Angie looked at her mother, then at Kerry, then at the screen in front of them. She looked back at her mother, and then she looked at Kerry.

Kerry merely shook her head, and went back to the screen. "Thank you, Charlotte. Herndon--have you heard any more about that last plane? Is it confirmed in Pennsylvania? Miami ops is seeing a trunk down in the west there, but we don't want to assume."

Cynthia took a step into the room. "Whom is she talking to?" she asked Angie.

"The rest of the planet," Angie said. "Do you think you could ask the kitchen to make some fresh coffee? I think Kerry's going to need it."


Chapter Nine

"DAR, DID YOU say all the transatlantic phone lines were down?" Alastair pulled his seat a little closer to Dar.

"Alastair, don't talk to me for a minute," Dar said. "I'm rerouting traffic and you don't want me sending financial data streams to Tibet."

"Oh. Well, no, I sure don't."

Dar kept her eyes on the screen and her fingers on her keyboard, going through the somewhat delicate task of rerouting traffic across alternate paths they were never intended to travel. At stake were a lot of American tourists in Europe who needed to get to their ATM accounts, or use their credit cards.

Including herself and Alastair, of course.

There were four links across the Atlantic from New York, from four different providers, going to four different head ends in Europe. Absolutely rock solid redundancy unless you happened to lose the major landing point offices for all four providers on the same day.

What were the odds of that? Well. Dar exhaled, blinking a little as she peered at the screen. It was too bad she hadn't taken a bet on those odds, wasn't it? Probably could have paid off ILS's outstanding debt with the winnings.

She finished typing and reviewed the results, switching over to her network monitor to watch the lines out of Miami branching to South America, across to the Bahamas, and out to Africa. The traffic would have to take a back route across Africa to Europe, and the access would be hundreds of milliseconds slower.

A thousand milliseconds was a second though, and the end result would be an extra tap of someone's fingernails on the top of an ATM before it barfed out the local currency.

"Damn," Dar sighed. "The world's getting smaller every damn day."

"What's that, Dar?" Alastair turned around in his chair. "Can I talk to you now?"

Dar sat back and let her hands rest on her thighs. "I'm done," she said. "For now anyway, until the next damn thing happens." She flexed her fingers a little, reviewing in her head the details she knew she had to send over to the operations group soon.

Twenty changes that, in normal times, would have gone through four levels of approval, been scheduled weeks in advance with carefully coordinated validation from the individual banks and networks involved. No one except for Dar would have even considered doing it on the fly, but that was her role in this type of situation.

Anyone could have made the changes, one by one. Only Dar had the comprehensive understanding of the intricate spider web that was their network to do it without documentation, trusting her instincts and getting the moves done at the speed at which events were actually transpiring.

Had she not been there, or had net access, it still would have happened. Dar wasn't nearly so arrogant as to write a single point of failure into either her network design or their corporate processes. No one was indispensable.

Sir Melthon entered. He crossed over to Dar's borrowed desk and stuck his hands in his pockets. "My people are telling me it's no good trying to call over to the States. We've got resources in New York we can't contact, and it's a bit worrisome."

"The main trunks from overseas come into New York City," Dar said. "The termination point was underneath the World Trade Center."

"Ah," he grunted. "Putting a kink in your work, I'm guessing."

"Not really," Alastair said. "We've got a pretty comprehensive plan for this sort of thing."

Sir Melthon's head dropped forward a little, as he peered at Alastair. "For this sort of thing?"

"Well, disasters," he explained.

"Dar?" Kerry's voice echoed softly in her ear. "Can you cover for me for ten minutes?"

"Sure." Dar put her other ear bud back in. Then she removed it, and reached over to trigger the speakers in her laptop and half turned the machine so that their newest client could see the screen. "This is a system we developed to direct and coordinate a response to any kind of widespread disaster."

"We?" Alastair moved back so give Sir Melthon a better view. He folded his hands over his stomach and twiddled his thumbs. "Charmingly modest as always, Dar, but didn't you design this?"

