Then Leo Krasner’s Casio alarm watch finally beeped, jolting him awake. “Whoa,” Krasner said through a yawn. His breath was fermented, noxious. “All right now, we should have some action in just about three minutes. Let’s boot ’er up.”
A little over an hour later, he had a sizable amount of captured traffic outgoing from Manhattan Bank, all stored on his computer. “We got a shitload of information here,” he said. “Pattern of transaction, transaction length, destination code. Everything. Now it’s a simple matter to mimic the transactions and get inside.” He pulled the connector out of the computer’s serial port. “I’m going to leave the breakout box here.”
“Won’t it be detected?”
“Nah. The fuck you want, you want me to yank this thing off right now and interrupt the line? Then we’d really be screwed.”
“No,” Baumann said patiently. “The breakout box can’t be removed until after transmissions have stopped, which means after banking hours. And yes, I most certainly want it removed. I can’t risk having a piece of evidence here for longer than a day.”
“You want to repair the patch, you do it,” Krasner said.
“I’d be glad to do it, if I could be certain of my ability to do it perfectly. But I can’t. So we both must return here. Tonight?”
Krasner scowled. “Hey, man, I happen to have a life.”
“I don’t think you have much of a choice,” Baumann explained. “Your payment depends upon satisfactory completion of all aspects of the job.”
The cracker was silent, sullen, for a moment. “Tonight I’ll be analyzing the traffic and writing code. I don’t have time to slog around the sewers tonight. It can wait.”
“All right,” Baumann said. “It will wait.”
“Hey, and speaking of analyzing the traffic, I can’t do shit without the key. You got it with you? If you forgot to bring it-”
“No,” Baumann said, “I didn’t forget.” He handed the cracker a shiny gold disk, the CD-ROM Dyson had given him. It had been stolen-Dyson did not say how he had arranged this-from a high-ranking officer of the bank. “Here’s the key,” he said.
“How new is this? Passwords still valid?”
“I’m sure the passwords have been changed by now, but that’s insignificant. The cryptographic software is unchanged, and it’s all here.”
“Fine,” Krasner said. “No problem.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
Malcolm Dyson switched off CNN and pressed the button to close the sliding panel on the armoire. He had been watching a business report on the computer industry and could think about nothing except the plan.
The soft underbelly of capitalism, he knew, was the computer. And not just the computer in general, the computer as an abstract concept, but one specific collection of computers, in one specific building in lower Manhattan.
Its location is kept secret, yet when you know the right people, you can find out. Bankers and money men occasionally talk about the Network over drinks late at night, speculating about what might happen if… and, with a shudder, dismiss the thought.
Great catastrophes can happen at any moment, but we don’t think about them. Most of us don’t give much thought to the possibility of a gigantic meteor colliding with our planet and extinguishing all life. With the end of the Cold War we less and less often think about what might happen if an all-out nuclear war were to erupt.
The destruction of the Network is every banker’s nightmare. It would plunge America into a second Great Depression that would make the 1930s seem like a time of prosperity. This possibility is, fortunately, kept hidden from the ordinary citizen.
It is, however, very real.
Dyson had come up with the idea, originally, and Martin Lomax had provided the spadework, which he had presented to his boss six months ago-almost six months after Dyson was paralyzed and his wife and daughter were killed.
The report Lomax had written now lay in a concealed drawer in the desk in Dyson’s library. Dyson had read it countless times since then. It gave him strength, got him through the days, diverted his pain, both physical and psychic. It began:
FROM: R. MARTIN LOMAX
TO: MALCOLM DYSON
First, a brief history.
In the years immediately after the California Gold Rush of 1848, the American banking system became increasingly chaotic. Banks would send payments to other banks by dispatching porters with bags of gold coins. Errors and confusion were rampant. In 1853, the fifty-two major banks in New York established the New York Settlement Association in the basement of 14 Wall Street to provide some coordination in the exchange of payments. On its very first day, the Association cleared 22.6 million dollars.
By 1968, this antiquated system began to break down. It was virtually impossible to get anything done. The era of teletype technology in the 1950s gave way to that of the computer in the 1960s. By 1970 the advent of the computer allowed the Association to be replaced by the Network, shorthand for the National Electronic Transfer Facility.
The Network began with one computer connected to a telephone. The newfangled system was at first distrusted by the world’s banks, but confidence began to grow. Banks began to accept wire payments. Gradually, every major bank in the world sought to join the Network.
Today, over a trillion dollars moves through the Network each day-90 percent of the dollars used anywhere on earth. Since virtually all Eurodollar and foreign exchange trading is conducted in dollars, and the world’s flow of money is centered in New York, the Network, and its Unisys A-15J dual processor, has become the very nerve center of the world’s financial system.
How fragile is the Network?
A brief case history will illustrate. At the close of business on June 26, 1974, German banking authorities closed the Bankhaus Herstatt in Cologne, a major player in foreign exchange trading. At the end of the German banking day it was still noon in New York, where banks suddenly found themselves out hundreds of millions of dollars. By the next day, the world banking system had gone into shock. Only quick action by Walter Wriston of Citicorp averted a global crash. As president of the Network at the time, he ordered the Network to stay open through the weekend until all payments were worked out. Any bank that refused to honor payment orders was thrown out of the Network.
A direct terrorist strike on the Network’s Water Street facility would trigger worldwide havoc. It would so seriously disrupt the U.S. stock market, Eurodollar payments, and virtually all foreign exchange and foreign trade payments that the world payments system would collapse at once.
The destruction of the Network would topple the business world and plunge America and the world into a massive depression. The U.S. economy would be obliterated, and with it that of the world. America’s reign as a global power would be ended, as the country and much of the world returned to an economic Dark Ages.
It is only a matter of luck-or maybe ignorance of how the capitalist world works-that no terrorist has so far targeted the Network.
But if we could locate a masterful, experienced professional terrorist with a strong motivation-financial or otherwise-to accomplish the task, it is my strong belief that no more effective revenge could ever be wrought on the United States.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
Now there was a name, the alias Baumann had used to enter the United States. In some ways it was a major victory; in some ways it was dust.
“He may never use it again,” Roth said.
Sarah nodded. “If so, the lead’s useless.”