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. Perhaps 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.