Debt of Honor

  “Hi, Clarice.” Murray stood up for his luncheon guest. He thought of her as his own Dr. Ruth. Short, a tiny bit overweight, Dr. Golden was in her middle fifties, with twinkling blue eyes and a face that always seemed on the edge of delivering the punch line of a particularly good joke. It was that similarity between them that had fostered their bond. Both were bright, serious professionals, and both had elegant intellectual disguises. Hearty-fellow and hearty-lady-well-met, the life of whatever party they might attend, but under the smiles and the chuckles were keen minds that missed little and collected much. Murray thought of Golden as one hell of a potential cop. Golden had much the same professional evaluation of Murray.

  “To what do I owe this honor, ma’am?” Dan asked in his usual courtly voice. The waiter delivered the menus, and she waited pleasantly for him to depart. It was Murray’s first clue, and though the smile remained fixed on his face, his eyes focused in a little more sharply on his diminutive lunch guest.

  “I need some advice, Mr. Murray,” Golden replied, giving another signal. “Who has jurisdiction over a crime committed on federal property?”

  “The Bureau, always,” Dan answered, leaning back in his seat and checking his service pistol. Business to Murray was enforcing the law, and feeling his handgun in its accustomed place acted as a sort of personal touchstone, a reminder that, elevated and important as the sign on his office door said he was today, he had started out doing bank robberies in the Philadelphia Field Division, and his badge and gun still made him a sworn member of his country’s finest police agency.

  “Even on Capitol Hill?” Clarice asked.

  “Even on Capitol Hill,” Murray repeated. Her subsequent silence surprised him. Golden was never reticent about much. You always knew what she was thinking—well, Murray amended, you knew what she wanted you to know. She played her little games, just as he did. “Talk to me, Dr. Golden.”

  “Rape.”

  Murray nodded, setting the menu down. “Okay, first of all, please tell me about your patient.”

  “Female, age thirty-five, single, never married. She was referred to me by her gynecologist, an old friend. She came to me clinically depressed. I’ve had three sessions with her.”

  Only three, Murray thought. Clarice was a witch at this stuff, so perceptive. Jesus, what an interrogator she would have made with her gentle smile and quiet motherly voice.

  “When did it happen?” Names could wait for the moment. Murray would start with the barest facts of the case.

  “Three years ago.”

  The FBI agent—he still preferred “Special Agent” to his official title of Deputy Assistant Director—frowned immediately. “Long time, Clarice. No forensics, I suppose.”

  “No, it’s her word against his—except for one thing.” Golden reached into her purse and pulled out photocopies of the Beringer letter, blown up in the copying process. Murray read through the pages slowly while Dr. Golden watched his face for reaction.

  “Holy shit,” Dan breathed while the waiter hovered twenty feet away, thinking his guests were a reporter and a source, as was hardly uncommon in Washington. “Where’s the original?”

  “In my office. I was very careful handling it,” Golden told him.

  That made Murray smile. The monogrammed paper was an immediate help. In addition, paper was especially good at holding fingerprints, especially if kept tucked away in a cool, dry place, as such letters usually were. The Senate aide in question would have been fingerprinted as part of her security-clearance process, which meant the likely author of this document could be positively identified. The papers gave time, place, events, and also announced her desire to die. Sad as it was, it made this document something akin to a dying declaration, therefore, arguably, admissible in federal district court as evidentiary material in a criminal case. The defense attorney would object—they always did—and the objection would be overruled—it always was—and the jury members would hear every word, leaning forward as they always did to catch the voice from the grave. Except in this case it wouldn’t be a jury, at least not at first.

  Murray didn’t like anything about rape cases. As a man and a cop, he viewed that class of criminal with special contempt. It was a smudge on his own manhood that someone could commit such a cowardly, foul act. More professionally disturbing was the troublesome fact that rape cases so often came down to one person’s word against another’s. Like most investigative cops, Murray distrusted all manner of eyewitness testimony. People were poor observers—it was that simple—and rape victims, crushed by the experience, often made poor witnesses, their testimony further attacked by the defense counsel. Forensic evidence, on the other hand, was something you could prove, it was incontrovertible. Murray loved that sort of evidence.

  “Is it enough to begin a criminal investigation?”

  Murray looked up and spoke quietly: “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And who he is—”

  “My current job—well, I’m sort of the street-version of the executive assistant to Bill Shaw. You don’t know Bill, do you?”

  “Only by reputation.”

  “It’s all true,” Murray assured her. “We were class-mates at Quantico, and we broke in the same way, in the same place, doing the same thing. A crime is a crime, and we’re cops, and that’s the name of the song, Clarice.”

  But even as his mouth proclaimed the creed of his agency, his mind was saying, Holy shit. There was a great big political dimension to this one. The President didn’t need the trouble. Well, who ever needed this sort of thing? For goddamned sure, Barbara Linders and Lisa Beringer didn’t need to be raped by someone they’d trusted. But the real bottom line was simple: thirty years earlier, Daniel E. Murray had graduated from the FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia, had raised his right hand to the sky and sworn an oath to God. There were gray areas. There always would be. A good agent had to use his judgment, know which laws could be bent, and how far. But not this far, and not this law. Bill Shaw was of the same cut. Blessed by fate to occupy a position as apolitical as an office in Washington, D.C., could be, Shaw had built his reputation on integrity, and was too old to change. A case like this would start in his seventh-floor office.

