Deadline Y2K (24 page)

A talking head surrounded by snow flurries popped up on the screen. St. Basil's cathedral appeared pristine and immaculate above a squad of soldiers in winter uniforms marching across the square, the tattoo of their footsteps a chilling rhythm of despair.

“This is Red Square, empty. The world's largest public plaza is deserted. In the background, you can see the bright onion domes of the Kremlin picked out by spotlights surrounded by darkness. The lights are out in Moscow. In her long history Moscow has been ravaged by Ivan the Terrible, abandoned by Peter the Great, occupied by Napoleon and bombarded by Hitler, and in the last ten years she's struggled to make it in the bewildering world of free enterprise. And now? This may be the knock-out blow. We have reports of looting in many parts of the city, and unconfirmed reports that many of the looters are the police themselves. The army has been brought in to bring the police under control, and no one knows what's going to happen. Communications are failing all over the place, and the assumption here is that nothing works. We do know the army is having trouble fueling its tanks. Apparently the diesel pumps at the army depots stopped working a few minutes after midnight.”

“Are cellphones working?” asked the anchorwoman.

“No.”

“Do you know if the hot line between the Kremlin and the White House is working?”

“I don't know, but the lights are on inside the Kremlin compound which has its own generators and power supply. I would guess the hot line is open, but as I said, I don't want to assume anything is working. I think I contradicted myself, but this whole situation is contradictory. Information is at a premium because there isn't much of it. We have one report from the far northern city of Murmansk. We understand a detachment of Russian Naval
spetznatz
special forces are holding the operators of the local nuclear power plant at gunpoint, forcing them to keep the plant operating, but we can't confirm that report because we can't get through to anyone in Murmansk. Wait a minute now. What? When? Now? Okay, Jane, they just told us we can go inside the Kremlin and that's what we've been waiting for. That's all for now. This is Paul Delaney for CNN in Moscow.”

Doc turned away without listening to the anchorwoman's comments. Like everybody else, the Russians would learn that the millennium bug merely exacerbated older, deeper problems and brought them into focus. It was a catalyst, a watershed event that would weed out weakness in the technological gene pool.

Doc made his way up to the third floor, passed through the security doors, and told the Midnight Club what they'd already guessed.

“The passwords are locked in an isolated PC and Sarah has no access. End of story.”

“You just told us her name, Doc,” Bo observed.

“Yeah, well, her name is Sarah McFadden. I said I might go down there with a pistol and make her son of a bitch supervisor turn on the computer. Fat chance.”

“So if the primary goes down, he punches in the password, the override kicks over to the backup and then that fails. Presto, magic, we're in the dark.”

“Looks that way,” Doc said.

“I called Northern Lights in Vermont and told them to get out to their substations and start checking chips, and this guy on the phone, some supervisor says, ‘Who the fuck are you? Whaddaya mean check the fucking chips? We paid some assholes from Burlington to do that.' Did you check their work? I asked. ‘Who the fuck are you?!' I love this guy. Guys like that are the reason this whole thing is going down. Guys like him are going to make me richer than rich.”

“You'll be a lot richer if you figure out a way to get those passwords and keep the lights on in New York,” Doc said.

“What about Plan B?”

“We can't count on Mayor Rudy,” Doc said. “He might tell us to go fuck ourselves.”

Bo turned back to his screens, and Doc looked up to check the time. There were at least a hundred clocks in the room, counting all the clocks in the computers, but the one everyone checked was a big Southern Pacific Railroad station clock Adrian had found in an antique store. It had a big analog face with easy to read numbers and long, elegant hands that gracefully swept away the seconds, minutes and hours. It was ten minutes after five.

“What're you gonna do after?” Carolyn asked Ronnie for the 500th time that week.

“Carolyn, please. I'm not interested in after. This is now.”

“I'm just nervous. These phone lines are getting some heavy use. Close to overload.”

