A Calculated Risk by Katherine Neville (best time to read books .txt) 📗

leave me in a lurch like the one I was in tonight—most especially when he had the chance to flourish all that technological magic he alone could wield. And it was going to take magic, as Tavish and I understood only too well.

In the kitchen, I pulled the list of emergency numbers from the drawer, running my finger down until I found the home number of the VP of operations. Like mine, his number was there as a last resort, if a major production run aborted during the night.

I knew Chuck Gibbs, the VP of operations. We’d spent plenty of long, bleak nights in the past, down at the center, when production work had crashed. I also knew that Chuck had five little kids, and a wife who was getting tired of sleeping alone with cold feet. Tonight was Christmas Eve—when none of them would be delighted to hear the news I was about to spring on them.

“Chuck, this is Verity Banks from Electronic Funds Transfer,” I said when he answered the phone. “I hate to disturb you tonight of all nights—but I’m afraid there’s been a crisis in production.”

I could hear tiny voices squealing in the background—and a woman’s voice saying, “I don’t believe it—on Christmas Eve?”

“Oh, that’s okay,” Chuck told me. “The pitfalls of the profession, I guess.” He sounded as if I’d just track-cleated across his mother’s grave, and he added hopefully, “Is it something maybe one of the operators could resolve?”

The operators were already there at the data center, while I knew that Chuck lived in Walnut Creek, across the bay—a good hour’s drive away.

“I’m afraid not,” I told him. “There seems to be a malfunctioning drive, but we can’t bring down the system to replace it. You know it’s year end—our peak time of the year. We might crash the system if we start switching off peripherals in the middle of production. If we accidentally crashed, we’d have to cold-start the system and do roll-forward recovery.”

“That’s bad,” he admitted, verging on real depression.

Damned right it was—that’s why I’d thought it up: it could take weeks, even longer, if we had to recover all those live transactions that were pouring in just now. If Chuck had to shut down production, the bank could lose tens of thousands of dollars—and the news wouldn’t exactly be private. Even the press would hop on it, if a bank the size of ours went down over Christmas.

“I’m going to bring in a field engineer,” I told Chuck, “just to be on the safe side.” This would save Chuck’s ass as well, if something went wrong. “But I feel that a high-level manager should be present to make a decision, if the situation is worse than we think.”

“I agree,” Chuck said, sounding absolutely miserable. I could hear his wife saying, “You’re not driving the Bay Bridge on Christmas Eve—and that’s final!”

“I’ll tell you what”—I tossed the bone—“if you like, I can go over there in your place. I live only five minutes from the data center—and I don’t have kiddies waiting for Santa to come down the chimney! If it’s serious, I could call you—but it seems a shame for you to drive so far, if it turns out it’s not absolutely necessary.”

“Boy—that would be terrific!” Chuck said, nearly leaping through the phone to shake my hand. “You’re sure you don’t mind?”

“I know you’d do the same for me,” I told him. “But I’ll need clearance, of course, to bring in the engineer.”

“Done,” Chuck said with enormous relief. “Martinelli’s in charge of graveyard shift—you’ll be cleared for entry in less than half an hour. And say, Banks, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your doing this.”

“No problem,” I told him. “We’ll hope for the best.”

I put down the phone and went out to the living room. Tor glanced up from his conversation with Tavish and Pearl, and smiled.

“I’ve just learned of your plight, my dear, from your colleagues here,” he informed me, beaming broadly. “I gather I’m expected to lend a hand. I suppose it’s the fate of genius to constantly prove itself, but I’m always happy to be of service. Just remember, my feathered chickadee—after tonight, you owe me one.”

“Let’s go then,” I told him, wondering how it always happened this way. “We haven’t much time—we’ve got a date with a machine.”

It was amazing that one simple phone call could enable us to melt through six layers of security and penetrate the inner sanctum without a flurry. We’d agreed to let Pearl and Tavish go home—that we’d call if we needed bail.

Tor strolled behind me, head bowed, carrying the briefcase containing Tavish’s object code for the programs we needed to load, and wearing a battered trench coat we’d borrowed from Tavish. It had seemed more appropriately teckie, to suit his image as a field engineer.

“Boss says you’ve got a malfunctioning drive,” said Martinelli, the night-shift supervisor, as we came into the brightly lit data center.

A chubby Italian in sweatshirt and jeans with a flattop military crew cut, Martinelli oversaw the functioning of millions of dollars of state-of-the-art hardware, spread over ten acres of floor space that covered three stories at the Bank of the World.

“We’ve checked all the drives,” he added as Tor set down his briefcase with professional decorum, “but we can’t find anything wrong at all.”

“We’re getting an error message when we try to write on drive seventy,” I told Martinelli. “Perhaps you’ve overlooked something.”

He bristled a bit, but checked his configuration list.

“There’s no such drive ’genned onto this system,” he assured me, which meant that the system refused to recognize a drive with that number, because it had never been told about it.

Of course, I was lying my brains out—flying by the seat of my pants. I just wanted to get Tor onto the goddamned system, in any way possible.

“That must be the problem, then,” I told Martinelli. “Our system’s trying to capture wire transfers—but somehow, the address of the drive where it wants