Nemesis (43 page)

He paused again. Webb took that as a cue. “Jimmy, I’ll pay you a thousand pounds for a successful penetration.”

The man’s bloodshot eyes widened, and alarm flickered over his face. “You’re intae somethin heavy here.”

Webb nodded. In the confines of the taxi, a sour, unwashed smell was quickly building up.

“It’s your business why ye want in, I guess. Okay let me think.” The man was silent for a minute. Webb looked out at the congealed traffic. Then Judge Dredd was saying, “These high security places sometimes have a soft underbelly. They rely on outside systems like suppliers, research labs, civilian phone networks and so on. Somebody in Argentina tunnelled into Los Alamos via a legitimate university connection. It
might be worth a try. But even when you get the password file you still have another problem.”

Webb waited.

“The passwords are encrypted. So you have to run a cracker on it.”

“You mean a decryption package?”

A pained expression crossed the Judge’s face. “You cannae decrypt a password once it’s encoded, not in Unix. It’s a oneway system. However what you can do is run a dictionary file. What this does is apply the encryption routine to thousands of words, crap like Fred and Barney high on the list. You end up with millions of possibilities for thousands of words. It compares this encrypted output with the encrypted passwords in the file. When it finds a match, bingo, ye’ve got the password.”

The taxi had cleared Central London and was moving briskly; signs for Hounslow, Staines and the airport were appearing at intervals. The taxi was reeking of unwashed body.

Webb knew that with his next words he would be in grave breach of the Official Secrets Act; but he saw no alternative. “Jimmy, it’s important that you keep quiet about this. I have to know the source of messages going in to a place called Eagle Peak Observatory in Arizona. There’s a telescope in Tenerife. It can be controlled remotely through an intermediate node and I can give you the PIN numbers to do it. When I operate it from Arizona I see signals which look as if they come from the Tenerife telescope. I need to know whether they really do. I suspect they don’t.”

Webb pulled a fat brown envelope from his backpack, keeping it out of sight of the driver’s rear view. The man stared incredulously at it.

Jimmy asked, “Where is this intermediate node?”

“The Physics Department, Keble Road, Oxford University.”

“And where does the military come intae it?”

“I suspect the signals really originate from the Sandia Laboratory.”

“You don’t mean yon Teraflop?”

“I do. Can’t you do it?”

“In thirty-six hours? It’s a megachallenge, no question.”

Webb slipped the envelope over. Judge Dredd riffled the banknotes as if he couldn’t believe it, and slipped it into a pocket. The smell was turning into a stench and Webb wondered when Judge Dredd had last had a bath.

“But it might be done. I’ll no be able to penetrate the whole Teraflop Box, yon iron’s too big for that. But with root access I could install a packet sniffer at some network switch. A desktop PC will do. You just sit quietly watching the data and biding your time. Like a crocodile watching the comings and goings on a river bank. If you keep seeing the same sequence of signals near the start of a message you might be on to a password. Then you pounce. Once you’re in, you get out before anyone even notices. But you hide away a few lines of code that lets you get in the back door again whenever you feel like it.”

“Jimmy, I don’t care how you do it, so long as it’s done surreptitiously,” said Webb.

“This is a big job, ye appreciate. If I cannae hack it in time I might get the Angels of Doom on to it. Surreptitious-like. They say their latest SATAN scripts will find holes in almost anything.”

Webb scribbled down a set of numbers. “I’ll call you at midnight tomorrow. I’ll see you get the other half within a week.”

At the airport, Judge Dredd directed the taxi back home without stepping out, and Webb made his way through the crowds to Terminal One, gulping fresh air and feeling like Klaus Fuchs.

Shortly after Webb’s Jumbo had hauled itself into the air, an unknown, but clearly disguised, man entered the secure London office of Spink & Son wheeling a tartan shopping
trolley and carrying a brown paper bag filled with breakfast rolls and tins of beans. He made a purchase extraordinary even by the standards of that office, paying a fortune in cash in return for gold coins. In the main he bought the “old” sovereigns, with 0.2354 of a Troy ounce of pure gold. These he weighed in heaps of ten on his own scales, before loading them into the trolley. He then placed the rolls and beans on top of the coins, and wheeled the trolley out on to the street, towards some destination unknown. The transaction took up much of the afternoon. Also that afternoon, Albemarle, Samuel and other coin dealers in the London area likewise found heavy runs on the Krugerrand, the maple leaf, the US Eagle and the Britannia.

