‘ ‘I regret that sincerely. We will of course offer compensation to the fami-
lies. It is our hope that we can conclude matters. We will not disturb your
embassy or its personnel, and we hope that you will grant us the same cour-
tesy, to maintain communications between our governments. Is it so hard,”
he asked, “to think of us as equals? Why did you feel the need to hurt us?
There was a time when a single airplane crash, due lo a mistake made by
your people at Boeing, killed more of my citi/.cns than tin- munlx-i of Ameri-
can lives lost in the Pacific. Did we scream at you? Did we threaten your
economic security, your very national survival? No. We did not. The lime
has come for my country to take her place in the world. You’ve withdrawn
from the Western Pacific. We must now look to our own defenses. To do
that we need what we need. How can we be sure that, having crippled our
nation in economic terms, you will not at some later time seek to destroy us
physically?”
“We would never do that!” Hanson objected.
“Easily said, Mr. Secretary. You did it once before, and as you yourself
just pointed out, you retain that ability.”
“We didn’t start that war,” van Damm pointed out.
“You did not?” the Ambassador asked. “By cutting off our oil and trade,
you faced us with ruin, and a war resulted. Just last month you threw our
economy into chaos, and you expected us to do nothing-because we had
not the ability to defend ourselves. Well, we do have that ability,” the Am-
bassador said. ‘ ‘Perhaps now we can treat as equals.
“So far as my government is concerned, the conflict is over. We will take
no further action against Americans. Your citizens are welcome in my coun-
try. We will amend our trade practices to accommodate your laws. This en-
tire incident could be presented to your public as an unfortunate accident,
and we can reach an agreement between ourselves on the Marianas. We
stand ready to negotiate a settlement that will serve the needs of your coun-
try and of mine. That is the position of my government.” With that, the Am-
bassador opened his portfolio and extracted the “note” which the rules of
international behavior required. He rose and handed it to the Secretary of
State.
“If you require my presence, I stand at your service. Good day.” He
walked back to the door, past the National Security Advisor, who didn’t fol-
low the Ambassador with his eyes as the others did. Ryan had said nothing at
all. That might have been disturbing in a Japanese, but not in an American,
really. He’d simply had nothing to say. Well, he was a European specialist,
wasn’t he?
The door closed and Ryan waited another few seconds before speaking.
“Well, that was interesting,” Ryan observed, checking his page of notes.
“He only told us one thing of real importance.”
“What do you mean?” Hanson demanded.
“Nuclear weapons and the delivery systems. The rest was embroidery,
really meant for a different audience. We still don’t know what they’re really
doing.”
All the King’s Horses
It hadn’t made the media yet, but that was about to change. The FBI was
already looking for Chuck Searls. They already knew that it wouldn’t be
easy, and the truth of the matter is that all they could do, on the basis of what
they had, was to question him. The six programmers who’d worked to some
greater or lesser extent on the Electra-Clerk 2.4.0 program had all been inter-
viewed, and all of them denied knowledge of what they all referred to as the
“Easter Egg,” in every case with a mixture of outrage at what had been
done and admiration at how. Only three widely separated lines of code, and
it had taken all six of them working together twenty-seven hours to find it.
Then had come the really bad news: all six of them, plus Searls, had had
access to the raw program. They were, after all, the six senior programmers
at the firm, and like people with identical security clearances, each could
access it whenever he or she wished, up to the very moment that it left the
office on the toaster-disk. In addition, while there were records of access,
each of them also had the ability to fiddle the coding on the master computer
and either erase the access-time reference or mix it with the others. For that
matter, the Easter Egg could have been in there for the months it had taken to
perfect the program, so finely crafted it was. Finally, one of them admitted
quite freely, any of them could have done it. There were no fingerprints on
computer programs. Of greater importance for the moment, there was no
way of undoing what Electra-Clerk 2.4.0 had done.
What it had done was sufficiently ghastly that the FBI agents on the case
were joking grimly that the advent of sealed thermopane windows in Wall
Street office buildings was probably saving thousands of lives. The last iden-
tifiable trade had been put up at 12:00:00, and beginning at 12:00:01, all the
records were gobbledygook. Literally billions–in fat-1, hundreds ol hillions
of dollars in transactions had disappeared, lost in the coinpuiei tajH1 records
of the Depository Trust Company.
The word had not yet gotten out. The event was still a secret, a tactic first
suggested by the senior executives of DTC, and so far approved hy holt) the
governors of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the New York
Stock Exchange. They’d had to explain the reasons for it to the FBI. In addi-
tion to all the money lost in a crash such as had taken place on Friday, there
would also have been quite a bit of money made through “puts,” the name
for derivative trades used by many brokers as hedges, and a means that al-
lowed profit on a falling market. In addition, every house kept its own rec-
ords of trades, and therefore, theoretically, it was possible over time to
reconstruct everything that had been erased by the Easter Egg. But if word of
the DTC disaster got out, it was possible that unscrupulous or merely desper-
ate traders would fiddle their own records. It was unlikely in the case of the
larger houses, but virtually inevitable in the case of smaller ones, and such
manipulation would be nearly impossible to prove-a classic case of one
person’s word against another’s, the worst sort of criminal evidence. Even
the biggest and most honorable trading houses had their miscreants, either
real or potential. There was just too much money involved, further compli-
cated by the ethical duty of traders to safeguard the money of their clients.
For that reason, over two hundred agents had visited the offices and
homes of the chief executive officers of every trading establishment within a
hundred-mile radius of New York. It was a feat easier than most had feared,
since many of the executives were using their weekend as a frantic work
period, and in most cases they cooperated, turning over their own computer-
ized records. It was estimated that 80 percent of the trades that had taken
place after noon Friday were now in the possession of federal authorities.
That was the easy part. The hard part, the agents had just learned, would be
to analyze them, to connect the trade made by every house with the corre-
sponding trade of every other. As irony would have it, a programmer from
Searls’ company had, without prompting, sketched out the minimum re-
quirements for the task: a high-end workstation for every company-set of
records, integrated through yet another powerful mainframe no smaller than
a Cray Y-MP (there was one at CIA, and three more at NSA, he told them),
along with a very slick custom program. There were thousands of traders
and institutions, some of whom had executed millions of transactions. The
permutations, he’d said to the two agents who were able to keep up with his
fast-forward discourse, were probably on the order of ten to the sixteenth
power . . . maybe eighteenth. The latter number, he’d had to explain, was a
million cubed, a million times a million times a million. A very large num-
ber. Oh, one other thing: they’d better be damned sure that they had the rec-
ords of every house and every trade or the whole thing could fall apart. Time
required to resolve all the trades? He’d been unwilling to speculate on that,
which didn’t please the agents who had to return to their office in the Javits
Federal Office Building and explain all this to their boss, who refused even
to use his office computer to type letters. The term Mission: IMPOSSIBLE came
to their minds on the short drive back to their offices.
And yet it had to be done. It wasn’t just a matter of stock trades, after all.