“Eighteen thirty-two, to be precise,” said Tor. “You never returned my call.”
“I’ve been tied up,” I assured him. “In knots—to be precise.”
“If I send you an urgent message, I expect at least the courtesy of an inquiry into my situation. It’s the very least I’d do for you.”
“You didn’t ask for an inquiry. You wanted me to hop on a plane—because you snapped your fingers—and fly to New York!” I protested hotly. “Have you forgotten I’ve a job to do? Not to mention a bet to win.”
Tavish was looking at me with big eyes as he realized who it must be.
“As I say—it’s the least I’d do for you,” Tor repeated testily. “Now, may I get out of this blasted fog and come upstairs? Assuming, of course, that your guest or guests wouldn’t mind.”
I stopped breathing for an instant.
“Where are you?” I asked in hushed voice.
“At the newsstand down the block,” he told me. “I’d never before seen this city of yours—and I still haven’t. Are you sure there’s a town around here? All the way from the airport it was socked in just as now—we were fortunate the plane could land at all.”
I closed my eyes, put my hand over the mouthpiece, and whispered, “Thank you, God.” Then I shot a wink at Tavish.
“What a coincidence,” I told Tor over the phone. “We’ve just had one of those psychic transmissions of yours—so we’ve been expecting you.”
I’d never been so glad to see anyone in my life.
When I buzzed Tor into the building, and finally saw him ascending the last flight of steps from the elevator to the penthouse—bundled in his elegant cashmere overcoat, his coppery curls illuminated by the hall lamp—I wanted to rush out and embrace him. But that might have been ill-advised, considering what I wanted to ask of him the minute he walked in the door. So I took his coat instead.
After brief introductions—Tavish was quite stricken dumb by this first-time meeting with his idol—I settled them all in the living room so Pearl and Tavish could fill him in on our last eight hours of trauma; I went off to the kitchen to start the ball rolling.
“Charming place,” Tor called after me. “Virginal white—reminds me of that chapter in Moby Dick. Quite appropriate to your personality, though.”
Regardless of his cynical brand of humor—always at my expense—I knew that even if Tor hadn’t been my mentor all these years, even if he hadn’t suckered me into this bet, even if he didn’t need a favor urgent enough to pry him from the bosom of his beloved New York, he’d still never leave me in a lurch like the one I was in tonight—most especially when he had the chance to flourish all that technological magic he alone could wield. And it was going to take magic, as Tavish and I understood only too well.
In the kitchen, I pulled the list of emergency numbers from the drawer, running my finger down until I found the home number of the VP of operations. Like mine, his number was there as a last resort, if a major production run aborted during the night.
I knew Chuck Gibbs, the VP of operations. We’d spent plenty of long, bleak nights in the past, down at the center, when production work had crashed. I also knew that Chuck had five little kids, and a wife who was getting tired of sleeping alone with cold feet. Tonight was Christmas Eve—when none of them would be delighted to hear the news I was about to spring on them.
“Chuck, this is Verity Banks from Electronic Funds Transfer,” I said when he answered the phone. “I hate to disturb you tonight of all nights—but I’m afraid there’s been a crisis in production.”
I could hear tiny voices squealing in the background—and a woman’s voice saying, “I don’t believe it—on Christmas Eve?”
“Oh, that’s okay,” Chuck told me. “The pitfalls of the profession, I guess.” He sounded as if I’d just track-cleated across his mother’s grave, and he added hopefully, “Is it something maybe one of the operators could resolve?”
The operators were already there at the data center, while I knew that Chuck lived in Walnut Creek, across the bay—a good hour’s drive away.
“I’m afraid not,” I told him. “There seems to be a malfunctioning drive, but we can’t bring down the system to replace it. You know it’s year end—our peak time of the year. We might crash the system if we start switching off peripherals in the middle of production. If we accidentally crashed, we’d have to cold-start the system and do roll-forward recovery.”
