The Zero Hour (44 page)

“Will you just goddam
do
it?” Ken bellowed. “Send out a message to all users—”

“Look, you can’t just shut down the whole goddam bank like that! You think—”

“Oh, God. Oh, Jesus God. Forget it.”

“What are you—?”

Ken pointed at his monitor. He thrummed the keys, but the screen remained frozen. He ran a finger along the row of keys, then pressed his entire hand onto the keyboard, but nothing appeared on the screen. “It’s too late.” Ken said, his voice shaking. “
Shit!
I don’t know if it was timed to go off now, or it got activated by my taking a look at it.”

The network administrator turned to a monitor at the adjoining workstation and banged at the keys, but it too was frozen. Shouts began to rise from the adjoining desks, until the entire computer center was chaos. People were running down aisles; the place had gone mad.

“Frank!” someone shouted, running toward the administrator. “We got a freeze-up!”

“
What the hell is going on
?” the man thundered to the enormous room.

Ken replied, his voice now almost inaudible: “You got yourselves a virus that’s taking over the whole system, the whole bank. A serious, fucking, monster virus.”

*   *   *

Racing for a taxi, Ken Alton nearly stumbled twice on his way out of the Manhattan Bank Building’s atrium. It was raining with such force the rain seemed to be coming up from the steaming pavement. It was morning, but the sky was dark with storm clouds.

He didn’t have an umbrella, of course, and his clothes were totally soaked through. A cab slowed down for him. Then a middle-aged woman darted in front of him and flung herself into the cab’s backseat. He called her a colorful name, but the slamming of the door kept her from hearing him.

Several stolen cabs later—damned New Yorkers get aggressive when it gets wet, he thought—he sat cocooned in the stifling warmth of a taxi hurtling toward Thirty-seventh Street. He leaned back and tried to gather his thoughts.

A virus. A goddam polymorphic computer virus. But what kind of virus was it? What was its intent? A practical joke—to gum up the works for a day or so? Or something more sinister—to wipe out all records of the second-largest bank in the country?

The idea of a computer virus—a piece of software that reproduces itself endlessly, spreading from computer to computer, copying itself ad infinitum—was relatively recent. There was the Internet Worm in 1988, the Columbus Day virus in 1989, the Michelangelo virus in 1992.

But how had it gotten in? A virus can be planted by any number of means. Someone inside the bank could have done it, or someone from the outside who had somehow gained access to the bank’s computer facilities. Or an outside phone link. Or an infected diskette. There was a famous story, famous at least among computer types, about a guy who rented a plush office space in London, pretending to be a software company. He persuaded a major PC magazine in Europe to attach a free diskette to copies of the magazine. The diskette contained an AIDS questionnaire as a public service: you popped it into your computer, and the program asked you a series of dopey questions and then gave you an AIDS “risk assessment.”

But it also did something else to your computer. It sent a virus burrowing its way into your machine that, after a certain number of reboots, hid all your files and flashed a bill. The bill directed the by now panicked users to send a sum of money to a post office box in Panama in exchange for a code that would unlock their files. The extortion scheme would have worked had some very smart hackers not broken the code and solved the virus.

Ken knew several people who were far more expert in the subject than he. As soon as he got to headquarters, he would have to figure out a way to send this virus on to his friends without infecting their systems, so they could examine it.

But this goddam cab was taking fucking forever. He took out his cellular phone, and he punched out Sarah’s number.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE

Most people fly on jets blissfully unaware of what keeps them aloft. So too do princes of capitalism wheel and deal in vast, inconceivable sums of money, ignorant of how their money travels magically from New York to Hong Kong in seconds. As long as the machinery works, that’s all that counts.

But Malcolm Dyson had always been a get-under-the-hood-and-fix-it kind of guy. He knew how the fuel systems and the drive trains of all his cars worked.

He knew, too, the machinery of capitalism, knew how incredibly fragile it was, knew the precise location of its soft underbelly. He worked a long day in his library at Arcadia, and then pressed a button on his desk that pulsed an infrared beam at the Louis XIV armoire in a niche to his right. A panel slid open with a mechanical whir and the television came on: CNN, the top of the hour, the world news.

The announcer, a handsome young man with immaculately parted dark hair and sincere dark eyes, said good evening and read the lead story off his TelePrompTer.