And in Zurich and London, the world centres for the exchange of gold, the price of the yellow metal moved imperceptibly upwards. It was the merest nudge, barely detectable above the random tremors of the global market.

The huge aircraft started the big haul and dwindled to a tiny flying insect skimming just above the Atlantic. Webb travelled first class. And while the sun stood still in the sky outside, and air of lethal coldness hurtled past inches from his head, he dined six miles high on smoked salmon and champagne, and he watched Loren and Mastroianni in love, and he worried.

While the tiny insect skimmed over the water, gold kept drifting up; still a whisper all but lost in noise. The exchanges in Hong Kong and Singapore had closed for the night; but clever men and women in London and New York, people who spent their days alert for tiny fluctuations in the jagged curves on their monitor screens, had noticed the trend on their monitors; they worried too, but about different things. But then these markets too closed, and waited for
the Earth to turn, for the sun to rise and pierce the Tokyo smog.

There was a thunderstorm over Newfoundland and congestion in the air over JFK, and the turbulence played with the huge aircraft like a cat with a mouse. At each bump Webb, in a state of terror, peered backwards into the dark; he could just make out the engine trying to shake itself loose from the flapping wing. He tried not to weep with relief when the Jumbo landed smoothly and taxied off the runway. A tired lady with a bright floral display in her lapel kept saying “Welcome to New York” to the ragged passengers pouring into Customs & Immigration. Webb sat worn out on a plastic seat while world travellers were whisked in limousines to Manhattan or took the helicopter, still flying in this weather, to East 60th Street.

An hour passed before a tall Indian appeared, black hair sweeping down his shoulders. “Mister Fish? Mexico bound? Would you follow me, please?”

Almost past caring, he followed the Indian on to a walkway and into the dark New York night. The air was bitter outside the terminal and snow was fluttering down.

“I’m Free Spirit,” said the man, ushering Webb into a Cadillac. “It don’t mean free liquor either, it’s my tribal name and I’m proud of it.”

“Right on,” Webb said.

Free Spirit stopped to pick up an old woman who should have been meeting her son at St. Louis by now are you a stranded passenger too, four boys they have and still trying for a girl he should cut it off and pickle it if you ask me you did say you’re a stranded passenger? Webb tried to nod in the right places.

The car stopped outside the Plantation Hotel and the clerk, a balding man of about sixty, gave the woman a ground floor room and took Webb up to the first floor. The
man hovered. Webb told him he had no dollars. The man said he took the other stuff too. Webb said he didn’t have any of that either and the clerk left shaking his head. Webb locked the door, had a warm shower and collapsed into bed.

He lay in the semi-dark and listened to the night sounds of New York and the elevator disgorging the late-night arrivals.

He worried because something didn’t fit. He was still worrying when he drifted into a confused, restless, dream-filled sleep.

While Webb slept, the quiet little run on gold continued, a trickle slowly gaining strength. More ominously, the dollar began to drift down against other currencies.

The meridian drifted at a thousand miles an hour across the Pacific, the vast, empty, watery hemisphere of the planet. Twelve thousand miles across the ocean, dawn touched the Sea of Okhotsk and the northernmost islands of Japan. An hour later the sun pierced the morning fog over Tokyo; an hour later again and Singapore awoke; and once again clever people, this time in glass-fronted towers overlooking Kowloon and Clearwater Bay, began to worry. They made precautionary moves.

The dollar’s drift became a slide.

Just before 1030 GMT, in London, three taxis drew up in New Court, a small courtyard in a narrow street close to the Bank of England. Three men emerged from the taxis and, as they entered the offices of N.M. Rothschild, were joined by a fourth man arriving on foot from the direction of the Bank tube station. As happened every morning at this hour, they were ushered into a small, quiet, wood-panelled office. The walls were lined with portraits of past monarchs, like hunting trophies: a reminder that, historically, even kings had needed the moneylenders. Each man had a desk on which was a telephone and a small Union Jack. The chairman of Rothschild’s was already seated, and he welcomed the
arrivals with a nod; it was a routine repeated twice daily, at 10:30 a.m. and 3 p.m.

