A Calculated Risk Read online

  The Bank of the World was a very big bank—perhaps, as its name suggested, the biggest bank in the world. Because of its size, the bank had plenty of rules—so many that no one had time to read them all, much less to follow them.

  There were whole departments whose sole function was to churn out new rules, and often they quarreled with each other over whose rules were the “official” ones. My desk was buried each week under new standards and procedures from groups I’d never heard of. The documents were duly filed by Pavel in the red-tape file, and promptly forgotten. I knew I’d find, amid all those reams of bureaucratic bullshit, something suitable to my purpose. After all, if there were so many conflicting rules governing the managing of money, there must be one that would enable me to steal some and prove Kiwi to be the irresponsible fool I knew he was.

  It took the better half of the day before I found it: a packet of brand-new procedures from Wholesale Information Planning Systems, or “WHIPS,” as they liked to call themselves. I knew the WHIPS group well; they were the most prolific policy setters at the bank. They’d set a record for producing useless paper. In this case, however, I felt sure there’d be an excellent use for their freshly hatched policy. It took a bit of imagination, but fantasy was always my strong suit. The first words that caught my eye were: “This methodology was used with great success at United Trust, to test their security systems.”

  How convenient.

  It was a method known as Theory Z. I already knew plenty about it; it made me want to vomit. It was an import from Japan, and when it had first been touted in the business journals as the latest management vogue, I’d thought it was the most ruthless attack by the Japanese since Pearl Harbor. But now that I was a theoretical thief, Theory Z took on a whole new color. The color was rose.

  The general idea was that managers were wholly unnecessary; everything in Japan, we were told, was carried out by little faceless teams called quality circles. They did everything required to make a product—designed it, built it, tested it—and all decisions were made by mutual consent: management by committee. The banking community loved it, they embraced it, they practically enshrined it. But they weren’t really sure exactly what to do with it.

  I thought I could tell them.

  I buzzed Pavel and asked him to get United Trust on the phone, pronto, and connect me with their head of security systems. He’d only have to say, in his golden voice, that the Bank of the World was calling, and they’d jump to. Money talks—and the bank was as rich as Croesus, even in a bear market.

  Pavel buzzed me back with the news that the security head was on the line. “He’s a veep, and the guy’s name—I swear—is Mr. Peacock.”

  “Yes, Ms. Banks,” Peacock’s voice bounded exuberantly over the line. (New York bankers always address you as “Ms.”—they’re really with it in New York.) “We do use Theory Z here; we use a quality circle to test all our systems. We put our best and brightest in this group.”

  According to Mr. Peacock, his quality circle was trying to break through security and fiddle about with the money—trying to trick the security and control systems, to see if they were smart enough to catch them. The reports of his findings must have been pretty hot stuff.

  “For security testing, the name of our quality circle is the SADO team,” he told me. “It stands for Search and Destroy On-line!” He bellowed with laughter. (A trait in our industry is to turn everything into an acronym. I refer to this as the BOME—the Bane of My Existence.)

  “So far,” he went on, “we’ve managed to crack our confidential customer password files, we’ve pulled off two active taps, and we planted a logic bomb only last week—we’re still waiting for the explosion! Ha-ha.”

  These things were far from mysterious; an active tap means you tap into a phone line while data (read “money”) is being moved, and alter the transaction—change the amount, or make it payable to your account—as opposed to a passive tap, where you “borrow” someone’s bank account number and password and take his money.

  A logic bomb is more interesting, but you must have access to the computer to do it; you fix the system so that at a certain moment in the future it will suddenly do something it’s never done before—like depositing money in your account, as a random example.

  I was glad Mr. Peacock was so eager to share his experience with a total stranger. But I’d learned what I needed to know, and it had little to do with the success of his work.

  I’d be sending out a new proposal tonight. A new idea deserved a new audience—and this one was a dilly: the Managing Committee, the group of big cheeses who decided how budgets would be spent at the bank. Their authority transcended all departments—including Kiwi’s—and though he didn’t sit on the committee, his boss was its chairman.

