by Mark Joseph
“Trust in God, my child.”
At the rear of the car a man started shouting into a cellphone, “God damn it, Ira, I told you sell every Jap stock this morning. What do you mean, you can’t get through? What the hell do you think I pay you for?”
“Hey,” shouted another voice. “Watch your language there, mister.”
“Shut the fuck up and get away from me. Hey! Hey!”
“Maybe you’ll think again before you call somebody a Jap.”
The crowd surged away from the confrontation, compressing the passengers toward the front as the train rattled into the next station. When the doors opened, Jody caught a glimpse of a man lying on the floor, his glasses shattered, his nose broken. He groaned, but the mood in the car had instantly shifted. No one moved to help him, and his assailant was gone. The car filled up again, the new passengers gazing upon the fallen man like a piece of litter.
Copeland stared out the window at a huge advertisement boosting Chase Manhattan. “Year 2000. We’re ready.” As the train began to move, the ad dissolved into a computer screen, the red button, the face of Edwards the CFO of the bank, and then the images were replaced by the dirty white tile that lined the station walls. The dark tunnel swallowed the train and his mind went blank, dangerously close to shutting down completely.
The Metro Tech Center was on Myrtle Avenue in central Brooklyn, a twenty-minute subway ride from Wall Street. At each stop more people got off than got on, the car thinned out and left a few vacant seats. Somewhere along the way the man who’d been assaulted, the young mother, and the gracious Hispanic lady exited the train, and Jody sat down. Copeland remained standing, clutching the overhead bar with both hands as he tried to imagine what he would find in the Tech Center’s computers. Rolling under the city, he wished the train would never stop. He wanted to continue right to the end of Long Island and across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe and just keep going in the opposite direction of the millennium bug, reversing time, reversing all the flawed code, undoing all the damage and putting things back together the way they were. Yet in his larcenous heart he knew things would never be the same. His belief system was shattered, as scrambled as data spewing from an infected computer. He’d believed in money and technology, and they’d betrayed him. He’d thought himself above the fray, but the implacable rotation of the planet meant that when the subway ride ended, the bug would still be moving toward New York, decimating time zone after time zone, destroying economies without regard to race, creed, religion, history or anything else. The bug was the great leveler, treating rich and poor with equal disdain. Even him.
It came to him in a moment of great clarity that he was just as responsible for the bug as anyone else, perhaps more so, although he certainly had done his share to fight it. For his own profit, of course, plenty of profit, oodles of profit, but there was nothing wrong with that. He was rich, but Doc was right. He was greedy. He wanted too much, and what was waiting for him in the Tech Center was the police. The train ride would end in jail. He was convinced Doc had set him up to take a fall.
“Donald?”
Jody was shaking his shoulder.
“Donald? Our stop is next.”
The station flashing past the windows seemed to awaken him from his reverie, and Jody led him off the train, through the station and into the clear light of Brooklyn.
On the surface life appeared normal. Traffic moved, the shops and stores displayed New Year’s trinkets, pigeons fluttered overhead. Along Myrtle Avenue, banners strung between the streetlights read, “Brooklyn Welcomes 2000.”
Across the street four unremarkable office buildings composed the Metro Tech Center, innocuous structures with no identification. Copeland had been there many times and had a security pass, but he hesitated before heading for the entrance.
Jody directed them into a coffeehouse and ordered double espresso for each of them. A languid waiter collected newspapers from empty tables. In a corner booth, a young woman in black turtleneck, black jeans, and silver jewelry studied the classifieds, gave up, rested her chin on her hands and scrutinized three young men with laptops at the next table.
“Code,” Copeland said, stirring his coffee.
“What code?” Jody asked, puzzled. “The 82 lines in Doc’s message?”
“I should have learned more code,” he said in a rambling voice. “It’s not a good idea to have employees who can do things you can’t supervise.”
“What are you talking about, Donald?”
“Doc,” he said. “He goes into his private computer lab with his weird people for hours at a time, and they’re in there writing code to do I don’t know what. You know, I’ve never been in there. Maybe that was a mistake.”
