaken enough to alert the security guards watching their monitors. Each time the guards had come running, taking forty-five seconds to arrive.

Security systems were checked and rechecked, but no fault was found, and while there were blurred images on the recorder, no-one thought the unthinkable, that these were real people.  So quite naturally, nothing happened and the incidents were forgotten by the rather too complacent security staff.   They put it down to computer trickery because one of their number remembered something in a defence magazine about experiments to reflect images onto surfaces remotely to fool opposition armies into thinking they were facing thousands of troops, instead of a small detachment.

“What dumb-bells”, Tony Simms said to his fellow conspirators. “They can’t figure it out, and probably never will do.”  Which wasn’t quite true as Great Britain’s MI5, via its overseas operations cousins, MI6, had sent off a highly cryptic note to its counterparts in America warning of the possibility of that country having its security breached “in an unconventional manner”.  No amount of questions and queries would elicit not even the slightest fragment of additional information, yet alone clues as to what on earth they were talking about.  The conclusion, eventually, we many months later, was that the highly secret, excruciatingly spooky spooks at the Cheltenham eavesdropping complex had picked up something that one of the net bandits had inadvertently said to one of the other net bandits on his mobile and that this caused a lot of pings and alerts. The information and  assumption, was useful in the eventual report on,the,whole fracas. Of course, the reality was that Brit boffins had lost something very secret and there was egg on a lot of faces.

Meanwhile, in The Oval Room, dust was swirling around the net.bandits from the shattered room and Twitter began to cough and splutter loudly.

“Fifteen seconds!” screamed Tony Simms above the chaos, forgetting his own rule of silence. “Twitter, next time get a health and safety kit from B & Q  like us. Okay, time to say bye-bye … ten seconds left.” 

He left the parting message of a burst of gunfire into the President’s computer.  This was just a monitor as everything was automatically stored on cloud systems, with passwords changed daily, so there would be no cyber attacks by nasty hackers. As the net.bandits had discovered, a monitor was all they needed to go wherever they wanted.  In the Mk2 version of course, not yet discovered by Samuel, they simply needed to be in range of wifi.  If they ever got their hands on the latest, latest version, with its special, unique branding, to be disclosed later, things became super easy, using gyro-static satellites.  

      "Go, go go", said Tony Simms.  There was no actual need for him to say anything; it just sounded right, imposing an air of urgency and military precision, often portrayed on the best action Films. And, of course, the secret agents, now with his words securely recorded, would think "Here's an ex-military man", whereas the truth was that Tony Simms was an ex recycling plant picker and part-time petty thief with a distinguished track record in magistrates courts. This fact eventually allowed law enforcers to easily identify him and his accomplices.

The three dusty figures, complete with rose petals on their heads and shoulders, were visibly seen to put single fingers on a small touch screen which appeared to be fixed to a Lynx anti-perspirant can, while Tony Simms keyed in an email address via an iphone connected to it.  Strange indeed.

The security men, stunned into silence and inaction, watched their screens and saw the three men change colour several times, metamorphose into funnels and disappear, apparently into the can of Lynx anti-perspirant.  This was because the clever system had detected the  computer was slightly out of order and had routed them through the can of Lynx deodorant and into another computer sitting in a cupboard and unnoticed by the vandals. "That is simply Impossible," declared one of the agents. Impossible? Yes. Fact? Yes. 

Later, analysts playing back the camera recordings slowed down the playback to confirm that they did indeed disappear into a can of anti-perspirant. Even later, the Michael Jackson-style smog masks that two of them were wearing, were identified from the distinctive logo as having been bought from a B & Q store in North London, with cash.

It would be impossible to find the buyer on CCTV because the store was new and there'd been a fault in the CCTV.  Tony Simms, a petty thief, new about CCTV and faults were easy to introduce.

The vandalism of the Oval Office would be TV headlines in the morning.  "In the past hour it has been revealed that an outrageous act of vandalism has occurred at The White House,"  said a stern announcer on Fox TV. And The Washington Post, too late for its morning paper deadline, declared online: "Big mystery over serious vandalism at White House".

        Of course, the details were deliberately being kept rather vague, due to the rather vague solid evidence of what exactly happened and more importantly, how.  At a Press conference later, a White House spokesman played the whole incident down to an almost "oh, by the way some idiot trashed the oval room" sort of way.  "We're interviewing staff because this could have been an accident", he told expectant reporters seriously hoping for something rather more newsworthy, like an act of terrorism and The President being evacuated.

By then Tony Simms, Twitter and Text were already safely tucked up in bed back in London, and it had taken them just trillion-milli-milliseconds.

After dusting themselves down and making rather a mess on the floor of the hotel room they had rented, they were not quite ready for sleep, even though it was five o’clock in the morning. 

Text was using a mobile phone, lifted that morning from a more conventional traveller at Euston Railway Station - a poor, unsuspecting commuter who would no doubt later be woken by armed police breaking down his door in a leafy suburb and hauling him away in front of his horrified wife and children. 

Text finished his text.  “Sweet dreams, Mr President. Signed, the net.bandits.”

The net.bandits had arrived and nothing, nowhere in the world, was now sacred or safe.