  “I have to ask, is this for-real?”

  “My best professional judgment is that my patient is telling the truth in every detail.”

  “Will she testify?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your evaluation of the letter?”

  “Also quite genuine, psychologically speaking.” Murray already knew that from his own experience, but someone—first he, then other agents, and ultimately a jury—needed to hear it from a pro.

  “Now what?” the psychologist asked.

  Murray stood, to the surprised disappointment of the hovering waiter. “Now we drive down to headquarters and meet with Bill. We’ll get case agents in to set up a file. Bill and I and the case agent will walk across the street to the Department and meet with the Attorney General. After that, I don’t know exactly. We’ve never had one like this—not since the early seventies, anyway—and I’m not sure of procedure just yet. The usual stuff with your patient. Long, tough interviews. We’ll talk to Ms. Beringer’s family, friends, look for papers, diaries. But that’s the technical side. The political side will be touchy.” And for that reason, Dan knew, he’d be the man running the case. Another Holy shit! crossed his mind, as he remembered the part in the Constitution that would govern the whole procedure. Dr. Golden saw the wavering in his eyes and, rare for her, misread what it meant.

  “My patient needs—”

  Murray blinked. So what? he asked himself. It’s still a crime.

  “I know, Clarice. She needs justice. So does Lisa Beringer. You know what? So does the government of the United States of America.”

  He didn’t look like a computer-software engineer. He wasn’t at all scruffy. He wore a pinstriped suit, carried a briefcase. He might have said that it was a disguise required by his clientele and the professional atm
osphere of the area, but the simple truth was that he preferred to look neat.

  The procedure was just as straightforward as it could be. The client used Stratus mainframes, compact, powerful machines that were easily networked—in fact they were the platform of choice for many bulletin-board services because of their reasonable price and high electronic reliability. There were three of them in the room. “Alpha” and “Beta”—so labeled with white letters on blue plastic boards—were the primaries, and took on the front-line duties on alternate days, with one always backing up the other. The third machine, “Zulu,” was the emergency backup, and whenever Zulu was operating, you knew that a service team was either already there or on the way. Another facility, identical in every way except for the number of people around, was across the East River, with a different physical location, different power source, different phone lines, different satellite uplinks. Each building was a high-rise fire-resistant structure with an automatic sprinkler system around the computer room, and a DuPont 1301 system inside of it, the better to eliminate a fire in seconds. Each system-trio had battery backups sufficient to run the hardware for twelve hours. New York safety and environmental codes perversely did not allow the presence of emergency generators in the buildings, an annoyance to the systems engineers who were paid to worry about such things. And worry they did, despite the fact that the duplication, the exquisite redundancies that in a military context were called “defense in depth,” would protect against anything and everything that could be imagined.

  Well, nearly everything.

  On the front service panel of each of the mainframes was an SCSI port. This was an innovation for the new models, an implicit bow to the fact that desktop computers were so powerful that they could upload important information far more easily than the old method of hanging a tape reel.

  In this case, the upload terminal was a permanent fixture of the system. Attached to the overall system control panel which controlled Alpha, Beta, and Zulu was a third-generation Power PC, and attached to it in turn was a Bernoulli removable-disk drive. Colloquially known as a “toaster” because its disk was about the size of a piece of bread, this machine had a gigabyte of storage, far more than was needed for this program.

  “Okay?” the engineer asked.

  The system controller moved his mouse and selected Zulu from his screen of options. A senior operator behind him confirmed that he’d made the right selection. Alpha and Beta were doing their normal work, and could not be disturbed.

  “You’re up on Zulu, Chuck.”

  “Roger that,” Chuck replied with a smile. The pinstriped engineer slid the cartridge into the slot and waited for the proper icon to appear on the screen. He clicked on it, opening a new window to reveal the contents of PORTA-1, his name for the cartridge.

  The new window had only two items in it: INSTALLER and ELECTRA-CLERK-2.4.0. An automatic antivirus program immediately swept through the new files, and after five seconds pronounced them clean.

  “Looking good, Chuck,” the sys-con told him. His supervisor nodded concurrence.

  “Well, gee, Rick, can I deliver the baby now?”

  “Hit it.”

  Chuck Searls selected the INSTALL icon and double-clicked it.

  ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO REPLACE “ELECTRA-CLERK

  2.3.1” WITH NEW PROGRAM ”ELECTRA-CLERK 2.4.0”?

  a box asked him. Searls clicked the “YES” box.

  ARE YOU REALLY sure????

  another box asked immediately.

  “Who put that in?”

  “I did,” the sys-con answered with a grin.

  “Funny.” Searls clicked YES again.

  The toaster drive started humming. Searls liked systems that you could hear as they ran, the whip-whip sounds of the moving heads added to the whir of the rotating disk. The program was only fifty megabytes. The transfer took fewer seconds than were needed for him to open his bottle of spring water and take a sip.

