The Zero Hour

Racing for a taxi, Ken Alton nearly stumbled twice on his way out of the Manhattan Bank Building’s atrium. It was raining with such force the rain seemed to be coming up from the steaming pavement. It was morning, but the sky was dark with storm clouds.

He didn’t have an umbrella, of course, and his clothes were totally soaked through. A cab slowed down for him. Then a middle-aged woman darted in front of him and flung herself into the cab’s backseat. He called her a colorful name, but the slamming of the door kept her from hearing him.

Several stolen cabs later-damned New Yorkers get aggressive when it gets wet, he thought-he sat cocooned in the stifling warmth of a taxi hurtling toward Thirty-seventh Street. He leaned back and tried to gather his thoughts.

A virus. A goddam polymorphic computer virus. But what kind of virus was it? What was its intent? A practical joke-to gum up the works for a day or so? Or something more sinister-to wipe out all records of the second-largest bank in the country?

The idea of a computer virus-a piece of software that reproduces itself endlessly, spreading from computer to computer, copying itself ad infinitum-was relatively recent. There was the Internet Worm in 1988, the Columbus Day virus in 1989, the Michelangelo virus in 1992.

But how had it gotten in? A virus can be planted by any number of means. Someone inside the bank could have done it, or someone from the outside who had somehow gained access to the bank’s computer facilities. Or an outside phone link. Or an infected diskette. There was a famous story, famous at least among computer types, about a guy who rented a plush office space in London, pretending to be a software company. He persuaded a major PC magazine in Europe to attach a free diskette to copies of the magazine. The diskette contained an AIDS questionnaire as a public service: you popped it into your computer, and the program asked you a series of dopey questions and then gave you an AIDS “risk assessment.”

But it also did something else to your computer. It sent a virus burrowing its way into your machine that, after a certain number of reboots, hid all your files and flashed a bill. The bill directed the by now panicked users to send a sum of money to a post office box in Panama in exchange for a code that would unlock their files. The extortion scheme would have worked had some very smart hackers not broken the code and solved the virus.

Ken knew several people who were far more expert in the subject than he. As soon as he got to headquarters, he would have to figure out a way to send this virus on to his friends without infecting their systems, so they could examine it.

But this goddam cab was taking fucking forever. He took out his cellular phone, and he punched out Sarah’s number.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE

Most people fly on jets blissfully unaware of what keeps them aloft. So too do princes of capitalism wheel and deal in vast, inconceivable sums of money, ignorant of how their money travels magically from New York to Hong Kong in seconds. As long as the machinery works, that’s all that counts.

But Malcolm Dyson had always been a get-under-the-hood-and-fix-it kind of guy. He knew how the fuel systems and the drive trains of all his cars worked.

He knew, too, the machinery of capitalism, knew how incredibly fragile it was, knew the precise location of its soft underbelly. He worked a long day in his library at Arcadia, and then pressed a button on his desk that pulsed an infrared beam at the Louis XIV armoire in a niche to his right. A panel slid open with a mechanical whir and the television came on: CNN, the top of the hour, the world news.

The announcer, a handsome young man with immaculately parted dark hair and sincere dark eyes, said good evening and read the lead story off his TelePrompTer.

“A computer virus has paralyzed the operations of America’s second-largest bank,” he said. “A spokesman at Manhattan Bank said that bank officials had no idea how the virus infected the bank’s computer system, but they believe it was the result of a deliberate attack by computer ‘hackers,’ or ‘phreakers.’”

A graphic appeared next to the announcer’s head, a photograph of the sleek world-famous Manhattan Bank Building. He said, “Whatever the source, Manhattan Bank chairman Warren Elkind announced that the multinational bank was forced to close its doors at eleven o’clock Eastern Standard Time this morning, perhaps forever.”

Dyson shifted slightly in his wheelchair.

“The bank’s computers went haywire this morning, with all terminals freezing up. It was later discovered that a malfunction in the bank’s electronic payments system caused the withdrawal of all of Manhattan Bank’s assets, estimated at over two hundred billion dollars globally, and transferred as-yet-undetermined, enormous sums of money to banks around the world-estimated at over four hundred and thirty billion dollars, far more than the assets in the bank’s possession.