Deadline Y2K (2 page)

“Exactly.”

“It has a certain appeal,” Doc said, stroking his beard. “But on the other hand, we could let all these insane corporations die when their computers fail. That appeals as well.”

“Be serious, Doc. What do you think of this as a business venture? Can we make money?”

“It's a winner, Donald. It's a license to print money.”

“What do you need?” Copeland asked. “Just name it.”

“Well, let's see. How about a big old IBM mainframe to play with, a few hundred applications and two or three engineers.”

“That's it?”

“I suppose you could buy me a bank, Donnie boy, but why bother?”

*   *   *

The following day they visited a warehouse in Queens and bought a fifteen-year-old IBM s/370 mainframe. Doc tore out a wall on the third floor on Nassau Street, reinforced the floor, hired a crane, installed the machine, and named it Old Blue. He spent a month testing the software that came with it, and then called Copeland in for a demonstration.

“This is what the world is going to look like on the first of January in the year 2000,” Doc announced to his audience of one. “What I'm about to show you is what will happen if things are simply left alone.”

Old Blue had spent its working life performing accounting services for an insurance company. The computer wasn't that old, but like many firms the insurance company had upgraded its hardware while continuing to run the same old, flawed software. Doc booted up an accounting program based on actuarial tables, reset the time and date to one minute before midnight, December 31, 1999, and gave the program a simple problem to solve, a schedule of premium payments for twenty years. Lines of orderly green numbers scrolled across the screen for sixty seconds until the clock rolled over to midnight. The machine seemed to sputter and hiccup. Old Blue recognized the date “00” as 1900, not 2000, and assumed that numbers representing the near future belonged in the distant past. Simple arithmetical calculations were no longer simple. The machine tried to divide and multiply by negative numbers. Within seconds, Old Blue tried to calculate an infinite regression, and the numbers on the screen went haywire. The random access memory quickly overloaded and the accounting program crashed. The computer was dead.

“Voilà,” said Doc, lighting a Camel.

*   *   *

At 6:30 every morning Copeland ate breakfast in the same Upper West Side delicatessen with three old friends he'd grown up with: a cop, a grocery store manager and a heart surgeon. Copeland was excited, bubbling over with enthusiasm for his Y2K venture, and within a week his pals had banned Y2K as a subject of conversation.

“The phones are gonna go down, the Internet will die, the military will be paralyzed, no one will get a welfare check, the IRS will be all screwed up, your microwave oven won't work, but that won't matter because there'll be no electricity.”

“Enough already,”
pleaded Jonathon Spillman, the grocery store manager. “For God's sake.”

“You're obsessive-compulsive, Donnie,” said Bill Packard, the doctor. “You should get your head shrunk.”

“Fuck you, Bill. This is gonna make me rich.”

“You're already rich,” said Ed Garcia, the cop. “Maybe you don't remember that you got rich financing computer companies that created this problem. If it's as bad as you say, maybe you should fix it for free.”

“I didn't create the millennium bug,” Copeland protested. “I discovered it.”

“Like a gold mine,” added Spillman. “You sound like a claim jumper to me. Should we hang him, boys, or just run him out of town?”

As friends who'd known each other since childhood will do, they teased Copeland without mercy to demonstrate their wish for his success. Intelligent men, they took his predictions of doom and destruction with a healthy ration of salt, but each filed away his knowledge of the millennium bug and wondered how it might affect his life at the turn of the century.

*   *   *

Copeland had a hunch that Y2K would generate the biggest return of any of his ideas, so rather than create a new company with his customary financial partners, he established a wholly-owned subsidiary called Copeland Solutions and financed the software development himself.

He was patient. He understood the realities of software development, the endless trial and error and testing and out-of-the-blue insight that led to success. Doc occasionally locked himself in the computer lab, got crazy, and burned a few million brain cells with amphetamines while thrashing away at his objective. Copeland left him alone, keeping busy with his other companies that made more than enough to support his Y2K project. Sometimes he didn't see Doc for weeks.