  Using the information Charles had provided me the night before, I built my case. Were they concerned about the defenseless position of our systems? They should be, I told them—even a six-year-old kid could crack our files! But known computer crimes were only the tip of the iceberg; how many crimes had gone unreported? Bankers ought to know the answer to that better than anyone, I thought. They were the ones who didn’t report the crimes. Depositors wouldn’t like to learn that the cash they thought was behind twelve feet of concrete and steel was in fact being shot around the world on telephone wires, with all the security of a transatlantic call.

  Once I’d whipped up their fears, I hit high gear: we had the technique, right here at the bank, to solve this dire problem—Theory Z, that wonderful method used so successfully by the Japanese!—a technique that was now official policy, with rave reviews, at major New York banks like United Trust. If the Managing Committee would approve my funding, I’d personally pick the experts and break into our own security, just like that. After all—how else was I going to do it?

  I felt wonderful as I handed the proposal to Pavel in an envelope and asked him to stamp every copy urgent and confidential, and to get them out that night. I was confident no one on the committee would oppose it—it found use for a new theory and solved an old problem. Opposing it would be like putting the squelch on mothers and apple pie. Far from being victimized or suspected as a potential thief, I might actually be awarded laurels for ripping off the money and then handing it back with a flourish: Verity Banks, electronic bankette.

  I’d avoided Kiwi by staying locked in my office all day. At eight P.M., I pulled on my trench coat, stuffed my work in my shoulder bag, and took the elevator down to the garage. It was dark and deserted, but I knew there were seeing-eye cameras everywhere, so if someone mugged me, the guys upstairs at the security desk could watch it in comfort. I drove up the ramp, popped my badge in the scanner, waited for the big steel gates to swing open, then drove through the fog-thick streets toward home.

  When I pulled up before my building, the black streets were still wet with rain. It took quite a while to find a parking slot, but at last I got inside the lighted marble foyer and took the elevator to the penthouse.

  I never turned on the lights when I came home. I loved to see the silhouettes of my myriad orchids against the distant lights of the city. Almost everything in my apartment was white—the plumpy sofas, the thick carpets, the lacquered étagères. The tables were thick wedges of glass, and on them were big glass bowls floating white gardenias.

  Entering the apartment, one had the feeling of falling through space. The city glittered and shimmered in perpetual mist through the walls of glass, and the white orchids tumbled everywhere, like a jungle climbing up through a cloud.

  As much as I loved it, I rarely brought others here. My apartment got mixed reviews and I knew many thought it was a mausoleum or museum to my own isolation. The white womb. And in a way, that’s exactly what it was. I’d worked my ass off for everything I’d earned. And I spent it on what I valued—peace and solitude. A city mountaintop.

  After dinner, I spent the time needed with Charles, to finish calculating the risk. I already knew I was talking about enormous su
ms of money. Billions a day moved through the bank’s wire systems, and though it couldn’t all disappear at once without being missed, I knew I could juggle a big chunk of that money for extended periods. The question was, how big a chunk? And how should I spread it around to best conceal my activities?

  I also wanted to see how much the risk increased, from the perspective of international crime apprehension—which was why I’d gone to Charles in the first place. He could give me data about the number of crimes per year, audits per year, and the kinds of crimes disclosed through audit or by other means. After jotting some notes from last night’s chat with Charles, I was ready to begin:

  “GIVE ME THE SPREAD ON DOMESTIC ELECTRONIC MISAPPROPRIATIONS ON A FIVE-YEAR PLOT,” I tapped in.

  “YOU MAY SPEAK IN ENGLISH,” said Charles, “I’M A USERFRIENDLY MACHINE.”

  “HOW MUCH MONEY HAS BEEN STOLEN IN THE LAST FIVE YEARS USING COMPUTERS?”

  “STOLEN FROM WHERE?” asked Charles. My patience was beginning to wear thin.

  “DOMESTIC,” I repeated, banging my fingers down on the keys.

