Deadline Y2K (20 page)

“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.

Fifteen million barrels of fuel oil were stored next door to the East River power plant on 14th Street. Pipelines delivered oil from these storage tanks to the other plants in the city. The reliable supply of fuel oil was the first link in the automated process that transformed petroleum into electricity, and the flow of oil through the pipes was controlled by date-sensitive computers. At the power plant, using computers at every stage in the process, oil was weighed, tested for quality, processed with additives, transferred to furnaces and burned, heating boilers in which water was turned into high-pressure steam that pushed against turbines spinning at dizzying speed, rotating generators and producing electricity. The average fossil fuel power plant had 600 computer applications running on forty systems. Five thousand embedded chips controlled valves, sensors and gates. The electric current manufactured by the plant was transmitted, distributed and blended with the output of other plants through a matrix of systems, substations, transformers, rectifiers, relays, and switches with computers at every step. The grid connected the power plants together into one unified system that made the most efficient use of the moment-to-moment capacity of the grid as a whole. At the same time, the computer-controlled connections between components of the grid were the part of the chain most vulnerable to the millennium bug and the least tested. Large utilities that had spent hundreds of millions on Y2K remediation could be pulled down by smaller companies without the resources to become fully compliant.

Doc and Deep Volt had exchanged e-mail for a year before they met, then played cloak-and-dagger games, meeting in odd places, passing information back and forth, learning to trust one another. An outspoken but thoughtful systems operator, her name was Sarah McFadden, an overworked, good-humored, middle-aged African-American mom with four kids.

On 14th Street, Doc leaned against a wall to scan the crowd. The intersection was jammed with traffic, the twelve-foot sidewalks bustling with urgent errands. Harried people crowded into little groceries and delicatessens to buy as much as they could carry. Doc guessed half were preparing for New Year's Eve; the others were laying in supplies for a siege. There was an end-of-the-world giddiness in the air and an edge in people's voices. If the power went out, it wouldn't be like Tokyo. People in New York owned hundreds of thousands of guns. In the 1977 blackout, looting had started seconds after the lights blinked off. Mayor Giuliani's new, improved, polite New York was a thin veneer of civility that could vanish in an instant.

No one was shooting yet. Instead, music was in the air, a weirdly incongruous country and western tune blaring from a car radio about a hard-luck truck-driving man whose woman still loved him no matter how bad he screwed up. “Oh, America,” sang the cowboy, “you know how to forgive. You are vast and have room for us all, even sinners like me.” Doc tapped his boot to the simple beat as he searched the stream of faces for Sarah.

To his left Doc could see the red brick stacks of the East River Power Station, a key component in his plan to keep power up and running in Manhattan. Left on its own, the plant would fail. Bo had broken into every system, copied every application and database, and found fatal errors he knew were not corrected. At one minute after twelve, the Midnight Club's first order of business was to take control of the program Con Edison called “the functional override” that transferred operational control from the primary to the first backup. Authorization to open the functional override file required the missing password.

Deep beneath the sidewalk, an accelerating subway rattled the concrete, and a flood of humanity issued from the exit. Sarah was among them. A quintessential New Yorker, she carried herself with a magnificent confidence that reminded him of the tall woman he'd seen that day in midtown. It made no difference that Sarah was five-six and weighed two hundred pounds. Her eyes shined with intelligence, and she never lost her smile.

“There are some passwords I just can't get,” she said. “The functional override controls are among them.”

“We'll manage,” Doc said, disappointed.

“I don't see how.” Sarah's brow developed a tiny furrow, the closest she ever came to a frown.

“Maybe I'll break into the control room with a machine gun and say, ‘Hands up! Give me the password or eat hot lead!' Just like in the movies.”

“If you do, I'll let you in,” she said with a chuckle. “We could use a little cowboy action to get people off their asses. Otherwise, Bombay.”

“India? What about it?”

“Haven't you heard? Bombay is on fire.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“They lost everything, power, phones, water, and fires started that they can't put out.”

He saw it in his mind's eye, Bombay and all of India and its billion people and their unique interpretation of the chaos engulfing them. The wrath of Shiva, the wrath of Allah, the wrath of all the gods the world had ever known. He shuddered. “What do you think, Sarah?” he asked. “Is this the Apocalypse?”

“Doc,” she said, “tomorrow the whole world may be on fire, and if it is we'll just have to find a way to put it out. And we will. Keep the faith.” A twinkle danced in her eye. “You know, I've figured out what you're trying to do.”

“How's that?”

“You have a mainframe somewhere, and you think you can simulate a ConEd backup system when the primary connection to the grid crashes.”

“That's about the size of it, yeah.”

“I don't care who you are, but I wonder why you're doing it? Is somebody paying you?”

“No. I'm paying other people. I can pay you if you like.”

“I'm not doing this for money.”

“I didn't think so,” Doc said.

“I'm just glad to learn you aren't, either. I wish I could do more. I'll keep trying to get those passwords.”

“Sarah,” he said, “it may come to that. There may be much more you can do if things look bad. I've told you about Vermont, right?”