“That’s bad,” he admitted, verging on real depression.
Damned right it was—that’s why I’d thought it up: it could take weeks, even longer, if we had to recover all those live transactions that were pouring in just now. If Chuck had to shut down production, the bank could lose tens of thousands of dollars—and the news wouldn’t exactly be private. Even the press would hop on it, if a bank the size of ours went down over Christmas.
“I’m going to bring in a field engineer,” I told Chuck, “just to be on the safe side.” This would save Chuck’s ass as well, if something went wrong. “But I feel that a high-level manager should be present to make a decision, if the situation is worse than we think.”
“I agree,” Chuck said, sounding absolutely miserable. I could hear his wife saying, “You’re not driving the Bay Bridge on Christmas Eve—and that’s final!”
“I’ll tell you what”—I tossed the bone—“if you like, I can go over there in your place. I live only five minutes from the data center—and I don’t have kiddies waiting for Santa to come down the chimney! If it’s serious, I could call you—but it seems a shame for you to drive so far, if it turns out it’s not absolutely necessary.”
“Boy—that would be terrific!” Chuck said, nearly leaping through the phone to shake my hand. “You’re sure you don’t mind?”
“I know you’d do the same for me,” I told him. “But I’ll need clearance, of course, to bring in the engineer.”
“Done,” Chuck said with enormous relief. “Martinelli’s in charge of graveyard shift—you’ll be cleared for entry in less than half an hour. And say, Banks, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your doing this.”
“No problem,” I told him. “We’ll hope for the best.”
I put down the phone and went out to the living room. Tor glanced up from his conversation with Tavish and Pearl, and smiled.
“I’ve just learned of your plight, my dear, from your colleagues here,” he informed me, beaming broadly. “I gather I’m expected to lend a hand. I suppose it’s the fate of genius to constantly prove itself, but I’m always happy to be of service. Just remember, my feathered chickadee—after tonight, you owe me one.”
“Let’s go then,” I told him, wondering how it always happened this way. “We haven’t much time—we’ve got a date with a machine.”
It was amazing that one simple phone call could enable us to melt through six layers of security and penetrate the inner sanctum without a flurry. We’d agreed to let Pearl and Tavish go home—that we’d call if we needed bail.
Tor strolled behind me, head bowed, carrying the briefcase containing Tavish’s object code for the programs we needed to load, and wearing a battered trench coat we’d borrowed from Tavish. It had seemed more appropriately teckie, to suit his image as a field engineer.
“Boss says you’ve got a malfunctioning drive,” said Martinelli, the night-shift supervisor, as we came into the brightly lit data center.
A chubby Italian in sweatshirt and jeans with a flattop military crew cut, Martinelli oversaw the functioning of millions of dollars of state-of-the-art hardware, spread over ten acres of floor space that covered three stories at the Bank of the World.
“We’ve checked all the drives,” he added as Tor set down his briefcase with professional decorum, “but we can’t find anything wrong at all.”
“We’re getting an error message when we try to write on drive seventy,” I told Martinelli. “Perhaps you’ve overlooked something.”
He bristled a bit, but checked his confi
guration list.
“There’s no such drive ’genned onto this system,” he assured me, which meant that the system refused to recognize a drive with that number, because it had never been told about it.
Of course, I was lying my brains out—flying by the seat of my pants. I just wanted to get Tor onto the goddamned system, in any way possible.
“That must be the problem, then,” I told Martinelli. “Our system’s trying to capture wire transfers—but somehow, the address of the drive where it wants to put them has disappeared. Have you guys been switching peripheral devices on us?”
“Nobody fucks with this system,” Martinelli assured me, patting a nearby processor. “This here wire transfer system runs on the mainframes—the most reliable, quality-assured system we got.”
“Unless somebody decided to switch a few plugs,” I said condescendingly. “We’re paying this engineer here—don’t let him sit on his thumbs. Let’s get the bug detector mounted, give him clearance to enter the supervisor, and maybe we can call it a night.”