  “YOU WANT TO KNOW HOW MUCH MONEY’S BEEN STOLEN FROM PEOPLE’S HOMES?” he asked innocuously. Wise-ass.

  “WITHIN THE CONTINENTAL UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,” I said. “DON’T PLAY GAMES.”

  “I AM TRAINED TO SCAN FOR LOGIC—NOT FOR HIDDEN MEANING,” Charles pointed out.

  He went off to tax his brain—a rather rusty one, I had to admit. He was a computer of ancient but rare vintage, and despite his personality, I couldn’t help hoping he’d still be in service a dozen years hence. I knew exactly how old Charles was; I’d known him most of his life. In fact, if it weren’t for me, he wouldn’t be alive today.

  When I’d finished school twelve years earlier, my first job had been with the gigantic New York computer company Monolith Corp. Like most programmers, I was always searching for an all-night data center where I could get time on the big machines; and one day I found one as I was flipping through our massive Data Center Guide to Manhattan. It was called the Scientific Data Center—and judging by the address, no one in his right mind would go up there at night.

  That evening, I took a cab to the small, grimy office building sandwiched between dark and foreboding warehouses, not far from the waterfront at East End. There was no night guard—not even a door buzzer—only a hand-pulled elevator that I found off the alleyway at the rear. Hoisting myself to the sixth floor, where the center was allegedly located, I found the sorry little room.

  The space was barely large enough to squeeze in all the computers—you had to climb over them to get at the drives—and bunches of cable were hanging everywhere, even from the ceiling. There was an inch deep of soot over all; it looked like a cross between a car repair shop and a spaghetti factory. How could machines keep running in all that filth and disorder?

  The night operators—two Brits, both named Harris—were amazed and thrilled to see me there. No one had visited this center in years, and they spent each lonely night playing chess, Go, and mah-jongg with the computers.

  The center itself, as I learned, was actually an archive for the United States government—its only client—and had been accumulating data, year after year, through some forgotten regulation requiring off-site backup of historical government records.

  That was the night I first met Charles—Charles the bonny, Charles the fair, Charles whose wonderful, earth-shattering repository of knowledge would keep me dazzled for years. And no one knew that he was there at all—or what his existence was worth—but me!

  Over the years, Charles’s data on transportation, banking, and a half-dozen other government-regulated industries had helped me with a myriad of jobs. My clients thought I was a genius when I pulled from thin air those impressive figures that should have called for years of research.

  When Charles “came down” each night at one o’clock, the Harrises would leave and take a meal with me at a shabby Italian restaurant down the street, whose neon sign provided the only light on the dismal block. Through a chicken-wire fence beside the table, we watched old men playing bocci for bottles of cheap Chianti; we ate pasta and veal parmigiana, and sang old Neapolitan street songs. And it was there—nearly a year later—that the Harrises told me in hushed whispers that Charles’s life was about to end.

  Machines do not grow old as people do—with their loved ones and lawyers clustered about their bedside awaiting the last gasp. Charles’s model number had come up on the official “obsolescence list”—which meant that one day soon, with little fanfare, he’d be picked up, thrown in the back of a truck, and hauled off to a company that would “reclaim” the precious metals in his wiring and sell off the rest of him for scrap. It seemed a sorry fate for a computer as wonderful as Charles. And not only that; if Charles were scrapped, a new machine would be installed in his place, and someone might learn what a gold mine of data he had tucked away in his little core banks.

  So, one morning, I went into the contracts department at Monolith Corp., pulled all the paperwork on Charles, and stamped it sold to the U.S. government. Voilà! Charles disappeared from the list of corporate fixed assets. I predated his “sale” to the previous year so that no one would notice it during this year’s audit. The government would still pay for operating the center—a monthly rate, with the cost of Charles built into the price of the service. And Monolith Corp. would still maintain the facility—thinking the government now owned Charles, and was continuing to pay them only for service and premises.

