Shoot the Moon

Chapter Twenty-Seven - Meltdown

The phone rang me out of deep sleep. I picked up and heard Hinchman shouting.

" - something weird, man. You better get down here right now. Come now!"

He hung up. I turned on a light and looked at the clock. It was quarter after four in the morning. And Echo was standing at the door of the guest room. She was wearing the navy blue silk pajamas she bought for me at Bergdorf-Goodman. I was always losing clothing to Echo.

She had the sleeves of the pajamas rolled. The bottoms were turned up and still covered her feet.

"What is it, Jack?"

"I have to go downtown to Hinchman's."

"What's wrong."

"I don't know."

"Be careful. I had a bad feeling just now."

Echo went back to the bedroom. I sat on the edge of the awful bed that folded out of the sofa until I could make a fist and focus my eyes. Then I pulled on a pair of jeans, a denim shirt and my leather jacket. The night man called me a cab and I had the driver stop at a place downtown and got two cups of bad coffee to go.

Hinchman opened his door before I could ring the bell. He took me to his computer without a word. The screen was rapidly scrolling sets of numbers.

"What's happening?" I said, offering Hinchman one of the blue paper cups decorated with Greek antiquities. He shook his head. The trash was full of empty Red Bull cans. Hinchman was chewing the inside of his cheek and grinding his jaws.

"It's been working like this since midnight. See how each group of numbers gets progressively larger?"

"Why?"

"I don't know. "

"Can you stop it?" I said.

"I've been afraid to turn it off. It's a virus, but I don't know what. We might lose the data."

"You've made a hard copy, though," I said. I waited. Hinchman stared at the screen. "You've made hard copies, Hinchman," I repeated, voice cracking up around the edges with panic.

"Most of it."

"What do you mean most?"

"About half."

"What have you been doing all week? Why didn't you copy all of it?"

He looked up at the ceiling.

"Oh, no," I said, "You haven't been dipping into the accounts?"

"You don't understand. With this stuff you can walk through banks a thousand miles away. I can reach a private account in a bank in Switzerland. You know what that means? I was inside the security." He shrugged. "I've been hacking a little around the edges."

My knees buckled. I fell into a chair. "Hinchman. Is there any way they can trace it back to you?"

"No. I was careful. I route through a server in the U.S. Department of Agricul - "

"Because these are people who don't go to the police and complain. Understand?"

"Don't worry about it."

"Can you copy the rest?"

"I doubt it. This is a time capsule virus, the thing was rigged to go boom today. Data processing consultants put this kind of thing into systems sometimes. To protect themselves if they don't get paid. It's a high quality piece of work too. My scans didn't pick it up. Of course, it's not a virus per se, just a scheduled task."

When the screen blinked and died we both gasped.

Hinchman stood up and then leaned down to his computer as if he were listening for its heartbeat.

"What happened?"

"The computer failed."

"Failed! What does that mean?"

"It crashed. Task was too much for it."

"What are you doing now?" I asked.

"Asking the computer what it was doing for the last five hours."

"I thought it was dead?"

"Crashed. I can get it going again." He started punching keys. Not knowing a thing about it I expected an answer right away. But it didn't come right away, in five minutes, or thirty.

At one point Hinchman muttered, "Jesus, what a mess."

I found a couch and lay down.

I was awakened at six-thirty by a shout. I went into the computer room. Hinchman was laying back in his chair chuckling grimly.

"What is it now?" I said.

"It's so stupid, it's brilliant. It's not a virus. It was just calculating Pi."

"Uh-huh," I said opening the cold second cup of coffee. "Is that bad?"

"Pi is an irrational number."

"Uh-huh." What?

"It's transcendental."

"Little words, okay? This isn't The Science Guy."

"The computer was scheduled to figure Pi to the last decimal place today at midnight."

"So?"

"You can't do it. As far as anyone knows, Pi goes on forever. If we had a mainframe that could handle the task, it wouldn't ever stop."

"So, you're saying?"

"It's impossible. There's two crazy Russian brothers uptown, built a supercomputer in their apartment. All they do with it is compute decimal places of Pi. They've been at it for years."

"Why?"

"To get famous, I guess."

"We can still copy the data can't we?"

"Not unless I can find the trapdoor. I have backups but they most probably will do the same stunt. If we can't bypass the code key - the signal - the computer will start over, calculating Pi until it fails."

"Think the same thing is happening to the bad guys?"

"Probably, if not worse. They better not pull the plug."

"Why?"

" I forgot to tell you, there is a virus part. When my computer shut down the data was wiped. That's the virus part. Your bad guys will probably get impatient and try to force close the job. They'll lose the data just like I did."

"So half the stuff is lost? What do I do now?"

"Find the guy that wrote this mess, get him to tell you the password for the trapdoor."

"What if he didn't set it up that way?"

"Has to be a backdoor, man. What good is messing something up if you can't undo it for a price?"

"I don't think he meant to undo it. This was a farewell shot."

"Where's the rationality in that?"

"Rationality doesn't enter into it. Anyway, we'll never know. Mickey's dead."

"Well, at least he had the satisfaction of knowing that he really screwed them. Nothing worse than not being able to access your data."

I smiled a painful little smile. Somewhere, giant blocks of stone were sealing the passages of the pyramid.

"Just like Land Of The Pharaohs," I said.

"Great movie," said Hinchman.