“What happened?” Ceci whispered to Kerry, who was cradling her head in both hands.

Kerry turned around in her chair and rested her elbows on her knees.

“Our national carrier decided to put a patch into place last night and it trashed a major switching office.” She sighed. “Affecting most of the Eastern Seaboard, and, for some bizarre reason, Dallas, Texas.”

“Mmm.” Ceci nodded. “What exactly does that mean in English?”

Kerry pointed towards the television, which was on CNN. A reporter was mumbling in the mostly muted newscast, showing pictures of angry people surrounding banks.

Ceci peered at them, then shook her head. “I don’t get it.”

“Well, most people nowadays when they go to get money, don’t get it from a bank.” Kerry sighed. “They get it from an ATM machine, and they have their paychecks automatically deposited, right?”

“Okay, yes, I see.”

“Well, what happens when money can’t move into the bank, and people can’t get it out of the ATM machines?”

Ceci stared at the screen, then at Kerry. “Is that what happened?”

“Yes.” She nodded. “From Boston to Miami, no one’s getting paid electronically or getting cash from a machine.”

“Good grief,” the older woman blurted. “And that’s what you two are sitting here trying to fix?”

“Yep.” Kerry looked exhausted. “And I’ve got that breakfast to go to, then more grilling. It’s not going to be a good day.”

“All right. Mark, get to the punch down room,” Dar said into the phone. “Tell everyone to get the hell out of your way, or I’m going to be flying down there to personally kick their asses.”

Kerry winced.

“You there? Good. Take the following circuits and hot patch them.”

Dar read off a list of numbers and letters. “Put them in the high speed ports H1, H2, H3 and H4 on one big pipe, and H3 and H4 on the other.”

She took the keyboard and rapidly switched to a configuration program.

“All right, hang on.” Dar typed furiously, slamming the enter key in frus-Eye of the Storm 333

tration as she got to the end of each line. “This better work or…”

“Easy.” Kerry rubbed her knee under the desk. “Look there, wait, Dar, that’s the wrong—”

“I see it.” Dar closed her eyes briefly, then reopened them and corrected her error. She reset the port she’d just finished, then flipped over to Kerry’s monitoring program. “C’mon…c’mon, you little b—son of a bitch.”

“Dar, that’s the wrong speed.” Kerry took the keyboard from her and started typing, brushing the taller woman’s hands away. “Yell at Mark some more while I do this.”

Ceci watched as Dar’s face twitched in annoyance, but was unable to react as angrily as she obviously wanted to. “Mark, are you done yet?”

She growled into the phone. “Now?” A pause. “Now?” Another pause.

“Kerry, go.”

“Okay.” Kerry finished and wrote the configuration changes, then reset the device. She counted silently under her breath up to twenty, then reconnected to it. “Done…done…wahoo.” She exhaled in utter relief.

“Passing packets on those ports, Dar.”

“I see it.” Dar had been watching the monitoring tool in the background and now she flipped it to the foreground and watched the shifting charts, which pumped in comforting shades of green and blue.

“Jesus.” She leaned against the phone. “Good work, Mark. Thanks for flying up so early.” The MIS chief had spent the evening scouring their local resources and trying to help Dar find a way to resolve the problem without breaching their extensive contracts with the companies involved in the crisis.

No luck. So Dar had asked him to go personally to the switching center, where he’d been consulting with the switch programmers since six a.m.

No luck. The Y2K patch had made such a mess of the firmware, even Mark’s and Dar’s combined programming talents had been unable to make head or tail of it, leaving the executive with a sparse list of options.

Stay down or breach their contract, and remove the services from their vendor. “I’d better call Hamilton Baird and let him know to expect some screaming.” She sighed, referring to ILS’s legal chief. “And he loves me so much as it is.”

“Dar, you had no choice.” Kerry yawned, putting her head down on one arm. “Doesn’t he live in Boston?”

“Mmm.” Dar tipped her head back and closed her eyes. “Yeah, he only sounds like he lives in Louisiana.”

Ceci kept quiet, assuming the green things and Dar’s obvious relief, were a good thing. She glanced up at the television, where talking heads were analyzing the problem, one that looked vaguely familiar. “Isn’t that your boss?”