The five constituted an inner circle of the London Bullion Market Association. They traded gold between themselves without ever physically exchanging the yellow metal. On their word, the twice-daily “fixing” of the price of gold, the value of gold was decided, and so the wealth of the world’s central banks, holding vast gold reserves, was determined.

The chairman of Rothschild’s (N.M. Rothschild, founded in 1804) opened the proceedings. He spoke in a soft, colourless voice, almost a monotone: here, gold and money, the most emotionally charged subjects known to man, were traded in an atmosphere from which all passion was ruthlessly expunged. “Gentlemen, we are faced with an extraordinary situation. My office informs me that there has been a sharp upwards movement in bullion within the last few hours.”

The man from the Standard Chartered Bank (a subsidiary of Mocatta and Goldsmid, founded 1684) nodded. “It’s small, but quite distinct. However, my office can find no reason for it.”

There were murmurs of assent. The man from Montagu Precious Metals (Samuel Montagu, a relative newcomer, having been founded in 1853) tapped a folder in front of him. “It is very mysterious. My buying orders from our Middle East offices alone amount to nearly a billion dollars at last night’s Comex rate.”

The man from Deutsche Bank Sharps Pixley (Sharps, founded 1750 and merged with Pixley in 1852) raised an eyebrow. “But what about security? Can you physically export so much gold from London to Saudi?”

Rothschild’s gave Sharps Pixley a disapproving look: the tone of surprise had been a tad too strong, too colourful, for this office.

The man from the Republic National Bank of New York spoke in a measured, cultured American accent. “My office feels that this is being driven by a small number of individuals
who, for whatever reason, are trying to capture as much of the private gold market as they can. The market has spotted this and is responding irrationally.”

“We must not have panic,” Deutsche Bank Sharps Pixley said, looking worried.

Rothschild’s almost smiled. “Panic can be profitable. As one of my predecessors said, the time to buy is when blood is running in the streets.”

And with what passed for social chit-chat over, the five began the serious business of fixing the price of gold, of resolving the age-old tension between buyer and seller. Each man had a portfolio before him, and referred constantly to his office through the telephone. As the prices began to converge, each dealer lowered his little flag to indicate agreement with the fixing price. The man from New York was the last to agree. The flight from the dollar would be catastrophic, but the force of the market was overwhelming. As soon as he had lowered his flag, a messenger was summoned and the price of gold was published worldwide. Overnight, it had almost doubled.

Immediately after the Rothschild’s morning session, encrypted information began to flow along the Highway from Midland Global Markets to the offices of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, whose assets under management were four hundred billion dollars. Midland Global owned the Corporation and four hundred billion dollars was a lot of responsibility. The Corporation began to offload its derivatives market, quietly tried to go short on the Nikkei.

For South Africa, the world’s largest gold producer, the news was good. Barclays de Zoete Wedd contacted their owners, Barclays Bank, for instructions, but the message was already on its way from London: somebody knows something, thinks the future is bad news. Some unspecified calamity may be on the way; maybe the greenhouse is beginning to run, or the Arctic ice cap is about to break off. Whatever. So reduce exposure to the future; get out of leveraged
currency swaps. And do it quietly, always quietly. No panic selling.

The Nikkei 225 Index faltered. By the close of day it had begun to plunge. On the Square Mile, the Bank of England raised interest rates, and raised them again, but the slide was becoming uncontrollable, the strain on currencies intolerable.

As the sun moved round, rumours began to sweep the markets. Whatever the calamity, somebody knew it was going to hit the States; maybe the big one was about to hit San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Whatever.

Panic. The slide on shares and currencies, now out of control, accelerated towards a precipice. Gold, the one certainty in an uncertain world, went stratospheric.

All this without knowledge of the nature of the impending disaster. But in the early hours of the morning, Eastern Standard Time, while Webb tossed and turned in a stifling hotel room, that information reached the offices of the
New York Times
.