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

to himself. They should clear more in the first batch this morning than any other day of the year—but the total batch came in under $3 million, and a lot of the transfers seemed really small.

Shit, he thought, swaying to the rhythm of heavy metal, we have to come in at the crack of dawn and plug our ears against all this racket. While the wire operators sit at quiet keyboards, filing their nails and gossiping. It really pissed him off.

Deep within the bowels of an unmarked building on Market Street was a bombproof, fireproof, security-sealed, four-acre vault, packed wall to wall with millions of dollars of gleaming hardware and equipment. The sign on the door read WORLDWIDE ITEM PROCESSING. It was here that all the bank’s cash clearings took place.

At three P.M. each day, when the branches closed, this floor would leap to life. By midnight the night of December 28, it was a madhouse of activity—a wild underground sea of churning bodies and flying paper—racing against the legal deadline that declared banks must post all transactions before they could open the next day at nine A.M..

Worldwide Item Processing never went down. No mistake, breakdown, fire, storm, or earthquake could be permitted to halt or even delay production. There were safeguards and ancillary systems and backup power supplies and—should anyone forget the well-rehearsed emergency priorities—there was a huge sign on the far wall that read THE PAPER COMES FIRST! After all—paper meant money.

At ten minutes past midnight, a batch header came through the massive sorter/collator, followed by a debit-and-credit ticket that posted the wire transfer received that morning from National Commercial Bank in Saudi Arabia. This wire had been reviewed and approved in at least four locations throughout the bank before arriving here.

The tickets fed into a reader and the wire information was written onto magnetic tape. When the tape was full, an operator pulled it off the drive, slapped on a sticky label, and placed it on a rack. A few minutes later, the dispatcher came along and picked it up in his cart.

“How much longer for this run?” the dispatcher asked the operator.

“A few more tapes. Fifteen, maybe twenty minutes,” he was told.

The dispatcher, with his cart of wire transfer tapes, took the elevator to the next floor up, where men were stacking boxes of tapes and disks against the wall. Truckers, down by the steel doors at the far end, were checking boxes against their bills of lading, then wheeling them out, stacked four deep, on dollies, to be loaded on the truck.

“If you guys hold on,” the dispatcher called up the ramp to them, “you can get the last of the debit/credit run before you split.”

The truckers nodded, and went outside for a smoke while they waited.

At one A.M., far across town, the dock clerk who’d unloaded the truck was buzzed into the Bank of the World data center. He shoved his dolly stacked with boxes up the loading ramp; a security guard checked the delivery ticket on top of the box and motioned the dock clerk to the window. The clerk unloaded the boxes and waited as the tape librarian behind the window prepared a receipt.

“Christ,” said the librarian, “it’s about time—we been waiting hours for these.”

He picked up a microphone, which broadcast his voice across the vast floor of the machine room inside.

“Set up for cash clearings. Thirty-seven files—should take all night, boys!”

A moan went up across the floor of the machine room, and a few seconds later the librarian’s phone buzzed at the window—just as he’d finished writing up the receipt and handed it to the dock clerk. It was Martinelli—the graveyard-shift supervisor.

“Tell that asshole from the dock to try to impress upon his drivers they should not pause for coffee when they’ve got twelve hours of stuff in their truck and we’ve got six hours to run it in.”

The phone crashed down in the librarian’s ear, and he smiled wryly at the dock clerk. “I guess you heard that as well as I did,” he told him. Then he put the boxes on the flat cart and wheeled them into the center.

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 29

At nine A.M., a blond, shaggy-haired young programmer sat before a terminal at the data center. The floor was nearly deserted, and the few people arriving and removing their coats seemed not to notice him as he powered up and logged on to the machine.

He pulled a crumpled list from his pocket, and checking the numbers, he keyed into the private customer accounts file and reviewed a few account balances. The first was a new account opened under the name of Frederick Fillmore, which displayed an eight-hundred-dollar opening balance.

Tavish smiled, and reviewed a number of other accounts in quick succession. The thousands of accounts he’d sliced wire transfers into, using the “salami technique,” should add up—for today at least—to over a million dollars.

It was the morning of December 30 when Said al-Arabi unlocked his telex room at National Commercial Bank in Saudi Arabia. He logged on to the terminal to see whether anything had come in during the night.

There was a message sitting out there, so he pulled it off on the printer and read it:

From: Bank of the World, San Francisco, California, USA

To: Wire Room, Nat’l Commercial Bank, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Message: Ref: Your wire to transfer USD dated 12-25-XX. No deposit was made. Stop. Wire was scrambled in transmission. Stop. Please retransmit. Stop. Repeat. No deposit was made. Stop. Could not read wire. Stop. Please retransmit.

End.

Said al-Arabi sighed.

The problem was that the bloody phone lines in Saudi were totally worthless. Half the time, the desert lines were buried in sandstorms. How did they expect the bank to do business all over the world, when they used bloody camel drivers to repair the equipment?

He went over to the file, unlocked the drawer, and pulled out the transfer he’d done to Bank of the World—a full four days ago now.