  “Well,” Searls asked as he slid his chair back from the console, “you want to see if it works?”

  He turned to look out. The computer room was walled in with glass panels, but beyond them he could see New York Harbor. A cruise liner was heading out; medium size, painted white. Heading where? he wondered. Someplace warm, with white sand and blue skies and a nice bright sun all the time. Someplace a hell of a lot different from New York City, he was sure of that. Nobody took a cruise to a place like the Big Apple. How nice to be on that ship, heading away from the blustery winds of fall. How much nicer still not to return on it, Searls thought with a wistful smile. Well, airplanes were faster, and you didn’t have to ride them back either.

  The sys-con, working on his control console, brought Zulu on-line. At 16:10:00 EST, the backup machine started duplicating the jobs being done by Alpha, and simultaneously backed up by Beta. With one difference. The throughput monitor showed that Zulu was running slightly faster. On a day like this, Zulu normally tended to fall behind, but now it was running so fast that the machine was actually “resting” for a few seconds each minute.

  “Smokin’, Chuck!” the sys-con observed. Searls drained his water bottle, dropped it in the nearest trash bucket, and walked over.

  “Yeah, I cut out about ten thousand lines of code. It wasn’t the machines, it was the program. It just took us a while to figure the right paths through the boards. I think we have it now.”

  “What’s different?” the senior controller asked. He knew quite a bit about software design.

  “I changed the hierarchy system, how it hands things off from one parallel board to another. Still needs a little work on synchronicity, tally isn’t as fast as posting. I think I can beat that in another month or two, cut some fat out of the front end.”

  The sys-con punched a command for the first benchmark test. It came up at once. “Six percent faster than two-point-three-point-one. Not too shabby.”

  “We needed that six percent,” the supervisor said, meaning that he needed more. Trades just ran too heavy sometimes, and like everyone in the Depository Trust Company, he lived in fear of falling behind.

  “Send me some data at the end of the week and maybe I can deliver a few more points to you,” Searls promised.

  “Good job, Chuck.”

  “Thanks, Bud.”

  “Who else uses this?”

  “This version? Nobody. A custom variation runs the machines over at CHIPS.”

  “Well, you’re the man,” the supervisor noted generously. He would have been less generous had he thought it through. The supervisor had helped design the entire system. All the redundancies, all the safety systems, the way that tapes were pulled off the machines every night and driven upstate. He’d worked with a committee to establish every safeguard that was necessary to the business he was in. But the quest for efficiency—and perversely, the quest for security—had created a vulnerability to which he was predictably blind. All the computers used the same software. They had to. Different software in the different computers, like different languages in an office, would have prevented, or at the very least impeded, cross-talk among the individual systems; and that would have been self-defeating. As a result, despite all the safeguards there was a single common point of vulnerability for all six of his machines. They all spoke the same language. They had to. They were the most important, if the least known, link in the American trading business.

  Even here, DTC was not blind to the potential hazard. ELECTRA-CLERK 2.4.0 would not be uploaded to Alpha and Beta until it had run for a week on Zulu, and then another week would pass before they were loaded onto the backup site, whose machines were labeled “Charlie,” “Delta,” and “Tango.” That was to ensure that 2.4.0 was both efficient and “crash-worthy,” an engineering term that had come into the software field a year earlier. Soon, people would get used to the new software, marvel at its faster speed. All the Stratus machines would speak exactly the same programming language, trade information back and forth in an electronic conversation
of ones and zeros, like friends around a card table talking business.

  Soon they would all know the same joke. Some would think it a good one, but not anyone at DTC.

  3

  Collegium

  “So, we’re agreed?” the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board asked. Those around the table nodded. It wasn’t that hard a call. For the second time in the past three months, President Durling had made it known, quietly, through the Secretary of the Treasury, that he would not object to another half-point rise in the Discount Rate. That was the interest rate which the Federal Reserve charged to banks that borrowed money—where else would they borrow such sums, except from the Fed? Any rise in that rate, of course, was passed immediately on to the consumer.

  It was a constant balancing act, for the men and women around the polished oak table. They controlled the quantity of money in the American economy. As though by turning the valve that opened or closed the floodgate on an irrigation dam, they could regulate the amount of currency that existed, trying always not to provide too much or too little.

  It was more complex than that, of course. Money had little physical reality. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing, located less than a mile away, had neither the paper nor the ink to make enough one-dollar bills for what the Fed parceled out every day. “Money” was mainly an electronic expression, a matter of sending a message: You, First National Bank of Podunk, now have an additional three million dollars which you may lend to Joe’s Hardware, or Jeff Brown’s Gas-and-Go, or for new homeowners to borrow as mortgage loans to pay back for the next twenty years. Few of these people were paid in cash—with credit cards there was less for a robber to steal, an employee to embezzle, or most inconveniently of all, a clerk to count, recount, and walk to the local branch of the bank. As a result, what appeared by the magic of computer E-mail or teleprinter message was lent out by written draft, to be repaid later by yet another theoretical expression, usually a check written on a small slip of special paper, often decorated with the picture of a flying eagle or a fishing boat on some lake that didn’t exist, because the banks competed for customers and people liked such things.