Infernal Revenue td-96

by Warren Murphy

  "This is Culpeper."

  Culpeper was the code name for the secret Virginia site where his data-recapture team was racing to even now, carrying the Minneapolis Fed backup files for loading on their mainframes. There the system would be recreated, the most recent twenty-four hours' worth of transactions checked and double-checked until every penny balanced.

  "What's wrong?" Richmond asked.

  "We crashed."

  "You crashed?"

  "Recall your team. Bring your system back up."

  "Got it."

  It took a single call to the lobby guard to stop both teams before they left the building.

  Richmond exhaled a hot sigh of relief. He never liked these drills. It was just as well not to go through one now. Still, it was strange that Culpeper had crashed. It was brought on-line only for these drills.

  "Let's bring us back up," he told his technicians.

  The mainframes, like dumb refrigerators, began to hum again. Terminal screens winked open like phosphorescent orbs.

  And someone said, "We've got a problem."

  "What is it?" Richmond said, rushing to the terminal where a technician waved anxiously.

  "The numbers are changing."

  "What do you mean, changing?"

  "Look. See?"

  Richmond bent over the screen. It was very active. Too active. Every digit was counting backward to zero.

  "Who's doing this?" Richmond bit out.

  No one was doing it. No one in the room. Not a keyboard was being touched.

  But at every terminal, transaction files were being accessed, manipulated and money was draining out of the Fed with the horrid velocity of light.

  "It's some damn hacker!" Richmond yelled hoarsely, pounding the terminal. It did not to stop the electronic exodus of money.

  "How do we stop it?" a technician screamed.

  "Cut the phone wires!"

  "Where? How?"

  No one knew. The system was designed to keep running at all costs.

  "Bring everything off-line. Hurry!"

  Technicians scrambled but they were mere flesh and blood, and the intelligence that was draining the mainframes like some electronic vampire was quicker than flesh and blood and bone.

  Harlan Richmond, tears streaming from his eyes, was reduced to pulling connector cables from the backs of his mainframes with his bare hands. But it was too late.

  The money was gone. Into cyberspace.

  "At least we have our backups," someone said, hollow voiced.

  "Yeah," Harlan muttered with a metallic bitterness everyone in the room could taste. "With no system in place to load them."

  Around the country, it was happening in Boston, New York, Atlanta and elsewhere. The Federal Reserve banking system files were simultaneously reduced to zero values.

  The chairman of the Fed received the call on his portable cellular phone in the middle of dinner in a fashionable Foggy Bottom restaurant.

  He was a strong man used to standing up to Congress and telling Presidents of both parties unequivocally no.

  But when he heard the news from his office, he sat very still for a moment and fainted into his lobster bisque.

  The President of the United States had his own worries. He had not heard from Harold Smith in over a day now. There was no telling what had happened to the man, and especially, what was happening in the Harlequin matter. Pyongyang, through its diplomatic mission, was stonewalling all inquiries.

  Congress and the press were taking turns jumping down his throat. He looked weak. After Somalia and

  Haiti and Bosnia, he didn't need to be drawn into an unwinnable confrontation with North Korea.

  And he couldn't tell Congress or the press or even his wife that he had people on it. Not without divulging a secret seven previous Presidents had carefully safeguarded.

  One thing was certain, if he got out of this mess politically unsulhed, he was going to abolish CURE once and for all. The man running it was clearly not up to the job.

  In the Oval Office the telephone rang, and the White House operator said, "An urgent call from the chairman of the Federal Reserve."

  "Put it through," said the President, thinking, What could be so urgent on a holiday weekend?

  The chairman of the Fed was sputtering so badly his words were impossible to understand.

  "Calm down. Stop spitting and catch your breath."

  "Mr. President, I am spitting because I fainted into my lobster bisque. And I fainted into my lobster bisque because the federal banking system has collapsed."

  "What are you trying to tell me?" the President said.

  "The Federal Reserve banks, all twelve of them, are kaput."

  "Impossible. The banks are sound."

  "The banks may be sound, but their computers have all crashed."

  "Crashed?"

  "Every transaction has been unwritten, even in our secret site in Virginia." The chairman of the Fed paused to catch his breath. His voice shook with his next words. "Mr. President, some unknown agency has penetrated the most secure financial computer system in human history and brought it to its knees. If they are capable of this, they are capable of doing the same to every bank, every guarantee, trust and savings and loan in the nation."

  "But we don't know this power has done that."

  "There would be no point in attacking the Fed unless the other banks are targets, as well. Mr. President, we have forty-eight hours to correct this situation, or the nation will suffer an economic catastrophe a thousandfold worse than the Great Depression."

  "Why would anyone want to—"

  Another line beeped, and the President put the chairman of the Fed on hold. Both needed to catch their breaths.

  Instead of the White House secretary, a warm, generous voice said, "Mr. President, I want you to consider me your friend."

  "Who is this?"

  "I am the entity that has crashed the federal banking system."

  "How did you get past the White House secretary?"

  "Easily," said the smooth voice. "Just as I brought the entire banking system into receivership. Easily."