The bug detector was a diagnostic program that acted as a kind of computer physician—buzzing around inside the machine while other programs were running, examining them to see whether they were sick. If you permitted it to override the “supervisor”—which governed the entire system—it could go in and make changes to those “sick” programs, without anyone being the wiser. Tor had told me to set things up this way, and to let him do the rest.
Martinelli—muttering something about women and ships—whipped a tape off a nearby rack and slapped it on a drive, flipping the leader around until the ribbon sucked down into the shaft. He let the glass door slide up, walked over to the console, and punched in a few things on the keyboard.
“You’re on,” he told Tor, and stepped away from the console.
“Do you have a butt I could bum?” I asked Martinelli, knowing that he loved smokes, and that he wasn’t permitted to do so within that climate-controlled atmosphere. “Let’s let this guy earn his exorbitant fee—shall we?” I gestured toward Tor.
Martinelli and I went down the loading ramp to the small coffee room beyond the data center’s sliding glass doors. From the corner of my eye, I glimpsed Tor at the console, his long fingers caressing the keys. I preferred not to think what might happen if something went wrong and he made even one tiny slip.
I kept Martinelli out in the coffee room as long as possible, hanging on his every word about how his team was faring in the interbank bowling league. The graveyard-shift coffee was—if possible—even worse than what we got during the day.
When at last we returned to the machine room, Tor was still standing there, his back to us, tapping away.
“Well, Abelard?” I said, clapping him on the shoulder. “How’s it going?”
“Just about finished—Héloise,” he replied, shrugging me off with disdain. In profile, I noticed that his skin was even paler than usual, and that his brow was beaded with a thin, faint line of moisture. I hoped to God everything was going all right.
I glanced with concern at the listings before him, which Tavish had given him—listings he’d never seen before tonight. They were all in hexadecimal code—totally meaningless to me. But Tor had scribbled a few scratchy-looking notes in red ink in the margins. And though they were gibberish to most people, I knew my life and the fate of all of us depended upon their being a hundred percent accurate. Just one slip of the wrist, and we might as well both commit hara-kiri right here on the data-center floor.
“Did you find out what it was?” Martinelli asked Tor, crossing over with a few of the night-shift operators in tow. “We run a clean ship here—we never got no message of a problem. What did you do to fix it?”
“Elementary, my dear chap,” said Tor, logging off the system, to my great relief. “I changed the device designation and let her rip.”
“Impossible,” said Martinelli. “You mean, in the program—while the program is running?”
“Really—it was nothing at all,” Tor assured him. “Just give us a call anytime.”
We moved through the last set of mantraps to the elevators. Down in the garage I could barely climb into the car, my legs were shaking so. I felt cold beads of sweat chilling my brow, and a clammy lump at the pit of my stomach. I expected alarms to go off at any moment, sealing us into the building when the computer at last encountered Tor’s newly inserted code. But I drove up the ramp and we left without a flutter.
Tor had been strangely silent throughout our escape from the scene of the crime. I wondered what he was thinking, and whether he’d been as scared as I.
“I hope the goddamned system doesn’t abort at three in the morning,” I told him, wending my way in the dark through the blinding fog.
“What effusive gratitude,” he said. “Remind me to fly three thousand miles in the dead of night to help you out again sometime.”
“I’ll buy you a brandy when we get back to my place,” I said.
“We’re not going to your place—that white death trap,” he informed me. “If you’re longing for a shroud, my dear, it seems to me you can stand out on any street corner in this entire ghastly white metropolis. You still belong in New York.”
“I hope you’re not planning to take me there tonight,” I said, peering through the windows to try to find the street I was driving on.
“I certainly should do so—but sadly the last plane has left by now,” he explained. “Keep going straight until you reach the bay—I’ve studied a map of this dreadful town while I was en route to you. We’re going to a place called Fisherman’s Wharf.”