Dar gave him a look from the corner of her eye. "Someone had to." She went on. "The system alerts everyone corporate wide where there is an event, either by sending them a network message..."

"Not much good if they're not in the building," Sir Melthon commented.

"Or via a PDA alert, SMS text message, or automated cell phone voice mail. Sometimes all four." Dar continued. "They're asked to respond in any of those methods, and the system logs their location, response and status."

Sir Melthon leaned closer. "Huh," he said. "How many people?"

"A quarter of a million," Alastair supplied. "It's a lot of people to keep track of."

"Those that can get on the net connect to this global desktop," Dar said, taking advantage of the slight lull in the chaos. "There's a chat area, a status tab for all the locations showing who's accounted for and who isn't, and the global conferencing system, which is a voice over IP bridge that lets us all talk to each other."

"Some folks call into that with their cell phones if they can, or a landline," Alastair supplied. "Keeps everyone informed, and lets us react to whatever we need to react to in real time."

"Miami exec? This is LA Earth station," a voice erupted suddenly. "Do we have a go to bring up the reserve transponders? We are not at capacity yet, but I bet we will be and we'd like to grab them before someone else does."

"LA Earth, this is Miami," Dar conceded to protocol, mostly for Sir Melthon's sake. "Go ahead and bring up whatever you have and hold it ready."

"LA, this is Seattle Netops. We're getting a request for additional uplink from Vancouver, can you take it? Four channels."

"Miami exec, this is Charlotte. Can you advise the status of Interbank? We have a text from London asking."

Dar cleared her throat a bit. "Charlotte, Interbank is routing via the southern links, approximately an extra seven hops, plus two hundred milliseconds, but stable," she reported.

"Uh, thank you ma'am."

"Miami exec, this is Miami ops, we're publishing the new routes on the big map," Mark said. "Be advised, we're assembling technical teams and checking inventory."

"What's that about?" Sir Melthon inquired. "Checking inventory?"

Dar checked the news ticker, and then looked up at the television screen. "Any word on how long the flights are grounded?" she asked. "They're getting teams ready to go and help all our customers get back onto service."

"Tomorrow noon, at the earliest I heard," Alastair said. "I've been exchanging mail with Bea. She's trying to see if she can get us international flights into Mexico and arrange a pickup if you don't mind going to Houston first."

"Huh." Sir Melthon got up and moved out of the way, strolling back across the room toward the door. "Not bloody bad, for Americans." He disappeared, leaving them to listen to the new voices coming from Dar's speakers.

"This is Tom Stanton from the New York office."

Dar recognized one of the senior salesmen's voice. "This is Miami, go ahead Tom," she said. "Good to hear you."

"I just made it up to our office on the Rock," the man said. "We were up in the South Tower."

Dar felt a chill run up and down her back, and Alastair leaned forward, his expression altering to one of grim seriousness. "Go on," she said, as the rest of the background chatter faded.

"What a nightmare," Tom said. "We were up on the ninetieth floor when the North Tower got hit. I saw the damn plane plow right into the side of the building and saw whatever was in its way come flying out the back side."

"Good lord," Alastair muttered.

"A lot of people stayed to watch," Tom said. "We started to head out of the place because it seemed to us the tower might lean over into the South. We couldn't get an elevator, so we started walking down and we were just past the sky lobby when that second bastard hit."

Dar caught a pop up box from the corner of her eye. She opened it.

I'm back, thanks sweetheart. Needed a bio break.

Dar flexed her fingers and typed back.

Anytime. I reported the Interbank reroute and told Seattle they could take four more sat channels from LA for Vancouver, and told LA they could bring up the cold reserve transponder space. She paused, glancing at Alastair who was typing on his PDA. Wish we were home on our couch.

"So we kept going," Tom said. "The stairs were full of dust and hot as hell. You could hardly breathe, and there were these firemen trying to go the other direction. What a mess. Pieces of concrete kept falling on everyone."

I wish we were too. My mother's here listening. I want my dog, and my PJ's and you, and all I have is my father's desk and my family not understanding what the hell I'm doing.