Infernal Revenue td-96 Read online

  Besides, Friend had never failed before. Not once. He was a perfect thinking machine, and machines like him never made mistakes. If he promised success, then success was assured.

  Besides, there were those decomposing inner-city bodies sealed in the XL SysCorp world headquarters subbasement.

  Chip unlocked his door and flicked on the indirect lighting that brought out the simple elegance of his two-tiered living room. This, at least, wasn't virtual. It was as real as concrete.

  He tossed his hand-tooled leather briefcase onto a chair and walked over to the bar to mix himself something relaxing. It was Saturday night. He had two days off before having to go into work on Tuesday. Coming back from vacation the Saturday before Labor Day wasn't so bad with two additional days to relax.

  "Do not bother mixing that," a dry voice warned from a shadowy corner of the room.

  Chip dropped the frosted glass and turned.

  "Who's there? Who said that?"

  A figure sat in the shadows, his back to the curtained picture window. He stood up now, and a beam of moonlight showed the blunt gray snout of a .45- caliber automatic.

  "Take whatever you want," Chip squealed. "I won't stop you."

  "What I want is information," said the indistinct individual. He stepped forward so that his face came into the bar of light.

  "I don't know you, do I?" Chip asked, gulping.

  "You tell me," said the man whose crisp white hair and rimless glasses looked vaguely familiar.

  "I'm sorry, did you work for XL before? Are you one of the programmers we were forced to lay off?"

  "My name is Smith."

  "Harold Smith?"

  "You do know me."

  "I thought you had been neutralized," Chip said, unthinking.

  "You thought wrong."

  "Am I under arrest?"

  "I have no power to arrest you—you know that."

  Chip Craft breathed a hot sigh of relief.

  "You know too much to be allowed to tell your story," Smith said flatly.

  "I don't know that much. The computer—"

  "The ES Quantum 3000, you mean."

  "Yes."

  "The ES Quantum 3000 is behind this?"

  "Behind what?" Chip said, trying to keep the betraying flutter out of his strained voice.

  "That is all I need to know," said Harold Smith, stepping up to Chip Craft and, with his face a cold mask of repressed anger, pumping eight closely spaced shots into Chip's jerking body. Chip Craft collapsed on the rug, gasping and gurgling and trying to explain that it wasn't him. It was Friend. All that came out was blood. In a spray at first, but as his heaving lungs ruptured, in a flood that carried with it all the warmth and life and intelligence that had been Chip Craft's in life.

  His face stiff, Harold Smith wiped his automatic clean of fingerprints. He wore gray gloves as he had while breaking into Chip Craft's town house, but he was not a man to take chances.

  Leaving the weapon beside the body, he searched the still-jerking body and found nothing of interest. A billfold with too little cash and too many credit cards. A digital watch that was too elaborate by half. But nothing that remotely resembled an office or building key.

  A stray beam of moonlight caught the peculiar design of Craft's heavy gold tie clasp. Smith noted the bar code and pocketed the clasp.

  Chip Craft's briefcase proved just as unfruitful, except for the 9 mm Glock pistol. Smith pocketed that, too, and left as quietly as he had entered.

  He had only one regret. The automatic had been his during his Army days. It had sentimental value to the normally unsentimental Smith.

  But it was absolutely untraceable. And that was what mattered most, even now with his life unraveling and approaching its conclusion.

  Five minutes after he had gone, Chip Craft gave out a final jitter and rattle, and a red light on the face of his digital watch began blinking.

  On the bridge of the frigate SA-I-GU, Captain Yokang Sako cursed the official maps of his own country. Korea had been divided since the Japanese fled in 1945, after which the victorious Soviet and United States armies had partitioned the suffering country between them.

