for several minutes but stare at the gaping black hole in the ground only a few yards away.
Turning off the Harley, the man kicked down the stand and walked to the edge of the pit, still trying to comprehend what he was seeing.
“Impossible,” he muttered, lifting his visor. “This is impossible!”
Just then, cries of surprise rose from the skaters on the lake as a BMW snowmobile rocketed across the frozen expanse. Narrowly missing the scattering villagers, the big machine zoomed straight up the bank onto the snowy street and across the village green.
At breakneck speed, the driver dodged the well and several children and slammed through a snowman, reducing it back into its basic component. Blinded by the explosion of flakes, the driver zigzagged down the street, nearly clipping several parked cars and another snowman before crashing into the granite cornerstone of the local bank. Stone chips went flying, the fender crumpled, and the engine sputtered into silence. However, the driver managed to stay in the seat just long enough to ride out the recoil before hopping off and yanking open a rear compartment to haul out a bulky toolbox.
The driver was clearly a woman, and wearing the incongruous outfit of a ball gown and a thick puffy winter jacket. Satin slippers jutted from a pocket, and she was wearing heavy black snow boots.
“Damn it, Della, it took you long enough to get here,” the driver of the motorcycle said, removing his helmet.
“Shut up, Zander. I live farther away than you do,” Della Gotterstein countered, striding toward what remained of the bookstore. “How bad is the damage?”
“Total,” Zander Meyers stated.
She scowled. “Bah, that is not possible.”
“See for yourself!” Meyers said, making a sweeping gesture.
Pushing her way through the rapidly thinning crowd, Gotterstein halted at the danger tape to stare down into the charred hole.
“Good God,” she whispered, setting down the toolbox to remove her own helmet. A wealth of golden hair cascaded to her trim waist.
“Told you,” Meyers said, running a hand over his thick hair, the expensive toupee shifting ever so slightly.
“How in the… I mean…what could…” She glanced around at the surrounding building, then swallowed hard. “Is this an echo?”
Meyers frowned at that. Echo was code for a terrorist attack. “To be honest, I have no goddamn idea.”
Displeased, Gotterstein pursed her lips at the blasphemy, but held her tongue. The man was an electronic genius, and that was all that mattered at the moment. His ridiculous belief in evolution was his own private affair.
As the last of the crowd politely departed, Meyers and Gotterstein ducked under the tape to walk carefully into the smoky crater. Only stacks of ash remained from the thousands of burned books, but there were also several puddles of congealed plastic, as well as a lot of melted wiring, and what might have been fried circuit boards. They were in such poor condition it was hard to tell.
“What do you think?” Meyers asked hopefully.
“Are you expecting a miracle?” Gotterstein retorted angrily, kicking over a bookcase. Underneath was a smashed keyboard. “Neither of us can repair this. There’s nothing left of the bank’s mainframe. It does not exist anymore!”
“Sadly, I concur.” Meyers sighed as a light snow began to fall. The flakes vanished with a hiss as they landed on the broken timbers and smashed bricks.
“Billions of euros lost,” Gotterstein said, glancing at the sky. “Are you sure this was not an echo?”
“According to the preliminary report from the fire department, this was caused by lightning,” Meyers said, turning up his collar.
“Bah, impossible!” the woman scoffed. “The Swiss banking consortium had us install every safeguard known to modern science. No amount of lightning could have done this!”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes! It would take hundreds of bolts to smash through all of our shielding, antistatic defenses and Faraday cages!”
“So maybe there were hundreds of bolts.”
“Are you insane?”
“Then how do you explain it?”
“I…I cannot.”
“Let’s check the garage,” Meyers said, starting back toward the street.
The snowy town seemed deserted as the man and woman crossed the street to an old barn. The side door was painted to resemble wood, but up close it was clearly welded steel. Unlocking the door, they stepped inside and waited. After a few moments, the ceiling lights automatically flickered into life.
Proceeding along a bare concrete tunnel, they passed several massive cannon emplacements and ammunition bunkers. The air of the disguised fortress was stale, and the dust on the floor showed that no one had been inside the building for years.
At the end of the tunnel, they each inserted a special key into a pair of slots and turned them in unison. There was a low hum, and the wall broke apart to reveal a computer workstation.
Sitting alongside each other, Meyers and Gotterstein both ran a systems check, then started furiously typing for several minutes. Slowly, the room began to warm as the wall vents started sending out waves of heat.
Situated around them on the walls, a dozen plasma screens strobed into operation and began scrolling complex electrical schematics, data flow charts and endless lines of binary code.
“Dead?” Meyers asked without looking up from his work.
“Dead,” Gotterstein muttered, brushing back a curl from her face. “But essentially undamaged.”
“Excellent!”
“Agreed. The links are burned out. Those line fuses we installed last year apparently did the trick. The computer is off-line, but there has been no loss of memory, function or data. We can get this up and running in a couple of hours, and nobody will be the wiser that every bank in Switzerland temporarily lost all of their financial records.”
“I concur,” Meyers said, leaning back in his chair. Then he grinned widely. “Score one for the good guys, eh?”
“Praise Jesus!” She laughed.
Trying not to roll his eyes at the religious nonsense, Meyers said nothing. The woman was an expert at writing code and fixing hardware, a rare combination these days. Her only flaw was a ridiculous belief in supernatural mumbo-jumbo.
“I’ll call my wife and let her know I’ll be late for dinner,” Meyers said, rummaging in a pocket of his heavy coat.
“Late for dinner tomorrow,” Gotterstein countered, extracting her own cell phone. “I’ll call our contact at FINMA and give him a preliminary report.” She referred to the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority, which oversaw Swiss banking.
“Be