  Looking back, I found that the acquisition of Charles was my first illegal act. He’d been reborn, thanks to me, into a life of crime, so it wasn’t surprising that now he was helping me to plot another.

  But as valuable as his data might be, speed was scarcely Charles’s middle name. It was well past his bedtime by the time he’d finished chunking out the one-page bits of graphs I’d requested, and I still had to paste them together by hand to see what they said:

  Of $25 million in known computer thefts that had taken place over the last five years, only $5 million had been recovered. Across the top of my chart I’d printed a schedule in weeks—fifty-two—for one year. Down the side of the chart were bank accounts, by thousands, from one to fifty. The numbers Charles had printed across the page showed how much money (per week) I could deposit in each block of one thousand accounts. Over the top of all this—in little red X’s—Charles had printed the graph that showed risk, by weeks and by dollar volume. The graph went off the page when I hit $10 million—not bad for a few months’ work.

  I poured myself a cognac and sat in darkness, watching the lights of a small boat as it sailed back from Tiburon to the San Francisco harbor. The fog had thinned, but I couldn’t see the stars. It was altogether a lovely night to be alive, and in San Francisco. At such a moment, it was impossible even to imagine the brink of the decision upon which my life was now suspended. I chose not to think of it at all.

  Suddenly, the phone rang, jiggling a few blossoms off the cymbidium on the glass table. I spilled a drop of brandy and wiped it away with my finger—then picked up the phone.

  “Hello,” said the old familiar voice. “You called?”

  It was a soft, gentle voice, with the edge of a knife in it—the kind that makes chills in your spine, even if you think you’re impervious.

  “Why, Mr. Turing!” I said. “Just imagine hearing from you after all these years; I thought you’d passed away in 1953!”

  “Old technocrats never die,” said Tor, “nor do we fade away. Not when we have little protégées like thou, to keep us on our toes!”

  “Protégée,” I pointed out, “means someone who’s sheltered—protected. That’s hardly been the case with you and me.”

  “Protecting you from yourself is more like it,” he admitted cheerfully.

  “Isn’t it a bit late to be calling for a chat?” I said. “Have you any idea what time it is?”

  “The birds are chirping in the trees here, my dear, I’ve been tr
ying to reach you all night. It seems your phone was tied up.”

  “What exactly is it that’s so important it can’t wait?”

  “Don’t try to deny anything. I get my information from a firsthand source: Charles Babbage, I believe he calls himself. You know quite well that I’m on a first-name basis with every computer in the country.”

  I knew quite well that this was the image Tor liked to project—but it didn’t explain how he’d learned about Charles. I felt the throbbing behind my eyes and took another slug of brandy.

  “How could you possibly know about Charles?” I asked. “He doesn’t even exist on paper.”

  “That’s certainly true, my dear,” he agreed. “You pulled his dossier years ago, didn’t you? And you’ve been using him ever since—”

  “Have you any proof of these accusations?” I said, knowing the answer already.

  “My dearest girl, does the pope ski in Gstaad?” he said charmingly. “If you were in my place, could you think of any reason that someone would—in the course of a few short hours—wish to review the Federal Reserve security standards, the American national standards for money transfer, all the historical archives on all the international wire transfer services—and the FBI criminal records archives on interstate wiretap convictions …?”

  “I’m a banker—it’s my job to be interested in the security of financial systems,” I said, rallying with the sort of indignation that can be mustered only by the genuinely guilty. “It might look suspicious, I admit—”

  “Suspicious! Premeditated, is what it looks like! You falsified the records of that computer over ten years ago! Breaking into confidential files with a stolen computer—”

  “No one makes them dump their silly files there, do they?”

  “Does he,” Tor corrected. “My dear young woman—I’m afraid I know you far too well to write off your actions to idle curiosity. You could carry out that foolish job you have with both hands tied, and blindfolded. These attempts at girlish naïveté, I’m afraid, have left me quite unmoved. Now, I’d like to ask you a simple question—and receive a sincere answer—after which you may go to bed.”