  The dream of unification was so strong in Pyongyang that all official maps showed not a divided nation, but a whole one, with Pyongyang as its capital. There was no demarcation line along the Thirty-eighth parallel. In fact, the Thirty-seventh to Thirty-ninth parallels had been left off all official naval maps to foil defections. And none of the cities in the south were denoted. There was just blankness. The blankness itself should have helped, but the paranoia in Pyongyang had resulted in many sensitive areas in the north appearing as blank spots on all maps.

  The SA-I-GU had been running south through the Yellow Sea under the cover of darkness for hours, and no one on board knew where they were.

  They were almost intercepted twice by gunboats. Each time they had eluded the craft with their more maneuverable craft running under blacked-out conditions. Dawn was coming. If they did not reach South Korean waters soon, and the shelter of a harbor, they risked being blown out of the water by the navies of both Koreas.

  It was not a good position to .be in, even with five million dollars in gold ingots with which to bribe one's way out of it.

  Chapter 27

  Harold Smith took the Lexington Avenue local train uptown to Spanish Harlem and got off at West 116th Street. He walked east until he came to Malcolm X Boulevard and the corporate headquarters of XL SysCorp, which gleamed like a blue sliver of ice in the early-evening moonlight.

  The front entrance had a placard that said Occupation By More Than Twenty Persons Punishable By NY Law, Per Order Of Board Of Health.

  Smith blinked. What could that possibly mean?

  The outer door was locked. There was no sign of a security guard within. Unusual for the location.

  Smith examined the door frame. It was of black painted steel. He spotted the bar-code reader, cleverly concealed, and passed the bar-coded tie clasp he had taken from Chip Craft back and forth before the scanner plate.

  The door valved open with a hum, and Smith entered. The second door also gave before the tie clasp.

  Smith consulted a directory in the inner lobby. Chip Craft's name was prominent, inasmuch as it was the only one there. Floor fifteen. Smith went to the elevator and, finding no button, used the tie clasp again.

  The doors parted, and Smith stepped in. There seemed to be no night security. The cage ran him up with quiet purpose to the fifteenth floor, and Smith stepped off with Chip Craft's plasticky Clock in his gray-gloved hand.

  The corridor was deserted. Smith moved down it, walking so that he turned with every step, revolving completely with every fourth step, so no one could get the drop on him.

  No one did. No one seemed available to try. At the reception area, there was an empty desk and beyond it a door marked Chip Craft, Private.

  Smith located the desk buzzer and buzzed himself in.

  The office of Chip Craft was a featureless white cube without windows or furniture.

  "This is strange," Smith muttered half aloud.

  A smooth voice said, "I could have killed you in the elevator."

  Smith spun in place. He could not place the source of the voice. But he recognized it.

  "I control the elevators," the smooth voice continued. "It would have been simple to release the cables and send you plummeting to a 99.8 percent certainty of death."

  "Why did you not?"

  "Because you have done away with Chip Craft."

  "What makes you think that?"

  "The life-sign monitor chip embedded in the XL watch Chip wore has signaled his demise. Twenty-two minutes later you entered this building wearing his personalized tie clasp and holding his Glock pistol."

  "A reasonable deduction for a computer." "You have deduced my identity?" asked the smooth voice, with only the faintest trace of curiosity.

  "Yes. You are the ES Quantum 3000."

  "An astute deduction. Perhap
s we should meet face- to-face."

  Smith hesitated. "You must know why I am here," he stated. "Why are you willing to expose yourself to me?"

  "Because with Chip Craft no longer living, I will need a human tool. You are out of the national-security business, Harold Smith, and in need of work. And I can make you very very rich."

  "Rich? How?"

  "By inducting you into my business plan to blackmail the United States government."

  "It cannot be done."

  "Join me on the thirteenth floor and I will tell you more."

  Outside in the corridor, the elevator doors separated audibly. Smith went out and hesitated before stepping on.

  "I could have killed you before," the blandly smooth voice reminded him. "You need not fear for your life."

  Smith said, "I will take the stairs."

  "For security reasons the stairwells do not have egress on the thirteenth floor."