“A computer virus has paralyzed the operations of America’s second-largest bank,” he said. “A spokesman at Manhattan Bank said that bank officials had no idea how the virus infected the bank’s computer system, but they believe it was the result of a deliberate attack by computer ‘hackers,’ or ‘phreakers.’”

A graphic appeared next to the announcer’s head, a photograph of the sleek world-famous Manhattan Bank Building. He said, “Whatever the source, Manhattan Bank chairman Warren Elkind announced that the multinational bank was forced to close its doors at eleven o’clock Eastern Standard Time this morning, perhaps forever.”

Dyson shifted slightly in his wheelchair.

“The bank’s computers went haywire this morning, with all terminals freezing up. It was later discovered that a malfunction in the bank’s electronic payments system caused the withdrawal of all of Manhattan Bank’s assets, estimated at over two hundred billion dollars globally, and transferred as-yet-undetermined, enormous sums of money to banks around the world—estimated at over four hundred and thirty
billion
dollars, far more than the assets in the bank’s possession.

“The consequences for the American economy are, according to the Federal Reserve chairman, incalculable. We have two reports now, from Washington, where the White House is said to be ‘gravely concerned’ as this disaster unfolds, but first from New York City, where an estimated three million small investors and bank depositors have had their entire life savings wiped out.”

Then there was videotape footage of desperate crowds storming Manhattan Bank branch offices in Bedford-Stuyvesant and the Bronx. Dyson took a cigar from the humidor on his desk and snipped its end with intense concentration, muttering, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet, folks.”

CHAPTER EIGHTY

Warren Elkind’s inner office was chaos. His desk phone rang nonstop; young men and women rushed in and out with messages. It was crisis mode. His bank was crashing and burning. Sarah stood at his office door, still.

“Where the hell have you been?” Elkind shouted to her across the room. “This fucking computer virus, or whatever the hell it is, has emptied the bank’s coffers, down to the last penny, and now they’re telling me they’re never going to unwind this mess—”

“So now you want to talk.”

“Christ! All right, I want everyone out of here. Everyone!”

When the office was cleared out, Sarah came closer. “When you called me, you mentioned Malcolm Dyson. You think he’s behind this?”

“How the hell do I know? I’m saying it’s a possibility.”

“There’s nothing in your FBI file about Malcolm Dyson.”

“It’s sealed, for God’s sake!”

“What’s sealed?”

“The scumbag probably blames me. He was indicted in the biggest insider-trading scandal ever to hit Wall Street, which is why he went fugitive, but he probably blames me. Thinks he’d still be a U.S. citizen, free and clear and living in Westchester, if I hadn’t turned him in.”

Sarah said, coming still closer: “Did you turn him in?”

“It wasn’t exactly that way,” Elkind said.

“You were the witness that turned him in,” Sarah said. “You were the only one who knew. You made the case.”

“He needed the bank’s help in financing an immense stock buyout, and he offered to cut me in. I refused. I’m a banker, not a kamikaze pilot.”

“You turned him in to the SEC,” Sarah prompted.

“Not quite so simple.”

“Nothing ever is.”

“After the SEC got on to him, he invited me to lunch at the Harvard Club. He wanted to make sure we ‘got our stories straight’—i.e., that I’d lie for him. By then I’d agreed to cooperate with the SEC. The SEC investigator wired me. He wanted to tape a tiny microphone and battery pack to my undershirt, but I wasn’t wearing any, and they didn’t want to tape it to my skin. So the guy offered me his undershirt to wear! I told him, look, I don’t wear polyester blends. But I wore the guy’s undershirt anyway. They found an empty supply closet next to the dining room and sat there while I broadcast to the tape recorder. I was terrified Dyson would find out.”

“I guess he eventually did. He didn’t threaten you or anything?”

“No. The one time I was convinced he’d go ballistic, and go after me, was when he was almost killed by the feds, in a botched shootout. I didn’t go out in public for weeks, let me tell you.”

“When was that?”

“The date, you mean?”

“Right.”

