I had to do something, at once.
“Peter-Paul,” I said nicely, “I’m not as close to Pearl as you seem to think, but it’s possible I might think of a way to entice her to leave your department. What would you say if I told you I knew a job she’d jump at in a minute?”
“I’d be forever grateful, Banks—your devoted slave.”
“I’ll do what I can,” I assured him, wondering how the hell I was going to pull this one off. “But if I succeed, you’ll have to stop plotting with Kiwi against me. Stop this war between our departments, at least until I finish this project. And you can’t have Tavish back till then, either—is that understood?”
“Absolutely,” he said with sincerity. “Tavish was the last thing on my mind.”
Stuff it up your deviated septum, I thought. But aloud, I said, “I trust you.”
Right after lunch, I hauled Tavish into my office. He was looking rather glum.
“I want you to slap tracers on all passwords that are accessing any of our programs or files,” I told him. “Somehow, Kiwi and Karp have learned what we’re up to, and that Pearl’s in on it, too. If they haven’t bribed someone on the quality team, they may actually be tracking our activities on the system itself.”
“At once,” Tavish agreed, “but first you should know that Kiwi’s been after me—he took me to lunch today.”
I stopped in my tracks. “Divide and conquer, it seems,” I told him. “I had lunch with your dear friend Karp. He wanted a favor—what did Kiwi want?”
“He offered me a job—offered is not the right word—he threatened me.”
“Threatened you?” I was flabbergasted. “What do you mean by that?”
“The moment that we succeed in violating a single system or file, Lawrence expects us to make a formal report on all our activities—then our group will be disbanded at once. Kiwi says I can come to work for him. The alternative is to go back to Karp.”
“Why not stay with me, on my next project?” I suggested, trying to calm him down.
“You aren’t going to have a next project,” he informed me. “They’ve really got their knickers in a twist; they plan to get rid of you for good this time—and Pearl along with you.”
Great. Those two bozos actually expected me to hand Pearl over to them as a parting gift. And clearly, Lawrence was behind it, too—what sleaze. Why did being a bastard seem a prerequisite for banking?
“As a matter of fact,” I told Tavish, “I do have another project up my sleeve. I told you about my wager with Dr. Zoltan Tor, but I never mentioned the stakes.”
“I wish I’d never heard of that dreadful bet,” said Tavish grimly, his hand on the door. “Who cares what the stakes are? They’re far too high for me. I’ll wind up in prison, or deported as an undesirable alien, and all because I tried to do something as noble and honorable as robbing a bank!”
“You can drop out of this anytime you like,” I assured him. “But I still have a bet, which amounts to this: If Tor loses, he’ll get me back that job at the Fed that Kiwi blackballed me for. But if I lose, I must work a year directly for Dr. Tor.”
“Work for Dr. Tor?” Tavish brightened. “That’d hardly seem to me like losing a bet. If I could even meet him—shake his hand, talk to him awhile—I’d feel I’d died and gone to heaven. I’ve been wanting to ask, since you know him so well, whether one day that might be arranged.”
“I can tell you the very day,” I assured him. “It will be the day you get out there and crack that goddamned code.”
At five, Pearl was in my office, pacing like a panther.
“So then what did he say?” she fumed.
“He asked me to get rid of you—find you another job.”
“Where?”
“In Siberia—why should he care? He said you drove him crazy filling out forms, that you even followed him to the men’s room!”
“That’s a blatant lie!” she cried. “Maybe I’ve waited outside the men’s room once or twice.…”
“You have to lay off.” I laughed. “I agreed to get you away from Karp, and I must. It’s only for a little while, but I can’t afford to risk Karp’s hysteria—my time’s running short. If we don’t get into that system tonight, I’ve lost the bet, and Tor will guess it at once. Maybe I’d still be able to move some money around—show up a few Karps and Kiwis, as I’d first imagined. But the whole bank’s breathing down my neck now. It won’t take long for them to figure out the rest—and when they do, I’d better be able to trump their ace, or clean up and get out of town.”
“Tonight?” said Pearl. “Honey, I can’t believe this. It’s been a few weeks—a month at most. Somehow, till this moment, it seemed like a game to me. But you’re really going to do it—aren’t you?”
“You bet,” I told her, then winced at my choice of words.
It was this stupid, bloody bet that, in less than a month, had plunged me into the mess I was in now. How had Tor managed all this, in one short day in New York? A month ago, I was the highest woman executive at the biggest bank in the world. I’d spent a lifetime learning banking, I had a twelve-year track record in technology, and the promise of an even more successful career ahead.
By midnight tonight I’d either be robbing a bank or on a plane to New York to sign myself up for what seemed eternal bondage. All thanks to Tor, who’d fanned my spark of revenge into an international vendetta. Good Lord, didn’t I ever learn?
Just then, there was a soft tap at my office door. The lights were off beyond the glass—as they had been since three, when the bank shut down for the holiday.
Pearl and I peered at the shadowy form hovering outside.
“What should we say I’m doing here, if it’s Karp?” asked Pearl in hushed voice.
“We’re discussing your new job,” I whispered back.