The '90s marched on. Copeland ate breakfast with his buddies every morning, took his wife Marie to dinner at the Four Seasons and his little boy Eddie to Yankee Stadium, but these were perfunctory activities that had nothing to do with his overweening passion for making money. He grew estranged from Marie and scarcely noticed as she drifted away. Eddie was raised by nannies. Copeland traded his Mercedes for a Cadillac and then the Caddy for a Porsche. Life got faster. He could speed across the East River, catch a glimpse of the skyline and be back in his office in minutes flat. It gave him an expensive thrill. For cheap thrills, he went to massage parlors in Chinatown and on autumn weekends visited a bookie in the fish market on Broadway at 83rd to lay a hundred bucks on the Jets.

Finally, two years after Copeland's epiphany on the bridge, Doc created a software package called “Copeland 2000” that targeted the millennium bug in old legacy systems used by banks. Dependent on mainframes like Old Blue running old applications, banks and other financial institutions with millions of lines of date-sensitive computer code were extremely vulnerable to the millennium bug. Copeland 2000 went to market in late 1993 and had few takers at first, credit unions and small savings and loan companies. Then, over the next two years, as other firms began offering Y2K software and sounding the alarm, more and more major companies began to realize that the millennium bug
was
serious. The big boys began to line up, and in 1995 Copeland Solutions scored its biggest coup: the Chase Manhattan Bank.

Chase had been among the first major banks to assess the Y2K problem and arrive at the correct conclusion. With 200 million lines of infected code spread among 1,500 different computer systems running thousands of applications, Chase had to eliminate the millennium bug from its systems or go out of business. It was that simple. There was no choice. The result was a $160 million contract with Copeland Solutions.

*   *   *

Others banks around the world quickly followed Chase into Copeland's stable of clients. Money poured into the company, yet, having achieved success, Copeland discovered he wasn't satisfied. The high wore off within a few weeks and he found himself feeling flat and bored. He wanted a new, more difficult challenge. Without realizing it, he was a crime waiting to happen.

Despite his reputation as a bold and ruthless businessman, even his old breakfast pals believed he was honest. The truth, however, was that Copeland was primed to consider criminal activity as the next step in business. After all, the line between venture capitalism and white-collar crime was fuzzy at best. All he needed was an opportunity, and one soon presented itself.

The Chase contract gave Copeland Solutions' programmers access to the bank's most sensitive data. Every account, record, and program had to be examined for millennium bug flaws and corrected. As this process began, it was only a matter of days before Doc started noticing discrepancies.

The bank was so big it didn't know how much money it had or where it was. The first interesting account Doc stumbled across dated from 1985. In that year a programmer working for the bank had managed to pull off what later was to become one of the most common forms of computer fraud in the banking business. Every time one of the bank's computers completed a foreign exchange transaction, it converted foreign currency to dollars and rounded off the number to the nearest mill. The anonymous programmer had written a tiny program that dumped each minuscule fraction of a mill into an account that didn't show up on regular records. As it happened, the programmer was hit by a truck and died the next year, but his program continued to function flawlessly without attracting the attention of any other Chase official. By 1995, when Doc got to the account, it held more than four million dollars the bank didn't know existed.

Doc mentioned the orphaned account to Copeland, recounting the tale as hacker's lore.

“If we left that account alone,” Copeland mused, “how much would it be worth by the end of 1999?”

“Seven or eight million, and I'm sure I'll find more accounts like this.”

“Adding up to how much, would you guess?”

“No way to tell, but maybe as much as a hundred mil.”

“That could be a lot of free money,” Copeland observed.

“Hell of a joke to play on the bank,” Doc said.

“If the world goes all to hell in January 2000, it would be interesting to have that much cash when everyone else was going bankrupt.”

“What are you suggesting, Donald?”

“Grand larceny.”

