A Calculated Risk, Katherine Neville [english novels for students txt] 📗

bathe and change. I’d powdered and put on cologne and pulled on my floppy cashmere sweater just as the doorbell rang.

Pearl arrived in a flamingo-colored angora sweater that wrapped like a bathrobe, and Tavish in a T-shirt to match—surely picked out by Pearl. It read “Real Men Eat Beluga Caviar.”

We broke out the champagne, settling the bottle in the silver icer beside the coffee table, and flopped down on cushions to feed and relax in preparation for the night’s computer crunch.

“Sitting on top of the world like this, surrounded by flowers and champagne,” Pearl commented, “it makes me feel everything else—the bank, my awful career, that creep Karp—they’re all unreal.”

“But thanks to modern technology,” said Tavish, “they’re only a phone call away.”

That was the phone call that was going to change my life, I thought.

At nine, we were gathered around the big lacquered table in my study, Tavish tapping away, a determined expression on his face. Pearl and I, weary with exhaustion and a bit too much champagne, were now drinking strong black coffee and checking his work from time to time.

“This computer—Charles Babbage, is it?—he has some personality.” Tavish grinned from behind the terminal. “He’s just told me he expects to be paid overtime for this job.”

I’d worked out a deal with the Bobbsey Twins, to keep Charles up late tonight so we could “patch through” his mailing list to the bank’s computer and set up our new customer accounts.

The bank got new customers every day, so establishing accounts like these was standard procedure, as long as we’d have a beginning balance to start them off.

And we’d have that money—from the wire transfer system—as soon as our “program changes” were moved from the test system into live operation in production. Since we didn’t know until five o’clock that evening—when Bobby cracked the code—exactly what those new programs would do, it was a rush to get them written, and the authorized paperwork filled out to notify the data center these changes would be coming in tonight.

On the other hand, it was a convenient time of year to be asking for last-minute changes to production systems. There was always a huge queue of things to go into production on every system, just before year-end closing, and the wire transfer system was no exception. I just clumped our programs together with all the others before I left the office. I was sure that long before midnight, the codes would be inside the computer, catching wires and scattering that money through all our accounts.

But at ten o’clock, something went horribly wrong.

Pearl and I were out on the terrace in the late-night fog, calming down from the crazed hysteria of the day. Tavish was inside, wrapping things up. He’d just finished copying the list from New York, and released Charles Babbage to go off to nightly maintenance.

Suddenly, we heard him yell: “Bloody hell! Oh, bloody hell!”

We ran inside, and saw Tavish staring at the terminal screen with wild eyes.

“What’s happened?” I cried, dashing around the table to look at the screen.

Tavish’s voice seemed to reverberate from the back of my brain as I looked hopelessly at the green letters glowing there:

BANK OF THE WORLD TESTING

HAS ENDED FOR THE DAY.

HAVE A VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS

AND A HAPPY HOLIDAY!

“They’ve brought the bloody test system down!” Tavish was nearly screaming. “My bloody programs are sitting out there in the queue—and they’ve brought down the bloody system—two hours early!”

“Shit,” I said, staring numbly at the screen, wondering what in hell to do. I’d never felt so helpless in my life.

“And we were lolling around,” said Pearl, “eating Chinese food and swilling champagne, as if there were nothing but time. What exactly does this mean? What happens now?”

“‘From where you are, you can hear their dreams,’” said Tavish. “‘The dismays and despairs and flight and fall and big seas of their dreams …’”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Pearl, looking at Tavish as if he’d really flipped.

“Dylan Thomas,” said Tavish. “It means our dreams have died—our system has died—our project has died—we have died.”

He rose, and drifted from the room in a vaporlike trance, without glancing at either of us.

“Is this it?” Pearl asked me. “Isn’t there anything we can do?”

“I don’t know,” I told her, still staring at the screen. “I really have no idea.”

It was eleven P.M., and Pearl had just told Tavish she would dump her champagne over his head, if he said “If only we hadn’t …” even one more time.

That was when I got the idea. I knew it was a long shot—a wild-assed piss into the wind was more like it—but I was ready to try anything, rather than staring at walls all night and cursing myself for the next week until I could get on that system again.

“Bobby, can you write object code?” I asked him.

“A little—but it’s hardly a hobby of mine,” he assured me.

“What’s object code?” Pearl wanted to know.

“Machine language,” Tavish told her. “It’s what other programs are compiled into—bits and bytes—executable instructions, orders the machine can understand and carry out.”

“What are you cooking up?” Pearl asked me, but I was still looking at Tavish.

“Could you take the object code from those programs you wrote, and put it right into the live production library—as if it were already compiled and ready to run?”

“Sure, I guess so,” said Tavish with more than a trace of cynicism. “Of course, we’d have to get the operations department to bring down the wire transfer system—which is running right now twenty-four hours a day—and let me get on the machines to do it. But I’m sure they’d be delighted to halt production for us, if we explained we just had to get in there and rob the bank tonight.”

“I didn’t mean that,” I said, knowing that what I did mean was even more farfetched. “What I meant was—if I could get you on the production system right now—could you make the changes while the wire transfer system is still up and