Deadline Y2K (19 page)

At the same time the bridge and tunnel crowd of zesty youth was pouring into Manhattan for the big party. With the official celebration still twelve hours away, a river of booze was already flowing down the Great White Way to Times Square. New York was tanking up. It was New Year's Eve.

*   *   *

En route to the Metro Tech Center in Brooklyn, Copeland and Jody joined the crowd pushing into the Wall Street subway station. The overheated platform was packed, stinking with stress radiating from people fleeing the financial district. Thirty TVs suspended from the ceiling bombarded the restless crowd with news from Asia, but things were happening at too dizzy a pace for most to comprehend, including the New York 1 reporters who were clearly shaken by the scope of events.

“In the People's Republic of China, a huge millennium celebration at the Great Wall just outside Beijing turned to tragedy when two government helicopters crashed in midair and fell into the crowd of more than one million. The cause of the crash remains unknown, and the number of casualties is estimated in the hundreds.

“Here in New York, if you're planning a trip to the bank today for some holiday cash, you can expect a wait. A spokesman for Citibank told us just a few minutes ago that all branches are well supplied with cash to meet the needs of customers; however, we have reports of depositors lining up at New York's 3500 bank branches and 12,000 ATM machines. Unfortunately, armored cars delivering cash to the banks are stuck in traffic all over town.

“Now we turn to national news. In Charlotte, North Carolina, this morning, a branch of NationsBank was the scene of a fatal shooting when a man who was next in line when the branch ran out of money shot a teller and two security guards before being killed by police.”

The reporter paused, silently reading the teleprompter, looked away and then back at the camera. “I think we should take a break,” she said. As the camera cut away to the co-anchor, she said off-camera, “I don't want to read that,” and the director went to a commercial.

“Ski Utah!” blared the TVs. “The holidays are here and you can be spending them in a winter paradise…”

On the opposite platform a cohort of drunken college students started a chorus of “Auld Lang Syne.”

“My God,” Jody said to Copeland. “I wonder what she—”

“They're going to have to close the banks,” Copeland interjected. “It's the only thing that makes sense.”

“That will just make things worse,” Jody said. “Look at what happened down in Charlotte, and God knows what the next story was. I've never seen a reporter act like that.”

The rails began to vibrate and headlights appeared in the tunnel as the subway train approached. In defiance of the new, improved, graffiti-free New York, an artist had sprayed the front of the lead car with a flashy “2000.” The heavy train clanked into the station, wiping out all sound from the TVs. Copeland and Jody squeezed into the third car.

The passengers were more talkative with one another than usual. People exchanged worried but sympathetic glances. A middle-aged Hispanic woman tried to comfort a young mother sitting next to her with a baby on her lap.

“It can't be that bad, can it?” the elder woman said to the weeping stranger.

“I don't know what I'm going to do. The lines at the bank were so long, and I have to get home and feed my children, and my boss said he didn't know if he could pay us next week or not.”

“Trust in God, my child.”

At the rear of the car a man started shouting into a cellphone, “God damn it, Ira, I told you sell every Jap stock this morning. What do you mean, you can't get through? What the hell do you think I pay you for?”

“Hey,” shouted another voice. “Watch your language there, mister.”

“Shut the fuck up and get away from me. Hey!
Hey!
”

“Maybe you'll think again before you call somebody a Jap.”

The crowd surged away from the confrontation, compressing the passengers toward the front as the train rattled into the next station. When the doors opened, Jody caught a glimpse of a man lying on the floor, his glasses shattered, his nose broken. He groaned, but the mood in the car had instantly shifted. No one moved to help him, and his assailant was gone. The car filled up again, the new passengers gazing upon the fallen man like a piece of litter.

Copeland stared out the window at a huge advertisement boosting Chase Manhattan. “Year 2000. We're ready.” As the train began to move, the ad dissolved into a computer screen, the red button, the face of Edwards the CFO of the bank, and then the images were replaced by the dirty white tile that lined the station walls. The dark tunnel swallowed the train and his mind went blank, dangerously close to shutting down completely.

