The Zero Hour (39 page)

Slowly, agonizingly slowly, his head moved downward, planting a trail of scorchingly hot kisses on her belly, the wisps of hair beneath her navel, and—

“Brian—” she said, a vain attempt to gain control.

Down there, his tongue fluttering like a butterfly, or a hummingbird, his head moving back and forth, then up and down, his tongue alternately rigid and probing, then soft and wet and oscillating. He kissed, sucked gently at her labia,
hummed
a few notes along with the song, sucked a little harder, hummed again, and then enveloped her clitoris and the hood around it with a luscious, feather-soft kiss. She rocked back and forth, undulating her hips as the teasing little tickle of pleasure built into a sharp-edged wave and grew stronger and larger and she heard something so far away, something—

—a mechanical noise, of the ordinary world, not of the world of pleasure into which she was floating—

—her pager. She groaned. Her pager had gone off.

Brian grunted his annoyance. “Not now,” he said.

“I’m—I’m sorry—I have to…” She rolled over, took her cellular phone out of her purse. Naked, she took it into the bathroom, shut the door, clicked on the ventilation fan to muffle her voice.

“Yes, Ken,” she said. “I really hope this is important.”

“Sorry to bother you,” Ken Alton said. “But yeah, I think it is. I got it.”

“Got … what?”

“The passport. The passport Baumann used to enter the U.S. The name is Thomas Allen Moffatt.”

Sarah disconnected, folded up the phone, and returned to the bedroom. Brian was lying on his back, a crooked half-smile on his face. “Everything all right?” he murmured.

“Everything’s fine,” she said. “Good news.”

“Good,” Henrik Baumann said. “We can all use good news. Now, where were we?”

Part 5

TRAPS

When the strike of a hawk
breaks the body of its prey,
it is because of the timing.

—Sun-tzu,
The Art of War

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

At four-thirty in the morning, the narrow alley off the side street in the Wall Street area of lower Manhattan was dark and deserted. Opaque steam rose from a manhole cover. A discarded yellow wrapper from a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder drifted along the wet asphalt like tumbleweed.

Two figures appeared at one end of the alley, one tall and lean, the other small and portly. Both were clad in heavy pants and boots, long-sleeved overshirts, and welder’s gloves.

On their backs were mountaineering backpacks and air tanks connected to mouthpieces that dangled at their sides. They approached the steaming manhole. The taller one, who was carrying a four-foot crowbar, inserted the sharp end of the crowbar between the manhole cover and casing, then pushed downward with all his body weight.

“You see why I couldn’t do this myself,” Leo Krasner said.

Baumann did not answer. He kept pushing at the fulcrum until a low, rusty moan began to sound, then a higher-pitched squeak, and then the manhole cover began slowly to lift.

“Go,” he said.

Krasner trundled over to the opening, turned his portly body around, and began clambering down the rungs of the steel ladder built into the side of the manhole. Baumann followed, sliding the manhole cover back with great exertion. Finally the ornamented iron cover was back in place. They were underground within one minute and thirty seconds.

First Krasner, then Baumann dropped from the end of the ladder into the still water below. Two splashes disturbed the silence. The smell was rank, overpowering. Krasner heaved; Baumann bit his lower lip.

They reached around for the silicone mouthpieces, pulled them up, and bit into the nubs that held them in place. Baumann switched on Krasner’s air tank, then Krasner did the same for him. With loud hisses, they began inhaling the tanked air. Krasner took several deep, grateful breaths.

Despite the stench, they were standing not in sewage but in a few inches of runoff water from storm drains, which ran through miles of tunnels beneath the streets of New York. The oval concrete tube was seven feet or so high and about five feet wide, and it seemed to go on forever. These drainage tunnels served a dual function: along the top and the upper sides of the tunnel ran many cables for power and telecommunication links.

“We can leave the crowbar here or take it with us,” Leo said.

“Take it,” said Baumann. “Let’s move quickly.”

There was a splash, and a rat the size of a small dog ran by.

“Shit!” exclaimed Leo with a shudder.

Baumann pulled a caver’s headlamp from his backpack and put it on. He checked the reading on his compass and zeroed his pedometer, then waited patiently for Leo to do the same. He did, and consulted a map that had been compiled by a group of crackers he knew who liked to do nefarious deeds in the city.

For almost a quarter of a mile they slogged through the tunnels, guided through the maze by their compasses, pedometers, and the surprisingly detailed map of the underground tunnels. A more direct route would have meant entering via a manhole on a much more visible major street, which was out of the question.

They came to a juncture between two tunnels whose curved walls were covered with a profusion of large oblong boxes connected to thick wire casings. Each removed his mouthpiece, then switched off the other’s air tank. The air here was much better.

This was, Leo explained, one of the many central switching areas in which repairmen from NYNEX could access telephone lines. To Baumann’s untrained eye, it appeared to be a forest of wires in maddening disarray.

“Each one is labeled with a tag,” Krasner said, panting. “Series of numbers and letters. By customer account number. Fear not, I know the one we want.”

Two, then three rats scurried by underfoot. One of them stopped to sniff something in the cloudy gray water, then moved on.

After a few minutes of searching, Leo located the right cable.

“Coax,” he announced. “Just like they told me.”

“Hmm?”

“It’s coaxial cable—copper wire. Hell of a lot easier to splice.”

“What if it had been fiber-optic cable?”

Krasner shook his head in disbelief at Baumann’s ignorance. “I brought every tool we’d need, whether it was copper or fiber.” With a pair of wire cutters he snipped the copper line and proceeded to strip it. “Problem with fiber is, they could tell if there’s a tap on the line. The coefficient of the material you use to connect the two cut ends of the fiber will always change the characteristics of the light pulse. So it’s going to be obvious to a monitor that there’s a new material conducting the light pulse. It would be detected instantly, soon as they’re on line.”

He fed both ends of the copper wire into a square “breakout box,” which was, he explained, made by a company named Black Box. This was a tap, a sophisticated, undetectable, high-impedance parallel tap for computers, often used for diagnostic purposes.

Then Krasner carefully removed from his backpack an NEC UltraLite Versa notebook computer no bigger than a hardcover book. He connected the breakout box to the serial port in the notebook computer.

“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.

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.