“Drink your coffee. It’s good,” Jody coaxed. “Doc doesn’t let anyone in there except his freaks.”
“I don’t know what they do in there.”
“Donald, what are the total sales of Copeland Solutions 2000? From the beginning.”
“About 400 mil.”
“Doesn’t that answer your question? Doc’s people wrote the software that made you one of the largest vendors of Y2K software in the world. What’s your problem?”
“You sound like a PR lady.”
“I am a PR lady, but right now I feel like a psychiatric nurse.”
“How would you know what that feels like?”
“My mother is one,” Jody answered, pleased to hear an echo of Copeland’s usual acerbic tone. “Are you going to tell me about these 82 lines of code before we go over to the Tech Center, or what?”
He sipped his coffee, ran his fingers through his hair and asked, “What do I look like?”
“You’re a mess,” she replied. “So am I. So what?”
“I haven’t been in the subway in years. When did they put in the TVs?”
“Focus, Donald. 82 lines of secret code. What are we looking for?”
Copeland stared at a copy of the Post that lay on the next the table. “JAPAN INC. SINKS,” announced a headline on the front, right under, “JETS 12 POINT UNDERDOGS ON SUNDAY.” He started to laugh. All his tension welled up and poured out as gleeful peals of hilarity. People in the cafe stared, and Jody flushed with embarrassment. After all the cockeyed craziness she’d seen that day, watching Donald Copeland lose his mind wasn’t her idea of fun.
“You knew this was coming, didn’t you,” she said.
“Yes.”
“That’s why you advised everyone in the company to put their money into cash or gold and hide it under the mattress.”
“Yes.”
“You’re a smart guy, Donald. You must have an edge here. If there’s a way to make money out of these disasters, you figured it out.”
“No one could really predict what was going to happen,” he said with a shrug.
“So, did you put your money under the mattress?” she asked.
“Sure, only my mattress is a safe deposit box somewhere.”
“I see. Now, the 82 lines of code.”
Copeland looked at her with cool, level eyes and she saw that whatever psychotic cloud had fogged his mind had lifted. He had the sly look of the Donald she recognized when he lied to someone he wanted to manipulate, and she didn’t like it.
“Doc’s code will probably be a reminder to get one of the techies at the bank to check a laundry list of programs,” he said. “I think Doc wanted me away from Nassau Street so I wouldn’t go nuts. He prefers that I go nuts in … Brooklyn, of all places.”
“You’re full of shit,” Jody said with a forced smile. “I know when you’re telling the truth and when you’re not.”
“Then I should either fire you or make you a partner in the company,” Copeland shot back.
“Given the choice,” Jody said, standing up, “I quit. I don’t think you know the difference between a lie and the truth, Donald. I’ve spin-doctored so much shit for you, made you look good, protected you, done everything for you but get down on my knees and kiss your ass. I don’t know
why I came all the way out here with you this afternoon. You and Doc have some kind of game going on between you, and I don’t care what it is. You and your 82 lines of code can go to hell. I’m going home. Happy New Year, ex-boss.”
She stepped toward the door. Desperate, he pleaded, “Wait a minute. Please.”
“Why? You said the bank might slam you with a lawsuit. Maybe you deserve it.”
“Maybe I do,” he said, perilously close to a confession. Choking on guilt, he couldn’t quite utter the incriminating words.
“For what?” she asked. “Deserve it for what? What did you do?”
He took a deep breath, sipped his coffee and asked, “Have you ever discovered, all at once, that nothing you believed was true?”
She thought about that. “Not until today,” she said, “and right now I’m not sure what to believe, except I’m pretty sure you’re nuts.”
“I think Doc is trying to rob the bank,” he blurted.
Her jaw dropped. She sat down and stared at him, blinking several times in rapid succession.
“Why the hell do you think I’d ride the damned subway to the middle of nowhere fucking Brooklyn?”
“Oh, shit,” she said.