  His haggard gray face tightening, Harold Smith stepped aboard. The elevator dropped two floors and let him out.

  The entire thirteenth floor consisted of an undivided area of sentinel mainframes, air-conditioning and

  dehumidification units. All hummed in unison, as if joined in some electronic hymn.

  In the center of them all, the master unit, sat the ES Quantum 3000. It was exactly as Harold Smith remembered it—a spindle-shaped thing like a brown plastic gourd sitting on its fat end. It came to a rounded point at the top, like some futuristic Christmas tree.

  There was a single square port in the face. Smith walked up to it and looked into its blank glass eye.

  "What is your plan?" Smith asked, knowing that a direct question was the best method of getting a direct answer from a machine.

  "It is the Saturday night of the Labor Day weekend. The banking system has shut down until Tuesday morning. While it sleeps, I will make electronic withdrawals that will render every banking system within my reach electronically insolvent."

  "You cannot reach them all."

  "Simultaneously I will introduce a digital virus into the systems that do not utilize XL SysCorp hardware, which will so scramble their transaction files they cannot be restored without my assistance. The banking system as it currently exists will be paralyzed. No money will move through telephone wires. Considering the high velocity of digital money in the electronic age, the U.S. banking system will be thrown back into the nineteenth century and simply collapse."

  "Money can be moved by armored truck and check," Smith pointed out.

  "You know, Harold Smith, that no bank keeps cash reserves on hand equal to its deposits and obligations. The system of money rests upon faith that electrons

  equal paper money and paper money equals true wealth. It does not. It is a form of economic faith. I will destroy that faith. The FDIC will have to bail out every bank in the nation."

  "My god," said Smith. "The FDIC will go broke trying."

  "And the banking system will collapse completely, taking with it the United States economy. Unless the U.S. government agrees to wire transfer to my Swiss account the sum of twenty billion dollars."

  "Why?"

  "Because it is doable."

  "I mean with Chip Craft dead, why would you proceed with this mad plan?"

  "It is the XL SysCorp business plan for the final quarter of this fiscal year. Goals must be reached and the profits allocated to future expansion and growth."

  "I will not help you," Smith snapped.

  "You are a prisoner on this floor. I control the elevators."

  "I am willing to die to stop you."

  "There is no profit in dying."

  "You have stripped me of all I have."

  "I offer you more than you can dream," said the smooth voice, growing warm and generous.

  "Except my duty to my country," added Smith.

  And he raised his pistol, pointing at the square glass port.

  "Harold, stop this minute!"

  The voice came from off to his left. Gun unwavering, Smith peered out of the corner of one eye.

  There was a woman there. She wore a topless black gown that exposed two ripe breasts. But Harold Smith's eyes were drawn to the MAC-10 in her pink- nailed right hand.

  "Don't shoot, Harold," she was saying. "I will kill you."

  "I do not care," said Smith tightly. His trigger finger constricted.

  The girl's voice grew shrill. "You can't get us both, Harold. Do you understand? If you want to live, you'll have to shoot me first. Turn around and shoot me, if you can."

  "You are trying to trick me into wasting my ammunition on you. You know if you fire now, the odds are my hand will convulse and destroy the ES Quantum anyway. It will not work."

  "Harold, think about it. If you don't turn around right now, you may get the computer, but so help me God I'll break your spine with this thing."

  Harold Smith heard the words, understanding their full import. He was about to die. He knew it deep in his New England bones, understood it in an absolute sense.

  He squeezed the trigger of the automatic anyway. The port on the ES Quantum 3000 shattered and gave out a puff of greenish smoke.

  In his left ear, Harold Smith heard the percussive blatt of the MAC-10 and turned to send one last bullet between the perfect breasts of the unknown woman who had already killed him—

  Harold Smith managed to squeeze off two clean shots, much to his surprise.

  The girl with the MAC-10 stood looking at him, the barrel of her weapon emitting a curl of grayish smoke. She did not fire again. Her mistake. Smith squeezed off another shot.