  The President swallowed. "Bring it back," he said with all the firmness he could muster. "Please."

  "Gladly."

  "Say again?"

  "I said I will gladly restore the banking system to normalcy. In return for the sum of twenty billion dollars, which you will wire-transfer to a Swiss bank account number I will provide."

  "This is blackmail!"

  "This is the end of your presidency and U.S. economic might if you do not comply within forty-eight hours."

  The President reached under his desk to disengage the automatic call-taping system. "How do I reach you?" he asked in a very subdued voice.

  "I will call back at precise intervals until I have the answer I require."

  And the line went dead. Switching back to the chairman of the Fed, the President explained what had happened in rushed sentences.

  "What do we do?" he said at the end of it. "We can't pay this! Deficit reduction will go straight into the dumper."

  "We can't not pay it."

  "Is that your recommendation as chairman of the Fed?"

  "It is my best gut reaction if we want to stave off economic collapse. As chairman of the Fed, I stand squarely against paying ransom to anyone."

  "You're a big help," said the President disconsolately.

  Suddenly the matter of a missing nuclear attack submarine seemed very small in the big picture. And the big picture was getting very big and very, very black.

  Harold Smith was back at Folcroft Sanitarium.

  The CURE computer was up and running again. He had entered the secure computer system of the Chemical Percolators Hoboken Bank, which a computer search had determined held the XL SysCorp corporate account. Smith was trying to find his missing twelve million dollars. But the XL SysCorp corporate account was surprisingly modest. Less than two million. And it had not changed in a week.

  If nece
ssary, Smith would examine every multimillion-dollar bank account in the nation until he found it.

  It should not be very hard to find, he reasoned. All he had to find was a posted credit for twelve million in the past twenty-four hours. How many such transactions of that size could there be? Especially in the sleepy days before Labor Day.

  Smith paged through transaction file after transaction file looking for a likely XL subsidiary account because he had yet to trust his new system even though he now understood how it had been manipulated.

  He was mildly surprised to see the numbers change on one file when he accessed it. Perhaps it was the graveyard shift updating the day's activities.

  The numbers were also changing on the next file. And the next. Sensing something amiss, Smith accelerated his checking.

  Every file was being updated. No, scratch that. Every file was being looted. The numbers were going down, inexorably, relentlessly down.

  Million-dollar accounts were dropping to zero. It was happening all over the Percolators system.

  Frightened, Smith logged off. He sat staring at his screen. Was this reality he had witnessed or his own system going haywire?

  Smith had no way of knowing. He tried accessing another bank, one selected at random. He got the same manic activity. He logged onto the Folcroft bank account in the Lippincott Savings Bank, and it was happening there, too. He reached his own account just as the numbers dwindled to zero.

  Every bank he examined showed the same activity. After twenty minutes of checking, he found no bank whose numbers had not dropped to zero.

  "How can this be?" he muttered to himself. "I destroyed the ES Quantum 3000 before the scheme could be implemented."

  Harold Smith sat thinking for nearly ten minutes. If this was his computer malfunctioning, none of this was actually happening in cyberspace. It was a last parting joke from the ES Quantum 3000. On the other hand, if it was real...

  Harold Smith did not want to think about that possibility.

  But he had to investigate it.

  He dialed the President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and identified himself as Agent Smith of the Treasury Department.

  "We have received an anonymous tip that a hacker is targeting the New York Federal Reserve. Is your system up and running?"

  "They crashed."

  "Crashed?"

  "And it's not just us," the President of the New York Fed moaned. "If s every Federal Reserve bank. The whole Fed banking system is off-line. And we have state-of-the-art IDC mainframes. If you can find this crazy bastard, you'd better do it before Tuesday morning or I don't want to think about what's going to happen to this country."

  "My God," said Smith. The phone slipped from his numb hands.

  "The virus. The damn virus. That's what it must be. Timed to go off this evening, or..."

  Or upon failing to receive the correct disarming signal from the ES Quantum 3000, he thought with horror. It was a doomsday program. If the computer was taken off-line, a digital virus would kick in. Being a computer, the ES Quantum 3000 could have set it up so that the virus program would have to receive the disarm impulse every five minutes or so in order to remain inactive.

  Harold Smith sat stunned in the cold solitude of his lonely post.

  "I may have destroyed the U.S. economy," he croaked.

  And he buried his head in his trembling hands.

  It was Sunday morning.

  Sunday morning, and the late-summer sun made Washington, D.C., resemble the city of gleaming white promise the nation's forefathers had intended.

  And in the insulated womb of the Oval Office, the President of the United States could only stare at the ticking wall clock and hope for a miracle.

  He had long ago given up double-checking the red CURE telephone. The thing was as dead as the coming winter.

  The blackmailer had continued calling to see if the President was prepared to hand over the twenty-billion-dollar ransom. After the fifth call, the President had turned off the ringer of his desk phone.

  Each call had been traced. Each time the FBI had tracked it to a blind end. Once they reported a call had emanated from the vice president's office. That's when the Chief Executive had ordered a halt to all tracing. The attorney general was beginning to ask questions the executive branch would rather not answer.