She got up and opened the door. Tavish stood there, his arms filled with computer printout. He stalked across the room and spilled the massive pile onto my desk. Even looking at it from upside down, I knew what it was, and my heart skipped a beat.
“We’ve broken the test-key encryption, madame,” he said. “We’ll set up those bank accounts now. I believe we can expect some major deposits coming into them tonight.”
“Kismet,” I said with a grin as Pearl and I slapped hands.
I only hoped we weren’t going to be too late.
I phoned the florist and ordered the flowers—all white—lilies, chrysanthemums, narcissus, baby’s breath, white lilacs, and branches of cherry—a month’s supply. The florist was floored.
I rarely asked people to my home, because it was my own escape, the cloudlike region where I went to decompress. But on this evening, I decided it would be comfier for Pearl and Tavish and me to be here than to stay in a darkened data center eating cold pizza—probably safer, too, from the standpoint of possible detection.
I called the liquor store, too, and ordered the chilled champagne—and the Szechuan deli, where I selected by phone all the specials on Mr. Hsu’s daily list.
Arriving home, I saw that the doorman had already left the wine, in its crate of dry ice, outside my door. Mr. Hsu was sitting there beside the stacked flower boxes, on the top step.
“Madame True,” he said, rising to greet me. “I bring these foods because I am on my way home just now.”
“Mr. Hsu, will you stay for a glass of champagne?” I asked, hauling the flowers inside as he followed with boxes of food.
“No, I must return home, my wife is expecting me. But I wish to know one thing before I depart—how many persons will you expect to dine with you this evening?”
“Two others. Why do you ask?”
“It is just as I told my wife: Madame True always orders for thirty—even if there are only three. My wife did not believe me, foolish woman. One day when you come to my restaurant, you must explain to her your philosophy. It is very American.”
“You mean, better to have too much than too little?” I said.
“Yes. I
like this American philosophy very much. One day, it will make me a very rich man.”
I didn’t explain to Mr. Hsu that all computer types are compulsive “leftover” junkies, but left him to bask in his capitalist dream. Mr. Hsu helped me carry the champagne crate inside, then took his leave.
I barely had time to open and arrange the flowers, put away the champagne, pop the food into dishes to warm in the oven, and bathe and change. I’d powdered and put on cologne and pulled on my floppy cashmere sweater just as the doorbell rang.
Pearl arrived in a flamingo-colored angora sweater that wrapped like a bathrobe, and Tavish in a T-shirt to match—surely picked out by Pearl. It read “Real Men Eat Beluga Caviar.”
We broke out the champagne, settling the bottle in the silver icer beside the coffee table, and flopped down on cushions to feed and relax in preparation for the night’s computer crunch.
“Sitting on top of the world like this, surrounded by flowers and champagne,” Pearl commented, “it makes me feel everything else—the bank, my awful career, that creep Karp—they’re all unreal.”
“But thanks to modern technology,” said Tavish, “they’re only a phone call away.”
That was the phone call that was going to change my life, I thought.
At nine, we were gathered around the big lacquered table in my study, Tavish tapping away, a determined expression on his face. Pearl and I, weary with exhaustion and a bit too much champagne, were now drinking strong black coffee and checking his work from time to time.
“This computer—Charles Babbage, is it?—he has some personality.” Tavish grinned from behind the terminal. “He’s just told me he expects to be paid overtime for this job.”
I’d worked out a deal with the Bobbsey Twins, to keep Charles up late tonight so we could “patch through” his mailing list to the bank’s computer and set up our new customer accounts.
The bank got new customers every day, so establishing accounts like these was standard procedure, as long as we’d have a beginning balance to start them off.
And we’d have that money—from the wire transfer system—as soon as our “program changes” were moved from the test system into live operation in production. Since we didn’t know until five o’clock that evening—when Bobby cracked the code—exactly what those new programs would do, it was a rush to get them written, and the authorized paperwork filled out to notify the data center these changes would be coming in tonight.
On the other hand, it was a convenient time of year to be asking for last-minute changes to production systems. There was always a huge queue of things to go into production on every system, just before year-end closing, and the wire transfer system was no exception. I just clumped our programs together with all the others before I left the office. I was sure that long before midnight, the codes would be inside the computer, catching wires and scattering that money through all our accounts.
But at ten o’clock, something went horribly wrong.
Pearl and I were out on the terrace in the late-night fog, calming down from the crazed hysteria of the day. Tavish was inside, wrapping things up. He’d just finished copying the list from New York, and released Charles Babbage to go off to nightly maintenance.
Suddenly, we heard him yell: “Bloody hell! Oh, bloody hell!”
We ran inside, and saw Tavish staring at the terminal screen with wild eyes.
“What’s happened?” I cried, dashing around the table to look at the screen.
Tavish’s voice seemed to reverberate from the back of my brain as I looked hopelessly at the green letters glowing there:
BANK OF THE WORLD TESTING
HAS ENDED FOR THE DAY.
HAVE A VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS
AND A HAPPY HOLIDAY!
“They’ve brought the bloody test system down!” Tavish was nearly screaming. “My bloody programs are sitting out there in the queue—and they’ve brought down the bloody system—two hours early!”