On Carolyn's screens an array of charts monitored the core loads in telephone trunk lines, and it seemed as though everyone in New York was on the phone. Besides voice traffic, an enormous load of data traffic burdened the lines as millions dialed up the Internet. The T-4 lines were humming as processing centers all over New York frantically transmitted data to other sites for safekeeping. An equal amount was coming into the city, pushing the capacity of myriad systems to the limit.

Adrian seemed to be pissed off, which was no surprise to Doc. Lately, the kid had started wearing a motorman's uniform and had taken his identification with the subway to an extreme. He thought of it as his private railroad, and he didn't like the people who ran it. At the moment, all the trains were late, the platforms overcrowded, the system a mess, and he was upset.

“What's the matter now?”

“These idiots,” Adrian said. “They put all these extra trains on, and they're using old equipment that keeps breaking down. I've got five stalls right now.”

“How long have you been sitting there?” Doc asked. “When did you sleep last?”

“I don't remember.”

“Why don't you take a nap, Adrian?”

“No way. Fuck that. Leave me alone.”

Doc gave him a pat on the back and sat down next to Judd in front of the big TV in the lounge.

“Who's turn is it now?” Doc asked.

“Deutschland,” Judd said. “Germany got creamed. Everything in the East went down and took Berlin with it. Some of the West has power, but they shut down all the nuclear plants.”

“Poland?”

“Gone.”

“Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria?”

“Gone. In Budapest they had seven planes in the air when the air traffic control radars crashed. Six got down, but the pilot of the last one lost it on the runway and hit two of the others. How are things outside?”

“Bizarre, as expected. How are things here?” Doc gestured toward the cubicles.

“Tense, as expected.”

“And you? How are you?” Doc asked.

“It ain't the end of the world, y'know,” Judd said. “Just the end of a lot of software that was already dead but didn't know it.”

“You got that right, pal.”

On television the same reporter from Berlin was still standing in Freidrichstrasse in a pool of light generated by the network truck. The hiss and boom of fireworks peppered his commentary as he breathlessly described the bedlam around him.

“People just don't know what to do. Berlin is always rowdy on New Year's Eve. People fire off illegal fireworks and illegal firearms, but I think just now everyone who was hoarding firecrackers has set them off. The noise is deafening. People are running—I don't know to or from what—and I have no idea of the situation beyond what I can actually see, which isn't much. I understand the phones are working in some places and not in others. Apparently, the power outage occurred because the old power plants in the sector that was once East Berlin went down only a few seconds after midnight. I've been told the software in the computers in those old plants was pirated American software, but I can't verify that. Communications are very, very bad right now. This is Alexis Kosigian, reporting for CNN from Berlin.”

The network went to a commercial for United Airlines, which Doc thought ironic since not a single United plane was in the air. Judd flipped to CBS, and a shot of the vast plaza in front of Saint Peter's Cathedral in Rome filled the screen. Hundreds of thousands held candles in a moment of silent prayer. A light rain was falling on Vatican City, and the people were bundled up against the cold. A tremendous feeling of deep spirituality welled up from the television, and for once the commentator was quiet. After the chaos of Berlin, the silence was sobering.

The camera slowly panned up the façade of Saint Peter's to the balcony. Pope John Paul II, adorned in white vestments and surrounded by cardinals in red, approached the rostrum. Swiss Guards stood hard by, pikes in hand, ready to protect His Holiness from harm.

The director cut to a close-up as the Pope raised his arms to deliver a benediction in Italian with a disembodied voiceover in English.

“As we enter the Third Millennium of the Christian era…”

John Paul II suddenly dropped his arms with a quizzical look on his face. Behind him, one of the cardinals fell backward, clutching his throat. Shouts tumbled from the balcony and the voice of the commentator burst from the speakers.