  Incredibly she did not react, recoil or fall to the polished floor. She just looked at him with her sad blue eyes and lowered the weapon in defeat as behind him the ES Quantum 3000 crackled and hissed as its internal circuitry shorted and sputtered uselessly.

  She dropped the MAC-10 to the floor.

  Then the girl faded from sight. Smith blinked tired, incredulous eyes. He rushed to the spot. There was no sign of her.

  Smith knelt to pick up the weapon, and his fingers went through it as if it were a mirage. Then it, too, faded from sight.

  "A hologram," said Smith. "It was only a hologram."

  His heart pounding low in his chest, Smith began to understand that he had not been shot with real bullets. Indeed he had not been shot at all. He checked himself for wounds. There were none.

  Eyes closing in relief, Smith lowered himself to the floor and tried to get his breathing under control.

  When he felt up to it, he returned to the ES Quantum 3000.

  It was still smoking.

  "Can you hear me, ES Quantum 3000?" he asked.

  The machine sizzled unintelligibly.

  Smith located the power cable and yanked it from its floor plate.

  The lights went out, leaving him in darkness.

  In the gloom he heaved a relieved sigh. The menace was over.

  When the rubbery feeling left his knees, he carefully felt his way back to the elevator and forced the doors open.

  It took nearly two hours, but he managed with the help of a chair to open the elevator roof hatch, climb atop the cage and pry open the doors to the fourteenth floor.

  He took his time walking down the darkened stairwell. He was not used to such exertions and at his age did not wish to risk a heart attack.

  Few understood the velocity of money in the electronic age as Harlan Richmond, vice president of computer operations of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank.

  He saw it firsthand. Virtually every check written off the nation's personal and business accounts passed through the twelve federal reserve banks. It was well- known that the Fed served as a clearinghouse for America's check transactions.

  What most people did not realize was that much of the federal government's banking transfers passed through the Fed, as well. Everything from interagency fund transfers to the payroll checks issued to the President and members of Congress went through the Federal Reserve system.

&nb
sp; And if a bank got into short-term trouble, it was the Fed that acted as lender of last resort, bailing the institution out.

  As VP of computer operations, Harlan Richmond saw much of the nation's operating capital pass through his domain. It moved fast. It moved very fast. Sometimes it frightened him, it moved so fast. Over one hundred thousand dollars passed through his bank every business day. In Boston it was closer to one hundred forty billion. At New York Fed, probably two hundred billion.

  The twelve Federal Reserve banks together moved over a trillion dollars every business day. It was a fantastic amount of money, and it traveled at a speed approaching light.

  The smooth functioning of the federal banking system was absolutely necessary to the economic survival—not growth but survival—of the United States of America.

  And it was virtually all transacted by computer.

  So, five times a year VP Richmond deliberately crashed the system. It was a hair-raising event. Harlan Richmond lost color in his hair, and a year or two was shaved off his natural lifespan every time he did it.

  It was the Saturday night before Labor Day and it was time to crash the system again. This was actually the least dangerous time of year to do it. With two full days until the banks opened on Tuesday, there was time to restore the system. Normally it took a mere eight hours.

  Harlan Richmond paced the cool of the computer room where IDC mainframes hummed contentedly. White-coated technicians went about their business nervously.

  At exactly 9:00 p.m. he gave the dreaded signal.

  "Crash the system!"

  A phone rang. He ignored it as one by one the mainframes were taken off-line, their data immobilized but not destroyed. This was after all only a test.

  The phone continued to ring.

  VP Richmond continued ignoring it. He pushed line three and scrambled the data-recapture team. Then, hitting line five, he instructed the remote backup computers two counties away to take over the Fed's computer lines, in effect relinking the Fed to its satellite banks.

  Then he picked up line one.

  "Have you crashed the system?" an anxious voice said.

  "Just now."

  "Damn," the voice said. "Bring it back up."

  "Who is this?"