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

face—it would prove that the very problem existed that the Fed had wanted to hire me to solve. But to do it, I was going to need some help.

I had a friend in New York who knew more about stealing money than most bankers know about managing it—someone who had access to all the FBI criminal records, interstate police dossiers, and even some Interpol files. His name was Charles, and I’d known him for twelve years. Whether this surly prima donna would share his data with me—especially when he learned how I planned to use it—was another question.

Though it was nearly midnight New York time, I knew he’d still be up. Charles owed me more than one favor: I’d once saved his job and maybe even saved his life. Now the time had come to call in the debt. He ought to be grateful, I thought as I crossed the dimly lit floor of the data center from the elevators to my office.

But gratitude was not a word in Charles’s vocabulary.

“This idea stinks,” he told me with his usual reticence, when I explained what I had in mind. “The probability of your success is 1.157 percent greater than that of a snowball in hell.”

My idea, in a nutshell, was to “kite” wire transfers. Most people, at one time or another, have kited a check—usually without realizing that what they’re doing is illegal. You go to the supermarket on Saturday and cash a check for twenty dollars, though you don’t have the funds in your account to cover it. On Monday, before the check clears your bank, you cash another check—perhaps for thirty dollars this time—using twenty of it to cover the first check. And so on.

The only thing that prevents more people from playing this kind of roulette is that merchants these days can cash checks faster than we check-kiters can get to the bank to cover them. To stay ahead of the game and build up a whopping big sum, you need to keep track of exactly how long it takes for each bad check to reach your bank account so you can get there first. Conveniently—when it came to the wire transfer systems at the Bank of the World—such information was not only managed by computer, but the systems that managed it were mine.

I didn’t need Charles to tell me whether he liked my idea or not. I wanted him to tell me the probability of my success, using information he already had at his fingertips. For instance, how many “dummy” bank accounts should I set up to stash the dough? How many wire transfers should I “borrow” and return at any given time? How much money could I juggle in the air, without fear it would all come crashing down? And finally—how long could I get away with this game without getting caught?

To get the answers to these questions, I was willing to wait all night, regardless what sort of games Charles might choose to play. I sat, waiting for him to work his way into the right frame of mind, and I tapped my fingers on my government-issue, wood-veneer desk as I let my eyes wander around my office.

I had to admit that for a place where I spent, on average, a good twelve hours a day, it didn’t look lived in. At night, as now, under the fluorescent light, it seemed ghastly—a mausoleum. There was nothing at all on the built-in shelves; the single window looked out on the concrete wall of the opposite building. My only decor was the pile of books on the floor that I’d never bothered to shelve in the three years I’d been in this space. It was what one might call austere; I resolved to get a plant.

Charles broke in on my observations, to share a few of his own.

“Statistically,” he informed me, “women are more successful thieves than men. You commit more white-collar crimes—but fewer of you get caught.”

“Misogynist,” I said.

“Does not compute,” Charles replied. “I only report the facts as I see them. I don’t make value judgments.”

I was about to retort in kind, when he added petulantly, “I’ve run the risk factors you asked me for. Shall I give them to you—or do you want me to analyze them, too?”

I glanced at the wall clock; it was after ten, which meant after one A.M. in New York. I hated to offend Charles, but he was slow as molasses—I doubted he could analyze his belly button in the time we had left. As if my thoughts had been overheard by Divine Providence, a message was tapping itself out on my console:

“WE’RE TAKING HIM DOWN IN FIVE—PLEASE CLEAN UP.”

It was well past Charles’s bedtime, and his machine operators back in New York seemed to be shutting him down, as they did each night, for preventive maintenance.

“I NEED TEN,” I typed in impatiently. “HOLD YOUR HORSES.”

“MAINTENANCE WAS SCHEDULED AT 0100. WE NEED SLEEP TOO MADEMOISELLE. BUT BONNIE CHARLIE MISSES YOU. TAKE TEN, FRISCO. BEST REGARDS—BOBBSEY TWINS.”

Frisco indeed, I thought, as I “saved off” as fast as I could the work Charles had calculated for me. Charles might only be a million-dollar chunk of hardware, but sometimes computers have more valuable insights than people. I slipped the diskette into my sequined evening bag.

As I was about to log off the system, I remembered to print out my computer “mail messages” for the day, which my earlier chat with Kiwi had made me forget. Just before I shut down, Charles’s operators added a cheery last note on my screen:

“INTERESTING INQUIRY, FRISCO. PURELY THEORETICAL OF COURSE?”

“NO TIME TO CHAT—AND THOSE IN THE KNOW CALL IT SAN FRANCISCO,” I typed back. “I HAVE A NIGHT AT THE OPERA. TA-TA FOR NOW.”

“A NIGHT AT THE OPERA—A DAY AT THE BANK? T.T.F.N.,” they replied, and a blank screen came up.

I went out into the cold, wet night and headed back to the opera. The champagne was lousy at the opera, but the Irish coffee was