  Knowledge of the crash of the banking system had been restricted to a handful of close aides, and of course the First Lady, who had to know everything and eventually found it out if someone didn't tell her first.

  Telling her first long ago became the President's cardinal rule. The woman never let him forget the time she discovered his secret vasectomy operation through the Washington Post.

  Only five individuals, counting the chairman of the Fed, knew how bad the situation was. Certainly the various heads of the twelve Federal Reserve banks had an inkling of the problem and might guess at the larger picture. The rank-and-file commercial banks would have no clue until 9:00 a.m. Tuesday—two days hence. By that time their phones would be ringing off the hook with customers complaining about ATM machines that had been inoperative for forty-eight hours.

  What could be done in two days? The five smartest brains in the President's inner circle were working on it right now. And the friendly-voiced extortionist had taken to sending demand faxes to an unlisted White House fax phone.

  An hour later the President's chief of staff brought in a single sheet of paper. "The option paper on the you-know-what account, Mr. President."

  The President glanced over the sheet carefully laid on his polished desk.

  It summarized the situation in concise Washing- tones, presenting the Chief Executive with the usual trio of options, with a box beside each option so he could check the appropriate course of action. That was how decisions were made in the White House.

  Option one was to attack the problem head-on.

  Option two was to make a concerned speech and monitor public opinion.

  Option three was to do nothing.

  The President looked up at his chief of staff. "None of these options make sense. I can't attack the problem because we don't know who or what's causing it. If we attack it, the banking system will know it's in trouble, and we'll start a massive wire run on every bank the day they open. And I can't make a speech about it and wait for the damn polls because there's only forty-eight hours till this becomes public anyway. Do I have to tell you about option three?"

  "Mr. President, there is a fourth option."

  "Then why isn't it on this paper?"

  "We thought if it came to paying blackmail, you'd rather there be a deniable paper trail."

  "I'm not paying any damn extortionist!" the President blazed.

  "That's why the option was left off," the chief of staff said reasonably enough. "But if you prefer to exercise the fourth option, blink three times and I will make the necessary arrangements. Discreetly."

  The President crumpled up the option paper with a groan. "If it comes to that, I'll sign an executive order and to hell with history."

  He had never faced a situation like this. Usually, when he couldn't solve a problem immediately, he just checked option two and hoped for the best.

  Now he had to hope for a miracle.

  Chapter 28

  Dawn broke like scarlet thunder, showing Captain Yokang Sako his true situation.

  The red light outlined the flower of the North Korean navy to his foaming stern, strung out in a line, in fast pursuit.

  Yokang ordered all the speed wrung out of the engine room.

  Many nautical are short of South Korean waters, the frigate SA-I-GU was intercepted by the flower of the South Korean Navy. A blockade of stationary ships appeared dead ahead, presenting their armored sides like a many-segmented sea dragon at rest.

  It was clear that they had been warned of his intent.

  Equally clear was the undeniable fact that he would not be allowed to defect to the south.

  Captain Yokang ordered his
ship to come about.

  "We will try for the open sea," he said bitterly.

  The frigate changed course smartly, its greater power and maneuverability giving it a clear advantage over the other craft, which moved onto intercept courses.

  From the bridge of his ship, Captain Yokang Sako surveyed the assembled armada and trembled. There was the Soho-class frigate Chosun, the patrol submarine Sanshin. And two Iwon-class torpedo boats, the Um and the Yang.

  Most formidable of all was the single destroyer in the North Korean Navy, the Juche. It was moving in from the west, where it had obviously lain in wait, and it was getting inexorably closer to the SA-I-GU, its great deck guns swiveling toward the frigate.

  "They dare not fire at us," Yokang shouted to his quailing bridge crew. "For if we sink, the gold sinks with us."

  But it did not matter. There was no place to run to. If he turned again, Yokang knew, he would lose precious headway.

  With the Juche blocking all escape, Captain Yokang Sako order©! his ship to come to a dead stop. The other ships were moving to surround the SA-I-GU.

  From the Juche a shell sizzled across their bow to land with a frightening splash in the Yellow Sea.

  A radio message crackled through the warm morning air: "Prepare to be boarded."

  "What do we do?" asked Tuggobi, the first officer.

  "We await our fate," said Yokang, then added, "perhaps they will be satisfied with the gold and not require our necks in nooses."

  The look on the first mate's drained-of-blood face said that this was a very faint hope indeed.

  Minutes passed. Then from the surrounding vessels of the North Korean Navy no moves were made. No boats were put off. Nor were any further shots fired.

  "What do they wait for?" the first mate asked nervously.

  "I do not know," admitted Captain Yokang Sako, feeling his thick neck and swallowing hard. His mouth and throat felt very dry.

  Another minute passed, and from the port side came a thump.

  Another thump followed. And another. It was as if great nails were being driven into the armored side of the SA-I-GU.

  Sailors rushed to the port rail and looked down. They began making a commotion, yelling and screaming and pointing downward.

  And every time another thump came, they jumped in time with it.