Dar looked up. Sure enough, a very serious looking Alastair was front and center, freshly scrubbed and very concerned. “They dug him out of bed early.” She increased the volume. “Not the kind of publicity he 334 Melissa Good wanted today, I bet.”

“Mr. McLean, can you give us some idea of what is going on?”

Alastair cleared his throat. “Simply speaking? There was an attempt made to make a piece of equipment year 2000 compatible and that attempt resulted in the equipment failing.”

“Your equipment, sir? Are you saying this is something ILS did?”

The reporter leaned forward.

“No.” Alastair shook his head gravely. “This was done at the national carrier level, although we were made aware of the fact that it was in process.” He shifted. “They’ve been working throughout the night to correct the problem, but it’s very complex.”

“Mr. McLean, I don’t think I need to tell you what kind of impact this is having. Is this what we can expect? Is this an early example of what the year 2000 is going to be like?” the reporter asked. “We have several representatives on the line with us who would like to discuss this with you.

People who have some very serious concerns.”

“Well, certainly, we can discuss the issues.” Alastair looked distinctly uncomfortable. “I can’t say I can answer for an entire industry, however, and an isolated incident like this shouldn’t be taken as—”

“But you are the largest provider of interbanking services, are you not?”

“Yes, that’s true, but—”

“Then, Mr. McLean, effectively you can speak for the industry, because you’re being paid to make sure Americans aren’t impacted by the changes, aren’t you?”

“I can speak for ILS, yes.” Alastair sighed. “And review what we are doing towards that end, while we work on getting further status on the problem at hand.”

Dar smiled, flipped her phone open, and dialed her boss’s cell number by memory.

Alastair looked down, then interrupted the reporter in mid-word.

“Excuse me a minute, David. This might be the information I requested for you.”

Then she heard the phone answer. “Good morning,” Dar drawled softly into the phone. “Nice tie.”

“Dar, I’m on the air and this guy’s about to nail me,” her boss whispered.

“I know. We’re up. I moved them over to the new network.”

Silence. She watched the smile spread across the face on the screen, which was half turned to hear her conversation. Alastair closed the phone without a further word, then straightened, and tightened his tie a bit, the twinkle back in his eyes. Dar turned the sound up, wondering what he was going to say.

“As I was asking, Mr. McLean, what exactly does ILS intend to do about this crisis?” the reporter asked. “Hundreds of thousands of paychecks are on the line and citizens up and down the East Coast are unable to access their own money.”


Eye of the Storm 335

“Well, David,” Alastair responded. “Fortunately, we are lucky to have one of the most talented minds in the business as our CIO, and that phone call was just informing me ILS has rerouted around the problem and brought everything up on our own, brand new, internal network.” If he’d had suspenders, Dar was sure, he’d have stuck his thumbs in them and smirked. As it was, he gave a good impression of doing that anyway.

The reporter was definitely taken aback. He shuffled a few papers.

“That’s great news,” he temporized, then read something off a nearby prompter. “Yes, as a matter of fact, we just got word from Interbank that they’ve started restoring service.” He looked down at a slip of paper handed to him. “And that would be your CIO, Dar Roberts, is that right?”

“Hey. He’s talking about you?” Andrew was leaning against the wall, watching in fascination.

“He’s talking about me.” Dar slumped in her chair and exchanged a high five with Kerry. “We tried a dozen things with the company that ran that switch, but nothing worked. We had to end up rewiring everything and putting it on our network. We must have breached ten contracts in the process.”

Cheering was heard from the screen as people were shown clustering eagerly around the cash machines.

“Sad commentary on society,” Ceci murmured. “Almost Pavlovian, really.”

“You know,” Kerry got up and collapsed on the couch, “I don’t get to see the results of my labors quite so graphically most of the time.”

“No,” Dar agreed, standing up and stretching her body out, wincing at a painful knot on her back. “Want me to get more coffee?”

Kerry stuck her tongue out. “Any more of that and it’s going to come out my ears.” She peered at the screen as she heard the senate hearings mentioned. “Oh…hot dog. Yes!” She wriggled on her back and kicked her feet out.

“Postponed?” Ceci smiled at the blonde woman’s unrestrained joy.

“Only until this afternoon,” Dar grumbled.

“I don’t care. I get to take a nap.” Kerry stifled a yawn. “I’m so tired, I’d take an hour if I could get it.” The phone rang, and she moaned.