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.