“Shit,” I said, staring numbly at the screen, wondering what in hell to do. I’d never felt so helpless in my life.
“And we were lolling around,” said Pearl, “eating Chinese food and swilling champagne, as if there were nothing but time. What exactly does this mean? What happens now?”
“‘From where you are, you can hear their dreams,’” said Tavish. “‘The dismays and despairs and flight and fall and big seas of their dreams …’”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Pearl, looking at Tavish as if he’d really flipped.
“Dylan Thomas,” said Tavish. “It means our dreams have died—our system has died—our project has died—we have died.”
He rose, and drifted from the room in a vaporlike trance, without glancing at either of us.
“Is this it?” Pearl asked me. “Isn’t there anything we can do?”
“I don’t know,” I told her, still staring at the screen. “I really have no idea.”
It was eleven P.M., and Pearl had just told Tavish she would dump her champagne over his head, if he said “If only we hadn’t …” even one more time.
That was when I got the idea. I knew it was a long shot—a wild-assed piss into the wind was more like it—but I was ready to try anything, rather than staring at walls all night and cursing myself for the next week until I could get on that system again.
“Bobby, can you write object code?” I asked him.
“A little—but it’s hardly a hobby of mine,” he assured me.
“What’s object code?” Pearl wanted to know.
“Machine language,” Tavish told her. “It’s what other programs are compiled into—bits and bytes—executable instructions, orders the machine can understand and carry out.”
“What are you cooking up?” Pearl asked me, but I was still looking at Tavish.
“Could you take the object code from those programs you wrote, and put it right into the live production library—as if it were already compiled and ready to run?”
“Sure, I guess so,” said Tavish with more than a trace of cynicism. “Of course, we’d have to get the operations department to bring down the wire transfer system—which is running right now twenty-four hours a day—and let me get on the machines to do it. But I’m sure they’d be delighted to halt production for us, if we explained we just had to get in there and rob the bank tonight.”
“I didn’t mean that,” I said, knowing that what I did mean was even more farfetched. “What I meant was—if I could get you on the production system right now—could you make the changes while the wire transfer system is still up and running?”
Tavish looked at me and started to laugh.
“You’re joking, of course,” he said.
“Translation please,” said Pearl. “Does this mean the gray flannel mind’s come up with something outré?”
“She’s bonkers, all right,” agreed Tavish. “Those are ‘virtual’ machines down there: they have hundreds of peripheral devices running on-line, all shooting data in and out like gangbusters—and hundreds of partitions open, paging and thrashing at nanosec speed—”
“Hold on,” said Pearl. “I meant a translation into people-friendly English.”
“Basically,” he said with exasperation, “it’s like the Harlem Globetrotters from hell—juggling a million basketballs at once, and all at the speed of light. Going into a machine like that to make changes would be like trying to do brain surgery on a kangaroo while using a stopwatch.”
“A pretty fair description,” I complimented him. “Do you think you can do it, if I can get you on?”
Tavish shook his head, and looked at the floor.
“I’m crazy—but not that crazy,” he told me quietly. “Besides, there’s no way to get on the system from a dial-up terminal like this.”
“I wasn’t suggesting you phone in the changes,” I said with a smile, “I thought we’d install them in person.”
“You mean—inside the machine room itself?” gasped Pearl.
&nb
sp; Tavish leaped to his feet and tossed his napkin to the floor.
“No. No. No—and again no!” he cried. “It’s completely impossible!” He seemed slightly hysterical, and I could certainly see why.
If we made even the slightest error while a complex mass of machines like that was running, the entire system could come crashing down—with that sickening death rattle that gives computer types nightmares. Once you’ve heard it, even a flickering brownout in a supermarket makes you wince. In this case, it would be even worse than crashing a machine—since if we screwed up here, we’d bring down production for the entire worldwide processing of the Bank of the World.
But finally—if something like that happened while we were on premises—we’d be locked deep within the bowels of the data center, inside concentric circles of mantraps and guard posts. We’d be trapped for good and all, with no way out.
“You’re right,” I admitted glumly to Tavish. “I can’t ask something that dangerous of you. I was mad to even think of doing it myself.”
“You’ve been carried away with this wager of yours,” he agreed, calming down a bit and taking a seat. “Of course, if your friend Dr. Tor were here, things might be different. He could certainly do what you’ve asked—he’s written books on the subject.”
Terrific—and I hadn’t bothered to return his message at all. But Tor would hardly have been anxious to jet to the coast in my aid—even if I’d known what aid I was going to need. After all, we were competing, as he loved to point out.
Just then, the phone rang. And though I knew it would be stretching synchronicity too far, I had the oddest feeling who it might be as I nodded to Tavish to pick it up.
He put his hand over the mouthpiece. “Chap by the name of Lobachevski,” he told me. “Says it’s rather urgent.”
I smiled with a grimace, went over and got the phone. It was all over but the shooting now. Tor had somehow sensed from three thousand miles away that he’d won the bet.
“Why, Nikolai Ivanovich,” I said sweetly, “what a joy to hear from you. Haven’t seen any treatises of yours on Euclidean math since—when was it—1850?”