“I think that’s what he’s been doing with his secret project.”
“I don’t think Doc is that kind of guy,” Jody protested. “He’s straight arrow.”
“The perfect crime,” Copeland said. “A robbery committed by someone no one suspects who has access to the most sensitive financial data and the ability to outsmart the smartest computer nerd at Chase Manhattan.” Copeland was beginning to recover his normal, smarmy temperament and warm to the subject. If Doc had set him up to take a fall, he reasoned, he could turn the tables and point the finger at Doc. “This morning you were there when Edwards said Doc recovered 72 million bucks in lost funds.”
“Yes, and you turned white as a ghost.”
“Because the truth is there was over a hundred million.”
“Oh, boy. Oh, shit. Oh my God.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Where’s the rest?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Probably Panama.”
“And Doc knows you know?”
“Yes.”
“And you haven’t turned him in.”
“It’s blackmail. If I don’t cooperate and do what he wants, at midnight he’ll bring the bank down and make it look like a Y2K screw-up. I have to go into the Tech Center now and make sure Chase’s people haven’t discovered what he did. If they did, they could very well arrest me when I walk in, and he’ll disappear.”
“Doc did this?”
“He’s a very clever man, Jody. You know that.”
“So are you,” Jody said. “You’ve just concocted a hell of a potboiler.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“I said I didn’t know what to believe, and I still don’t.”
“Believe this. I’m going across the street. Coming with?”
He left the café and stood on the sidewalk looking at the Tech Center, an anonymous mass of gray stone with a cluster of microwave and satellite dishes on the roof. Inside, the electronic brains of Chase Manhattan consisted of twenty mainframe IBMs, 1600 terminals, 3200 phone lines, 400 PCs, two satellite dishes, high speed microwave transmitters, a bank of generators and emergency batteries in the basement and a brand new fully Y2K compliant telephone switching system. Most of the $160 million Chase paid to Copeland Solutions went into applications running on the IBMs in air-conditioned rooms on the second, third and fourth floors. The Y2K data conversion and remedial software had been thoroughly tested for a year, and Chase was as Y2K compliant as any enterprise of its size anywhere. Doc’s programmers and 200 bank employees had gone through 250 million lines of code using the most exacting methods and working to the highest standards. More than 800 major applications had been completely rewritten or replaced. The project was so massive there were bound to be mistakes, but Chase knew that, as did Lloyds of London who insured the bank against liability. Everyone believed the bank would pass through the date rollover without a major glitch. Already that day, the Bank of Manila and three Japanese commercial banks using Copeland software survived even though the Central Bank of Japan failed. He’d offered the Central Bank Copeland Solutions 2000 at a big discount and they’d turned him down. Too bad for them. Too bad for everybody.
He walked to the corner and waited for the light. A newspaper delivery truck pulled up to a newsstand on the corner, and the driver tossed out a bundle of the latest edition of the Post.
“FED SHUTS BANKS,” read the headline in six-inch type.
Tick tock. It was almost two o’clock. Just over ten hours to go.
“Okay,” Jody said, appearing beside him. “Coming with.”
10
The rash of heart attacks in the Bellevue emergency room slackened in the afternoon, only to be replaced by a wave of patients so frightened by the millennium bug that they’d hurt themselves or someone else. After watching the news all day, dozens of unstable personalities suffered psychotic episodes, slashing themselves, jumping in front of busses, committing self-defenestration or lashing out at anyone close—wives, children, strangers. The waiting room overflowed with weeping injured and disoriented friends and relatives.
