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

to put them has disappeared. Have you guys been switching peripheral devices on us?”

“Nobody fucks with this system,” Martinelli assured me, patting a nearby processor. “This here wire transfer system runs on the mainframes—the most reliable, quality-assured system we got.”

“Unless somebody decided to switch a few plugs,” I said condescendingly. “We’re paying this engineer here—don’t let him sit on his thumbs. Let’s get the bug detector mounted, give him clearance to enter the supervisor, and maybe we can call it a night.”

The bug detector was a diagnostic program that acted as a kind of computer physician—buzzing around inside the machine while other programs were running, examining them to see whether they were sick. If you permitted it to override the “supervisor”—which governed the entire system—it could go in and make changes to those “sick” programs, without anyone being the wiser. Tor had told me to set things up this way, and to let him do the rest.

Martinelli—muttering something about women and ships—whipped a tape off a nearby rack and slapped it on a drive, flipping the leader around until the ribbon sucked down into the shaft. He let the glass door slide up, walked over to the console, and punched in a few things on the keyboard.

“You’re on,” he told Tor, and stepped away from the console.

“Do you have a butt I could bum?” I asked Martinelli, knowing that he loved smokes, and that he wasn’t permitted to do so within that climate-controlled atmosphere. “Let’s let this guy earn his exorbitant fee—shall we?” I gestured toward Tor.

Martinelli and I went down the loading ramp to the small coffee room beyond the data center’s sliding glass doors. From the corner of my eye, I glimpsed Tor at the console, his long fingers caressing the keys. I preferred not to think what might happen if something went wrong and he made even one tiny slip.

I kept Martinelli out in the coffee room as long as possible, hanging on his every word about how his team was faring in the interbank bowling league. The graveyard-shift coffee was—if possible—even worse than what we got during the day.

When at last we returned to the machine room, Tor was still standing there, his back to us, tapping away.

“Well, Abelard?” I said, clapping him on the shoulder. “How’s it going?”

“Just about finished—Héloise,” he replied, shrugging me off with disdain. In profile, I noticed that his skin was even paler than usual, and that his brow was beaded with a thin, faint line of moisture. I hoped to God everything was going all right.

I glanced with concern at the listings before him, which Tavish had given him—listings he’d never seen before tonight. They were all in hexadecimal code—totally meaningless to me. But Tor had scribbled a few scratchy-looking notes in red ink in the margins. And though they were gibberish to most people, I knew my life and the fate of all of us depended upon their being a hundred percent accurate. Just one slip of the wrist, and we might as well both commit hara-kiri right here on the data-center floor.

“Did you find out what it was?” Martinelli asked Tor, crossing over with a few of the night-shift operators in tow. “We run a clean ship here—we never got no message of a problem. What did you do to fix it?”

“Elementary, my dear chap,” said Tor, logging off the system, to my great relief. “I changed the device designation and let her rip.”

“Impossible,” said Martinelli. “You mean, in the program—while the program is running?”

“Really—it was nothing at all,” Tor assured him. “Just give us a call anytime.”

We moved through the last set of mantraps to the elevators. Down in the garage I could barely climb into the car, my legs were shaking so. I felt cold beads of sweat chilling my brow, and a clammy lump at the pit of my stomach. I expected alarms to go off at any moment, sealing us into the building when the computer at last encountered Tor’s newly inserted code. But I drove up the ramp and we left without a flutter.

Tor had been strangely silent throughout our escape from the scene of the crime. I wondered what he was thinking, and whether he’d been as scared as I.

“I hope the goddamned system doesn’t abort at three in the morning,” I told him, wending my way in the dark through the blinding fog.

“What effusive gratitude,” he said. “Remind me to fly three thousand miles in the dead of night to help you out again sometime.”

“I’ll buy you a brandy when we get back to my place,” I said.

“We’re not going to your place—that white death trap,” he informed me. “If you’re longing for a shroud, my dear, it seems to me you can stand out on any street corner in this entire ghastly white metropolis. You still belong in New York.”

“I hope you’re not planning to take me there tonight,” I said, peering through the windows to try to find the street I was driving on.

“I certainly should do so—but sadly the last plane has left by now,” he explained. “Keep going straight until you reach the bay—I’ve studied a map of this dreadful town while I was en route to you. We’re going to a place called Fisherman’s Wharf.”

“Maybe you’ve studied a map,” I told him, “but you didn’t study the local customs. It’s after one A.M.—everything in San Francisco’s shut down by now.”

“Disgusting primitives,” muttered Tor, whose own town—like Las Vegas—never closed. “However, keep driving as I said. I’ve been assured that the place where I’m taking you will remain open as late as we like.”

I didn’t like—but I knew I owed Tor not only a favor, but my life. I doubted there were many folks on the planet who would or could have done for anyone what he’d done for me tonight, least of all on such short notice. If he wanted to see the bloody wharf, why not?

We pulled up near Fisherman’s Wharf—there was plenty of parking