“Oh, you wicked man,” Doc observed.

“Just an idea,” Copeland said. “Think about it.”

“The bank has auditors checking our work,” Doc cautioned. “They're not idiots. Chase expects us to find these accounts and report them.”

“You're smarter than they are, Doc.”

“We're already filthy rich, Donnie. Chase and all these other banks are going to make us even richer.”

“So what? You've been saying for years what the millennium bug will do: disaster, utter disaster. The world is going to come apart at the seams, and something like this will give us a comfortable nest egg when others will have nothing.”

“You're calling a hundred million dollars a nice little nest egg? Jesus.”

“Well?” Copeland said. “You have a hacker's heart. You'll do it because you can.”

“That's the problem, Donald. I have to do it. You can't.”

“It'll be the biggest bank robbery in history,” Copeland declared, “and the bank will never know it'd been robbed. With all the other disasters at the turn of the century, who's going to care?”

“Chase, for one.”

“But they'll never know, Doc.”

“You're a greedhead, Donald.”

“Yeah. Like the man said, greed is good.”

“Are you serious?” Doc asked.

“Yes, I'm serious. I've never been more serious. What the hell, the bank doesn't even know it has this money. It's there for the taking.”

“You're a scumbag,” Doc stated with barely disguised contempt. “We're selling software like crazy. This company is worth hundreds of millions. And you want to…?”

“It'd be criminal not to do it if we can,” Copeland said, grinning broadly. “It's the opportunity of a lifetime.”

2

Doc's first inclination was to quit on the spot, but he enjoyed his work and didn't want to turn his life upside down quite yet. To keep Copeland happy, he agreed to play along with no real intention of robbing the bank. Twisted by dreams of immense wealth, Copeland believed the ability to steal the money gave him the right to take it. That was the mindset of the economic engine running the global economy, it seemed to Doc. Situational ethics run amok. Grab what you can and why not; everybody else does. In theory, the heist was possible because no computer security system was foolproof, but in practical terms it was a less-than-perfect crime. The bank had 200 Y2K drudges working full time at the Metro Tech Center in Brooklyn, and more than a few were good enough to detect a theft of such magnitude. Who would take the blame? The chief programmer. But fear wasn't the reason Doc wanted no part of Copeland's scheme. Humble in his way, Doc was an honest man, a species of humanity unknown to Donald Copeland who believed every intelligent person shared his ethos of callous selfishness. Doc liked money as much as the next guy, yet he clung to the old-fashioned idea that capital could be used for purposes beyond self-aggrandizement.

Having decided to play along, he convinced Copeland that taking the money all at once during the millennium crisis was safer than milking it a little at a time. To placate the boss, he wrote a bogus program that kept a running account of mythical funds for Copeland to check every day, sometimes several times a day.

As the numbers escalated, the company's legitimate earnings skyrocketed even more quickly. Copeland Solutions expanded rapidly, selling their Y2K software packages to commercial banks in the Philippines, Japan, Latvia, Sweden, Germany and Spain. In 1996 Doc earned six million dollars in bonuses alone—not much by Wall Street standards, but enough for him to do something meaningful.

Doc had taken on the Y2K challenge because it gave him a chance to save a small part of the world from imploding. He could write source code in his sleep and truly loved computers, but deep in his heart he believed the wanton application of computers to all aspects of daily life was often reckless and misguided.

Cybernetics had caused a radical change in global demographics, dividing populations into two camps: the technologically aware and everyone else. Each technological advance pushed the two camps farther apart. Y2K was going to be a watershed event that would transform the dividing line into a perilously deep chasm. Small companies and individuals who couldn't afford to revamp their computer systems were going to perish while powerful companies who bought Copeland 2000 or similar programs would emerge stronger than ever. It was going to be a war of attrition, and ordinary people, the millions who went to work every day and trusted the systems that made their lives possible—electricity, phones, the subway, water—were going to be caught in the crossfire.