“There's a sudden commotion on the balcony of Saint Peter's, ladies and gentlemen, and I don't know exactly what happened. Just a moment, I'm hearing from the pool reporter on the balcony that Cardinal De Lignière of France has been shot. He was standing just behind John Paul and slightly to the right. I'm assuming that someone has tried to assassinate the Pope and missed. I didn't hear a shot. I don't think anyone heard a shot. This is a terrible, terrible thing that's happened here in Rome. Now medical people are bending over the cardinal and His Holiness is administering the last rites. This has all happened in a matter of seconds. From the pool reporter I'm hearing the cardinal is dead. Cardinal De Lignière of Lyons is dead. The front of the balcony is obscured by a line of Swiss Guards…”

“Holy shit,” Judd exclaimed. “I can't fucking believe it.”

Carolyn and Ronnie came running from across the room. “What happened? What happened?”

“Somebody took a shot at the Pope,” Judd said.

“Jesus,” Carolyn said, shaking her head in horrified wonder.

“They missed. They killed somebody else.”

“Change the channel,” Doc suggested. “Maybe somebody else knows more.”

Judd flipped through the channels, almost all of which had instantly gone to Rome.

“Over a billion people have seen this on television…”

“One of the tightest security systems in the world seems to have been penetrated…”

“Of all the unexpected things on a momentous day…”

“The Pope is struggling with the Swiss Guards…”

“People are looking up at the roofs of the buildings on the far side of the square…”

Bo walked in, looked at the TV for a few seconds, shook his head, and went back to his screens.

Doc's cellphone rang and he answered.

“Doc? This is Jody Maxwell. Where are you? I need to talk to you.”

“Where are you, Jody?”

“I'm standing outside your office.”

“I'll be right there.”

12

Jody was sitting on the corridor floor, a puddle of woe, blowing a defiant plume of menthol at the smoke detector.

“There she is,” Doc quipped. “Ms. Tough As Nails.”

“Hi, Doc.”

Her voice was small but vibrant, laden with emotions almost out of control. In the distance, barely audible, a clarinet solo from Battery Park cut through the night, echoing a mournful song of the city.

He squatted down beside her and placed his hand on her shoulder. “You look like you could use a drink.”

“You know,” she said, lapsing into the nasal Long Island accent of her childhood, “I like my job. I wanted this job. This place is crazy, but I like it here. Donald is an asshole, but he's our asshole, you know what I mean? I can tell him when he's full of shit, which is every day. If I did that with any other boss in this town, I'd be fired. And you, you're not like anybody I ever met. You're—I don't know what, but you make this place human.” She crushed her cigarette into the carpet, lit another and asked, “Am I going to have a job on Tuesday morning?”

“Sure. Why do you ask?”

“Will this company even exist? People are freezing in Warsaw. My grandfather came from Warsaw. What I'm trying to say is that the world may not exist.”

“Hey,” Doc said, “a fella just told me it's not the end of the world, it just seems that way. Look on the bright side. It can only happen once, like bubonic plague. It either kills you, or you're immune.”

“You're such a joker, always with the smart remark.”

“That bother you?”

“No, I s'pose not.”

“I'm glad you see it that way,” he said. “Folks are gonna need a few jokes tomorrow. People can be amazingly inventive during a crisis. That's how computers got invented in the first place, during the Second World War, and what's happening today is a war. Wars end. Even the Hundred Years War ended. France won. England lost.”

Doc wagged his eyebrows and grinned.

“I didn't sign up for a war,” she said.

“Nobody did, but we got one anyway. Heard the latest?” Doc asked. “Someone tried to kill the Pope.”

She gasped. “No. Where? In Rome?”

“In Saint Peter's Square with a million people assembled for a millennium service and half the world watching on TV. The half that still has TV.”

“Is he all right?”

“Yeah, but someone else was killed. A cardinal.”

“Oh, Christ, just what the world needs today. Why?”

“We'll probably never know. C'mon.” He helped her to her feet, unlocked the door to his office, went directly to the liquor cabinet and poured her a vodka.

“Thanks.”

“Have a seat.”

“Thanks.”

“You said you needed to talk, Jody, so what's on your mind? The big world crisis or something else?”

“Something else.”

“Yeah?”