“I’ll never forget it. It was the day of my wife’s birthday—we were at ‘21’ celebrating, and they brought a phone to the table. It was one of my clients in Europe. He told me Malcolm Dyson had been fired on by U.S. marshals in an ambush in Monaco, that his wife and daughter had been killed, and that he’d been wounded. That he’d probably be paralyzed for life. I remember thinking, shit, I wish they’d gotten him too. When you strike at a king, you must kill him, as the saying goes. This was going to be one guy out for revenge. That was June twenty-sixth.”

“That’s tomorrow.”

June 26 was also the day when, according to the second telephone intercept, the final payment was scheduled to be made to a Panamanian bank.

“Excuse me,” Sarah said. “I’ve got to get going.”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE

“I want you to contact the Justice Department,” Sarah told Vigiani, “and get a list of all known employees, colleagues, associates, and friends of Malcolm Dyson, who might be located in Switzerland. Then get in touch with NSA and have them pull up voice samples of any of those people they have in their archives. And have them try to do a voice match with the two voices in the intercepted phone conversation.”

There was a knock on the door to Sarah’s office. Roth pushed it open, saw that Sarah was meeting with Vigiani, but barreled ahead anyway: “Listen, Sarah, I got a call—”

“Roth,” Sarah said curtly, “I’m in a meeting.”

“Yeah, well, you might want to listen to this. We just got a call on the twenty-four-hour line from the police in Mount Kisco, New York. Responding to that NCIC lookout we put out.”

Sarah looked up. “Yes?”

“A couple of hours ago they got a theft report from an excavation company out there. One thousand pounds of C-4 plastic explosive was stolen from its warehouse last night.”

Sarah stared. “How much?”

“A thousand pounds.”

“Holy shit,” she said.

*   *   *

“So what you’re telling me,” Assistant Director Joseph Walsh sputtered, “is that you don’t know crap.”

“No, sir,” the FBI explosives analyst replied, coughing nervously into a loose fist. “I’m telling you we can only ascertain broad generalities.”

Walsh was intimidating enough in manner. He did not need to plant his burly six-foot-seven-inch frame next to the diminutive explosives expert, towering over him, as he was doing now. Sarah and Harry Whitman, the chief of the Joint Terrorist Task Force, watched the interplay with grim fascination.

“Jesus Christ,” Walsh thundered. “We have the fucking fusing mechanism. We know a thousand pounds of C-4 has been stolen. What else do you want? A blueprint and a wiring diagram? A guided fucking tour?”

But the explosives expert, a small and precise man named Cameron Crowley with a graying crew cut and a pinched pink face, was not put off quite so easily. He had done excellent work after the World Trade Center bomb and Oklahoma City, and everyone in Walsh’s office knew it. On reputation alone he could coast. “Let me tell you exactly what we do know,” he said, “and what we
don’t
know. We know a thousand pounds of C-4 may—I repeat,
may
—be part of this bomb. We don’t know if the theft of this plastic is a coincidence, or whether it was done by, uh, Baumann.”

“Fair enough,” Sarah put in to encourage the man.

“But assuming Baumann stole it, we don’t know if he’s planning one bomb or a series of bombs. We don’t know if he’s planning to use all of the thousand pounds in one bomb. That’s a hell of a lot of explosive power.”

“What’s a ‘hell of a lot’?” asked Walsh, as he pivoted to return to his desk.

The expert sighed with frustration. “Well, don’t forget, it only took one pound of plastic to bring down Pan Am 103. Four hundred grams, actually. A thousand pounds can certainly do a lot more damage than was done in TRADEBOM. That wasn’t even dynamite—it was a witches’ brew of ammonium nitrate and all sorts of other stuff—but it blew out a six-story hole in the tower. It had an explosive force equivalent to over a thousand pounds of TNT.”

He explained that on the table of relative destructiveness as an air-blast explosive, TNT is 1.0, ammonium nitrate is .42, dynamite can be anywhere from .6 to .9, and C-4, Semtex, and British PE-4 all have a value of 1.3 or 1.35. “So,” he concluded, “weight for weight, C-4 is about a third more powerful than TNT.”

“Can it bring down a building?” Walsh asked impatiently.

“Yes. Some buildings yes, some no. Not a huge building like the World Trade Center.” He knew there had been four studies done on the engineering aspects of the World Trade Center complex, which determined based on vibration analysis that the World Trade Center buildings could not be knocked down by any bomb short of a nuke. “In any case, it depends on a whole lot of factors.”