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

terrific. I ordered one before I went back to my box, and was sipping the whipped cream off the top as I watched the gods walk over the rainbow bridge and enter Valhalla. The golden strains of music wafted over me and the whiskey warmed my bones. I mellowed so much that I nearly forgot about Kiwi, my aborted job, my ruined career, my failed life—my idiotic idea of retribution by showing up the entire banking system. Who was I kidding? But that was before I looked at the note.

The crescendos of music were rolling over the footlights in waves as I glanced at the crumpled wet piece of paper containing those mail messages I’d printed off just as I’d left my office. There were the usual—my tailor, my caterer, my dentist, a few from my staff—and one that, the time stamp indicated, had come in just after I’d finished talking with Charles in New York. I could feel the slow, heavy throb in my ears as I read the last message:

If you want to discuss your project, do call.—As always,

Alan Turing.

This was disturbing on two counts. First, Alan Turing was a pretty famous fellow—a computer wizard and a mathematician—and he didn’t know me from Adam. Second, he’d been dead for close to forty years.

A DAY AT THE BANK

An organized money market has many advantages. But it is not a school of social ethics or political responsibility.

—R. H. Tawney

It came to me in a flash that next morning after my night at the opera—as I stood drinking orange juice under a scalding shower—who Alan Turing, the phantom phone caller, really was.

Turing—the real one—was a math whiz from Cambridge who went on to develop some of the earliest digital computers. In his short life, only forty-one years, he became one of the leading figures in British data processing, and was widely regarded as the father of artificial intelligence.

Most computer types had read his works at some time or another—but I knew someone who was such an expert, he’d lectured on them. He was one of the foremost computer gurus in the United States—a technocrat of the first water.

He’d been my mentor twelve years earlier, when I’d first gone to New York. He was the most reclusive person I’d met—a man of a thousand faces and as many accomplishments. I might know more about him than anyone else did, but what I knew could barely fill a page. Though I hadn’t seen him in years, and heard from him only rarely, he’d been the most important influence in my career and—other than Bibi—the largest in my life. His name was Dr. Zoltan Tor.

Everyone in computers knew the name: Tor was the father of networking, and had written the classic texts on communications theory. So famous was he, that younger people, reading the classics he’d written, imagined him to be long dead. Though he was not yet forty, and in strapping good health.

But now that he’d phoned—after all these years—how long was my health going to last? Whenever Tor decided to involve himself in my life, I got into trouble. Perhaps trouble was not the right word, I thought as I stepped from the shower. The word was danger.

Among Tor’s many accomplishments was his mastery of cryptography. He’d written a work about it that was committed to memory by all research associates of the FBI. That’s why I was nervous, because the book covered every aspect of the art of cracking computer codes, “hacking,” stealing information—and it told how such thefts might be prevented.

Why was Tor/Turing phoning now? How could he have learned so quickly what sort of “research” I’d been up to last night? It was almost as if he could read my mind over three thousand miles, and already knew what I was thinking of doing. I decided I’d better find out—and quickly—what he thought about what I’d been thinking.

But first I had to find him. Not simple, given a chap who didn’t believe in phones or mailing addresses, or in leaving messages under his own name.

Tor owned a company through which he handled financial transactions; it was called Delphic Group, after the oracle, no doubt, but its number wasn’t listed in the Manhattan phone directory. That was okay because I had the number.

Tor never visited his office, however, and when you called there, you got a strange response. I gave it a try.

“Delphic,” the receptionist snapped, not lavish with information.

“I’m trying to reach Dr. Tor—Dr. Zoltan Tor. Is he there?” Fat chance.

“Sorry,” she said, not sounding it, “you’ve dialed the wrong number. Check your listing, please.” It was like the goddamned CIA.

“Well, if you hear from someone whose name sounds like that, will you give him the message?” I said impatiently.

“What message are you referring to?”

“Tell him Verity Banks phoned,” I snapped, and slammed the phone down before she could ask me to spell or repeat it.

The veil of secrecy that shrouded Tor’s life—more impenetrable than the security systems of the world banking community—was as annoying to me as, ten years ago, his constant interference in my life had been.

Meanwhile, I had a job to do. It was nine o’clock by the time I’d dressed, gone downstairs, pulled my battered BMW out into the thick soup of San Francisco fog, and headed to work—keeping bankers’ hours. I made it a practice always to rise at the crack of dawn; but in winter, dawn doesn’t crack until eight-thirty. I had the oddest feeling that—late start or no—it was going to be a very long day.

The banking profession was riddled with consultants as a leper was riddled with sores. At the Bank of the World, we had efficiency experts to tell us how to manage our time, industrial engineers who told us how to manage our work, and industrial psychologists who helped us manage our environment. I never paid attention to any of them.

I wasn’t interested, for example, in those studies