A Calculated Risk by Katherine Neville (best time to read books .txt) 📗

“You mean cocaine?” I said, surprised.

“He’s got a hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year habit he can’t support, even on his inflated salary,” Tavish told me. “So he’s using his staff and the bank’s computer systems to churn out software that he sells on the open market. Though I can’t prove it, I believe his whole staff is moonlighting—that he pays them kickbacks. He’s asked me to do the same, or he’ll turn me over to Immigration.”

“But you aren’t here illegally,” I said, “you’re on temporary visa—trying to get your green card. I saw your file only this morning.”

“He no longer has a right to sponsor me. The firm he owned is technically defunct. In that sense, I’m at the bank under false pretenses as well. He supplied my references here, you see. If I were deported back to the U.K., I’d be fortunate to make a small percent of what I make over here for my technical skills. I’m not an ‘old schoolboy,’ you see—I’m just a working-class chap.”

“You realize this puts me in a real bind,” I lied. (What an astounding miracle of good fortune this dinner had turned out to be.) “I can’t blow the whistle on Karp if we have no proof of his illegal activities—and if I tried, you might get deported, or terminated at the very least, for coming to the bank under false pretenses. But if I could buy some time by finding someone else to work for him—someone he couldn’t refuse—then we could work out the details later about getting you out of this jam.”

“I’ve been thinking of nothing but that all day. I felt utterly sure he’d put up a fuss like this,” Tavish told me, “and I thought of the perfect person at last—someone who’s been wanting to get into that department forever.”

“You know someone who wants to work for Karp?” I said, amazed. “Whoever he is, he must be firing on two cylinders.”

“It’s a she,” he explained. “Her name’s Pearl Lorraine, and she manages foreign exchange for the bank. She’s an econometrician—a client of mine, since I’m supporting her systems. She’s brilliant—and black. He’d have to come up with some pretty good reasons to refuse her.”

“Pearl Lorraine? From Martinique? She knows the exchange business far better than Karp, and has some computer background, too. But what does she think of the idea?” From what I knew of Pearl Lorraine, she wouldn’t make such a move without plenty of motive; she was widely regarded as the most militant career opportunist at the bank.

“She says Karp is a bit of a Nazi, among other things; it seems he refers to his black employees as jungle bunnies, and brags that he hires only black female secretaries, because they have nicer derrieres.”

“Good Lord,” I said, “if all that’s true, what makes you think she’d work for a guy like that?”

“Simple,” said Tavish with a grin. “She’s better at foreign exchange than he is—she wants his job. And if you want to hit a home run, you have to be next up to bat when someone strikes out.”

I agreed with Tavish that under our pressed circumstances, Pearl afforded the perfect solution. I decided when the cheese and fruit arrived that it was time to move on to the real topic of tonight’s dinner.

“I’ll be leaving for New York at the end of this week,” I told Tavish. “The quality circle will all be on board by then—six of you—and there are a few things I’d like us to discuss before I go.”

Tavish regarded me seriously over his silver fork, and nodded for me to continue.

“First, I want you to crack the file that holds customer and correspondent bank account data—and then to hit the electronic funds transfer system.”

“Wire transfers? Your own system?” said Tavish. “That must be the hardest system at the bank; you’d have to get in from at least two places—”

“You need the test keys,” I agreed, “to get at the wire transfers themselves—and you’d need to know the customer account numbers and secret passwords to get money out of specific bank accounts.”

“You mean, we should steal one test key for one day—just to illustrate it can be done?”

“All those banks out there can’t change their keys daily,” I said. “There must be a program in the system that deciphers all the keys, and can somehow determine their validity even if they change without notice.”

“Astounding,” said Tavish, “and impossible to believe. If there were such a sort of ‘decryption’ program, you could take money from any account you liked, and move it anywhere—assuming you had the account numbers.”

I smiled, picked up a cocktail napkin, and drew a little diagram:

“Each bank branch keeps a card like this. The number at the top is the location number; it tells us which branch is making the transfer. This first column has a special code for the current month, the second column shows the current day, and the third column is the dollar amount of the wire transfer. These four numbers—location number, month code, today’s date, and dollar amount—are the test key! Each key changes as the day and dollar amount change—that’s it!”

“You’re joking,” said Tavish. “I work in foreign exchange systems; I don’t know anything about the bank’s branch operations. But if it’s as simple as all that, anybody could break into the system and rip off funds!”

“Perhaps they have,” I said, sipping my champagne. “That’s what you’re supposed to find out. But of course, it may be more difficult than I’ve imagined; I myself haven’t seen the systems that decode these keys.”

“How complex could it be, given input like this?” said Tavish, waving the napkin in excitement. “After all, they’re only programs in there, aren’t they? But if you are right about this being the way it really works, it’s bound to be a security horror beyond all imagining!”

“Any regrets about signing on for this project?” I asked.

“Lord Maynard Keynes was asked, on his deathbed, whether he had any regrets about his