Near the administration window, a teenager tuned a portable radio to an all-news station, and the wounded and distraught were forced to listen to a tidal wave of nerve-wracking stories from around the world. In Bangladesh, violence exploded between Hindus and Muslims who blamed one another for a rural blackout. In Jerusalem, zealous Christians who’d journeyed to the holy city to celebrate the millennium and await the Second Coming were fighting with Palestinian and Israeli police. Rioting and martial law had spread across Siberia, but reports were raw and unedited, the reasons for the disturbances unclear: fear, freezing cold, religious fervor, six hundred years of Russian angst and brutal oppression. In Hermosillo, Mexico, cholera broke out among the two million gathered to witness the Second Coming. A man in Chicago held thirty children hostage in a daycare center and threatened to kill them all before the world ended at midnight, Central standard time. As the stories piled up, the cumulative effect was too much for people to bear. Finally, a man walked over to the kid with the radio and asked him to turn it off. When he received a sullen stare in reply, he grabbed the radio and the kid pulled back. Punches, shouts, security guards, and the bug moved ever closer.
By 2:45 congestion in Manhattan was impeding ambulance traffic into the hospital, slowing the frantic pace in the emergency room. If this is the calm before the storm, thought Bill Packard, scrubbing down after a grueling stint performing emergency cardiac surgery, it’s time to batten down the hatches. He changed out of his surgical greens and ran over to the cardiology ward to see how Doc was doing.
* * *
Having done all he could, Doc was collecting his gear at three o’clock when his pager signaled a call from Deep Volt. He immediately phoned her back at the command center.
She answered, “Operations.”
“Doc here. Have something for me?”
Her voice dropped to a barely audible whisper. “Operator security codes,” she breathed.
“All of them?”
“No, but you’d better take what I have.”
“What format?”
“Zip disks. Meet me at the northeast corner of First Avenue and 14th Street in half an hour. I’m going over to the East Side power plant.”
As he clicked off the phone, Packard came into the ward and asked, “How’s it going?”
Doc shook his head. “This is one ward out of a hundred,” he complained bitterly. “Get the nurses and I’ll tell them what they have to do. Did Mrs. McCarthy ever find you?”
“Mrs. McCarthy is under sedation,” Packard replied with a sly grin. “She stormed into a surgical theater looking for me, and to use precise medical terminology, she lost her marbles.”
Before leaving, Doc
explained to the staff which machines had been jerry-rigged to perform adequately, and which dangerous devices had been turned off. “After midnight, anything automatic has to be monitored,” he told the nurses. “If an IV is programmed to deliver medication on a timed basis, make sure it does. Don’t trust any automatic equipment tonight, and you should be okay.”
Handshakes, hugs, thanks, and Doc was walking rapidly down First Avenue, his mind buzzing with electricity. The juice! Volts! Power plants! A million miles of cable and wire, routers, switches, rectifiers, transformers, circuit breakers, steam turbines and hundred car trains of West Virginia coal to feed the bright furnaces that turned heat into vital electricity.
* * *
The generation and distribution of electric power was staggering in complexity, and computers controlled everything from safety procedures at power plants to route selectors at local substations. Between the nuclear plant at Indian Rock in upstate New York and a wall socket in Manhattan, current passed through seven thousand systems directly controlled by computers. Being computers, these machines failed frequently, and utility operators had plenty of experience with breakdowns and blackouts. Nevertheless, they’d never been subjected to multiple failures in many parts of the system simultaneously.
In 1900 electricity had been sexy. Voltage was hot. Every young boy with a face that belonged on the Saturday Evening Post wanted to be Thomas Edison. The great man himself transformed New York into the world’s first electrified city. At the turn of the 20th Century, if you were hooked up to Edison’s wires, people came to your house and stared in awe at your lights. Electricity made you superior, closer to God, in step with progress. Electricity spawned countless technologies over the next hundred years, from illumination to computing, and people no longer thought of the reliable flow of electrons as sexy. Electric power was basic and dull and taken for granted.
At the other end of a wall socket in New York was a pool of oil beneath the Gulf of Mexico. All the power plants in New York burned fuel oil, minimally refined light crude petroleum extracted from the earth in an automated pumping operation whose machinery included hundreds of embedded chips. The safety of the oil riggers depended on monitoring equipment that processed data in date-sensitive applications. As the oil was pumped into ships and pipelines, computers were involved in every step. They kept track of everything from barrels pumped to overtime pay for riggers.