“Okay,” Sarah said. “I’m going to hold out the possibility it’s a nuke.”
“What?” exploded Pappas. “There’s no goddam reason to believe it’s a nuke, and if you want to scare half-”
“I know, I know,” Sarah said. “But it’s the only way DOE will be willing to call in NEST, and we’re going to need the resources of the best. And when we need them, we’re going to need them fast.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
Dressed in a European suit, Baumann fit right into the throngs of Wall Street businessmen swarming to work this morning. He might have been a cosmopolitan banker, an Anglophilic bond salesman.
He stood on Water Street and gazed casually across the street at the ordinary-looking office building. Hundreds of thousands of people passed by this building, people whose livelihoods depended upon Wall Street and who probably never gave the building even so much as a passing glance.
On the street level were administrative offices of a small bank called Greenwich Trust. On the upper floors were various other offices. The building’s lobby was green Wall-Street-office-building marble. There was absolutely nothing distinctive about the building.
Except for what was on the mezzanine level, behind unmarked doors accessed by a card-key system.
There, well protected and hidden from the world by the anonymity of its setting, was the Network, the nerve center of the world financial community. By now, Baumann knew quite a bit about what was behind those walls and doors. He knew there were two Unisys A-15J mainframes and optical disk pads for read-write media storage. In case of fire, Halon suppressants would instantly be released into the room. In case of power outages or surges, the machines would run on current that emanated from storage batteries fed by the city’s power grid. The batteries would sustain operations until diesel-powered generators could be switched on.
There was electrical backup and telecommunications backup, and the dual processors provided computer redundancy. There were twenty-two electronic authentication boxes made by the British firm Racal-Guardata to screen all incoming messages for code flaws before permitting them on the mainframes. By algorithmic means, checking for both number and spacing of characters, the authenticators would defeat interdiction.
The builders of the Network had done extensive risk analysis. Even in constructing the facility they had used union labor only up to a point, then brought in their own technicians to do the sensitive internal wiring. Regular maintenance was done by their own internal technicians too.
But when you came right down to it, it was early-1980s technology, really, with only the most rudimentary security precautions taken. It was nothing short of a scandal how the planet’s entire financial system could be brought down by one act of destruction visited upon this ordinary-looking office building in lower Manhattan.
After the World Trade Center bomb, there was talk about how badly damaged America’s financial structure had almost been. That was nonsense. The World Trade Center bomb had killed a handful of people and closed some businesses for a while. That was nothing compared to what was about to happen here, across the street.
A trillion dollars moved electronically through one floor of this office building each day-more than the entire money supply of the United States. Immense fortunes moved through here and around the world at the speed of lightning. What, after all, is a treasury bill these days but an item on a computer tape? The fragile structure of the planet’s finance depended upon the function of this room full of mainframes. It teetered on the confidence that this system would function.
Interrupt the flow-or worse, destroy the machinery and wipe out the backup records-and governments would shake, vast corporations would be wiped out. The global financial system would screech to a halt. Corporations around the world would run out of money, would be unable to pay for goods, would have to halt production, would be unable to write paychecks to their employees. How astonishing it was, Baumann mused, that we allowed our technology to outpace our ability to use it!
This was the genius of Malcolm Dyson’s plan of vengeance. He had targeted his revenge both selectively and broadly. A banker named Warren Elkind, the head of the second-largest bank in the country, had turned Dyson in for insider trading, and would now pay for his perfidy. A computer virus would invade the Manhattan Bank and cause all of the bank’s assets to be transferred out around the world. Not only would the Manhattan Bank be shut down, but it would be plundered of all its assets. It would be broke.
I don’t want Warren Elkind killed, Dyson had said. I want him to suffer a living death. I want his livelihood to be destroyed, the bank into which he’s poured his life to come toppling down.
Dyson knew that the failure even of such an immense bank would not seriously weaken the U.S. economy. That blow would come a day later, when the Network was brought down just before the end of the business day. Then the entire economy of the United States, which had sent agents to kill Dyson’s wife and daughter, would be dealt a paralyzing blow, from which it would not recover for years.
It was, really, a clever plan, Baumann reflected. Why had no one thought of it before?
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
Saturday morning, and Sarah took Jared to the St. Luke’s-Roosevelt emergency room to have his stitches removed. By late morning they were back at home. Sarah was about to call Brea, the babysitter, and return to the MINOTAUR headquarters, when Brian called.
“You’re home,” he said, surprised. “I was wondering if you and Jared might want to take a walk around the city.”
“A walk?”
“I want to show you two my favorite place in New York.”
“Let me make a few calls,” Sarah said, “and see how much time I can spare this afternoon. But I should warn you-”
“I know, I know. The beeper.”
He met them in front of their apartment building and took them downtown on the subway at West Seventy-second and Broadway.
“Where are you from?” Jared asked Baumann on the ride downtown.
“Canada.”
“But where?”
“A town called Edmonton.”
“Where’s that?”
“It’s in Alberta. It’s the capital.”
“Is that a state?”
“Well, we call it a province. It’s five times the size of New York State.”
“Edmonton,” Jared mused. His eyes suddenly widened. “That’s where the Edmonton Oilers are from!”
“Right.”
“You ever meet Wayne Gretzky?”
“Never met him.”
“Oh,” Jared said, disappointed.
Sarah watched the two of them sitting next to one another, noticing that Jared had started to become relaxed around Brian, that there was a chemistry there.
Baumann said, “You know, basketball was invented by a Canadian, a hundred years ago. The first basket was a bushel basket used for peaches.”
“Uh huh,” Jared said, unimpressed by Canada and its legacy. “Can you throw a pass?”
“As in American football?” Baumann asked.
“Yep.”
“No, I can’t. Sorry, I can’t play football with you. I’m a klutz. Do you like football?”
Jared hesitated. “Not really.”
“What do you like?”
“Tennis. Softball.”
“You play ball with your dad?”
“Yeah. You play ball?”
“Not so well, Jared. But I can show you buildings. Maybe you can show me how to throw a pass someday.”
As they walked to the Woolworth Building, Baumann said, more to Jared than to Sarah, “This was once the tallest building in the world.”
“Oh, yeah?” Jared objected. “What about the Empire State Building?”