The Zero Hour

“This baby’s modified so it’s got a gigabyte of storage capacity,” he said. He set the computer down on a small shelf that jutted out from the wall. “All right, it’s ten after six o’clock. We can’t do anything till nine A.M., and all we really need to capture is maybe an hour’s worth of traffic. In the meantime, I’m going to take a nap. The Manhattan Bank doesn’t open for business for another, oh, three hours.”

***

While Leo Krasner slept, Baumann sat next to him, thinking. He thought about his time in prison, about his childhood, about a woman at university with whom he had had a long and ardent relationship. He thought, too, about Sarah Cahill and the game of deception he was playing with her. If she had been distrustful of “Brian,” she was quickly becoming less so. Already he had successfully invaded her life, and soon, very soon, there would be many more opportunities to do so.

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.