The Metro Tech Center was on Myrtle Avenue in central Brooklyn, a twenty-minute subway ride from Wall Street. At each stop more people got off than got on, the car thinned out and left a few vacant seats. Somewhere along the way the man who'd been assaulted, the young mother, and the gracious Hispanic lady exited the train, and Jody sat down. Copeland remained standing, clutching the overhead bar with both hands as he tried to imagine what he would find in the Tech Center's computers. Rolling under the city, he wished the train would never stop. He wanted to continue right to the end of Long Island and across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe and just keep going in the opposite direction of the millennium bug, reversing time, reversing all the flawed code, undoing all the damage and putting things back together the way they were. Yet in his larcenous heart he knew things would never be the same. His belief system was shattered, as scrambled as data spewing from an infected computer. He'd believed in money and technology, and they'd betrayed him. He'd thought himself above the fray, but the implacable rotation of the planet meant that when the subway ride ended, the bug would still be moving toward New York, decimating time zone after time zone, destroying economies without regard to race, creed, religion, history or anything else. The bug was the great leveler, treating rich and poor with equal disdain. Even him.

It came to him in a moment of great clarity that he was just as responsible for the bug as anyone else, perhaps more so, although he certainly had done his share to fight it. For his own profit, of course, plenty of profit, oodles of profit, but there was nothing wrong with that. He was rich, but Doc was right. He was greedy. He wanted too much, and what was waiting for him in the Tech Center was the police. The train ride would end in jail. He was convinced Doc had set him up to take a fall.

“Donald?”

Jody was shaking his shoulder.

“Donald? Our stop is next.”

The station flashing past the windows seemed to awaken him from his reverie, and Jody led him off the train, through the station and into the clear light of Brooklyn.

On the surface life appeared normal. Traffic moved, the shops and stores displayed New Year's trinkets, pigeons fluttered overhead. Along Myrtle Avenue, banners strung between the streetlights read, “Brooklyn Welcomes 2000.”

Across the street four unremarkable office buildings composed the Metro Tech Center, innocuous structures with no identification. Copeland had been there many times and had a security pass, but he hesitated before heading for the entrance.

Jody directed them into a coffeehouse and ordered double espresso for each of them. A languid waiter collected newspapers from empty tables. In a corner booth, a young woman in black turtleneck, black jeans, and silver jewelry studied the classifieds, gave up, rested her chin on her hands and scrutinized three young men with laptops at the next table.

“Code,” Copeland said, stirring his coffee.

“What code?” Jody asked, puzzled. “The 82 lines in Doc's message?”

“I should have learned more code,” he said in a rambling voice. “It's not a good idea to have employees who can do things you can't supervise.”

“What are you talking about, Donald?”

“Doc,” he said. “He goes into his private computer lab with his weird people for hours at a time, and they're in there writing code to do I don't know what. You know, I've never been in there. Maybe that was a mistake.”

“Drink your coffee. It's good,” Jody coaxed. “Doc doesn't let anyone in there except his freaks.”

“I don't know what they do in there.”

“Donald, what are the total sales of Copeland Solutions 2000? From the beginning.”

“About 400 mil.”

“Doesn't that answer your question? Doc's people wrote the software that made you one of the largest vendors of Y2K software in the world. What's your problem?”

“You sound like a PR lady.”

“I am a PR lady, but right now I feel like a psychiatric nurse.”

“How would you know what that feels like?”

“My mother is one,” Jody answered, pleased to hear an echo of Copeland's usual acerbic tone. “Are you going to tell me about these 82 lines of code before we go over to the Tech Center, or what?”

He sipped his coffee, ran his fingers through his hair and asked, “What do I look like?”

“You're a mess,” she replied. “So am I. So what?”

“I haven't been in the subway in years. When did they put in the TVs?”

“Focus, Donald. 82 lines of secret code. What are we looking for?”