“Maybe you’ve studied a map,” I told him, “but you didn’t study the local customs. It’s after one A.M.—everything in San Francisco’s shut down by now.”
“Disgusting primitives,” muttered Tor, whose own town—like Las Vegas—never closed. “However, keep driving as I said. I’ve been assured that the place where I’m taking you will remain open as late as we like.”
I didn’t like—but I knew I owed Tor not only a favor, but my life. I doubted there were many folks on the planet who would or could have done for anyone what he’d done for me tonight, least of all on such short notice. If he wanted to see the bloody wharf, why not?
We pulled up near Fisherman’s Wharf—there was plenty of parking available at this hour—and I locked up the car. If it weren’t for the fog, I would’ve been scared out of my wits. But I figured anyone who wanted to mug me in all that soup would have to find me first.
Tor took my hand and guided me down the wharf, where the shops and bistros fell away and—down near the end—boats creaked and sloshed in the water between the ghosts of rickety, dilapidated buildings.
“This looks like the one,” he said, pointing at a small motorboat I could barely make out in the gloom.
“You’re taking me on a boat ride?” I said, slightly hysterical. “On the bay—at this time of night?”
But he climbed down without a word, and was fumbling about.
“Let’s see, the key should be … here it is.” I heard his voice in the fog. “Now, my dear girl,” he added as his hand came up out of the fog for mine, “have I ever introduced you to any experience you didn’t, in the long run, enjoy?”
“It seems this may be the first,” I assured him. But there was little I could do about it—so I gave him my hand and climbed down into the boat.
We were out on the water before I knew it—cutting out into the bay. When we’d cleared the wharfs and were out far enough, the black waters glittered with light from the city beyond. The bay was clear but for patches of mist, and the tall buildings of San Francisco soared above their whipped-cream shroud of fog like lost Atlantis rising, dripping with foam, from the sea. The moon above was fat and full, and draped with scudding clouds. I’d never seen anything so magnificent.
“It’s incredible,” I whispered to Tor, though there was no one within miles to hear. “I’ve never been out on the bay at night.”
??
?Just the first of many such experiences I see in your immediate future,” he assured me.
“Where are you taking me? Or is this just a general excursion?” I wanted to know. After all, he’d said the place would be open.
“We’re going to an island—our island,” he said softly, as if to himself. “In the midst of the wine-dark sea …”
THE HOSTILE TAKEOVER
It is not from the benevolence of the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their self-interest.
We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities, but of their advantages.
—Adam Smith
Ten years in San Francisco, and the only island in the bay I’d heard of was Alcatraz, though I’d never been there. But Tor, who had only left New York that afternoon, had found another one. He loved to impress people with that sort of omnipotence. But I couldn’t say I minded much. It was absolutely lovely.
It was small—perhaps one hundred yards—with a rocky coastline, and lawns still green after the winter rains. With the lights of Berkeley on one side and those of the city on the other, it seemed a refuge invisible from without—a lake isle in a womb of water—the gentle sloshing of waves eradicating the sounds of those real worlds on the farther shores.
“How did you ever find this place?” I asked Tor.
“The same way I found you,” he told me, “by magic or intuition.”
It made no difference—I loved it. We went hand in hand from the pier across the lawns. There was a little frame two-story house at the point, with cheery light inside. When we reached it, he fumbled in a pot of gardenias for the key, and unlocked the door.
“I’m very tired,” he told me, opening the creaky door. “It’s three hours later for me—nearly five A.M. If we were in Manhattan, I could hear the birds already chirping in the trees. I think I should call it a night.” A night?
“You surely don’t plan to sleep here?” I said.
“You don’t think I’d spend a night in that coffin you call home?” he said irritably. “I need space, and time to unwind. It’s been quite a day for me—thanks largely to you. And it should be really lovely, waking here in the morning.”