Copeland stared at a copy of the
Post
that lay on the next the table. “
JAPAN INC. SINKS
,” announced a headline on the front, right under, “
JETS 12 POINT UNDERDOGS ON SUNDAY
.” He started to laugh. All his tension welled up and poured out as gleeful peals of hilarity. People in the cafe stared, and Jody flushed with embarrassment. After all the cockeyed craziness she'd seen that day, watching Donald Copeland lose his mind wasn't her idea of fun.

“You knew this was coming, didn't you,” she said.

“Yes.”

“That's why you advised everyone in the company to put their money into cash or gold and hide it under the mattress.”

“Yes.”

“You're a smart guy, Donald. You must have an edge here. If there's a way to make money out of these disasters, you figured it out.”

“No one could really predict what was going to happen,” he said with a shrug.

“So, did you put your money under the mattress?” she asked.

“Sure, only my mattress is a safe deposit box somewhere.”

“I see. Now, the 82 lines of code.”

Copeland looked at her with cool, level eyes and she saw that whatever psychotic cloud had fogged his mind had lifted. He had the sly look of the Donald she recognized when he lied to someone he wanted to manipulate, and she didn't like it.

“Doc's code will probably be a reminder to get one of the techies at the bank to check a laundry list of programs,” he said. “I think Doc wanted me away from Nassau Street so I wouldn't go nuts. He prefers that I go nuts in … Brooklyn, of all places.”

“You're full of shit,” Jody said with a forced smile. “I know when you're telling the truth and when you're not.”

“Then I should either fire you or make you a partner in the company,” Copeland shot back.

“Given the choice,” Jody said, standing up, “I quit. I don't think you know the difference between a lie and the truth, Donald. I've spin-doctored so much shit for you, made you look good, protected you, done everything for you but get down on my knees and kiss your ass. I don't know why I came all the way out here with you this afternoon. You and Doc have some kind of game going on between you, and I don't care what it is. You and your 82 lines of code can go to hell. I'm going home. Happy New Year, ex-boss.”

She stepped toward the door. Desperate, he pleaded, “Wait a minute. Please.”

“Why? You said the bank might slam you with a lawsuit. Maybe you deserve it.”

“Maybe I do,” he said, perilously close to a confession. Choking on guilt, he couldn't quite utter the incriminating words.

“For what?” she asked. “Deserve it for what? What did you do?”

He took a deep breath, sipped his coffee and asked, “Have you ever discovered, all at once, that nothing you believed was true?”

She thought about that. “Not until today,” she said, “and right now I'm not sure what to believe, except I'm pretty sure you're nuts.”

“I think Doc is trying to rob the bank,” he blurted.

Her jaw dropped. She sat down and stared at him, blinking several times in rapid succession.

“Why the hell do you think I'd ride the damned subway to the middle of nowhere fucking Brooklyn?”

“Oh, shit,” she said.

“I think that's what he's been doing with his secret project.”

“I don't think Doc is that kind of guy,” Jody protested. “He's straight arrow.”

“The perfect crime,” Copeland said. “A robbery committed by someone no one suspects who has access to the most sensitive financial data and the ability to outsmart the smartest computer nerd at Chase Manhattan.” Copeland was beginning to recover his normal, smarmy temperament and warm to the subject. If Doc had set him up to take a fall, he reasoned, he could turn the tables and point the finger at Doc. “This morning you were there when Edwards said Doc recovered 72 million bucks in lost funds.”

“Yes, and you turned white as a ghost.”

“Because the truth is there was over a hundred million.”

“Oh, boy. Oh, shit. Oh my God.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Where's the rest?” she asked.

“I don't know. Probably Panama.”

“And Doc knows you know?”

“Yes.”

“And you haven't turned him in.”

“It's blackmail. If I don't cooperate and do what he wants, at midnight he'll bring the bank down and make it look like a Y2K screw-up. I have to go into the Tech Center now and make sure Chase's people haven't discovered what he did. If they did, they could very well arrest me when I walk in, and he'll disappear.”