Deal Gone Bad - A Thriller (Frank Morrison Thriller Series Book 1)

by Tony Wiley

  The moment Morrison had been waiting for. He picked up his table napkin and wiped his mouth. He could see that Harris was eager to hear his response. His partner made every effort to appear detached, but Morrison saw through him.

  “If you stop sending tails,” he said, “I won’t tell him a thing.”

  Harris nodded. “Good,” he said.

  His relief was obvious.

  “Good …”

  Chapter 20

  Harris left at three thirty for an appointment in town, leaving Morrison alone in the diner. Together, they had enjoyed a long lunch, but Morrison was in no hurry to leave. For one thing, he expected that at this hour, Johnson would still be sleeping. For another, something had just caught his attention. Three booths down and suspended from the ceiling was a flatscreen TV set on a news channel. And Sheriff Sanford’s face had just appeared on it.

  The volume was set pretty low. Normally, if there had been people and conversations going on in the diner, as had been the case earlier, Morrison wouldn’t have been able to hear a thing. The room was fitted with a dozen booths and, apart from them, was sparsely furnished. Clear, knotty pine siding covered the walls up to the top of the booths, then from there up they were simply painted white. There were no heavy curtains or any trace of soft material anywhere. Nothing to absorb or dampen the sound. So despite the low volume, Morrison could pick up every single word emanating from up there.

  Not that it was absolutely necessary to understand what the spot was about. For that, he had only to look at Sheriff Sanford’s face. She was positively gleaming, in a serious-looking way. She stood tall, straight as a rod, shoulders back, chin up. Her big sheriff’s hat concealed the blond streaks in her brown hair and made her look even taller. With her striking, healthy physical presence, she dwarfed the reporter who kept throwing soft and easy questions at her. Of course, she hit each and every one of them straight out of the ballpark. Taking all the credit for uprooting a nasty ATM-skimming operation. Reaffirming her determination to serve and protect all of Acton County’s good citizens. Morrison smiled to himself. She was good. She was really good. He could see why she had won her first election. And would probably win a second one by a landslide again.

  After Sheriff Sanford, the news switched to the weather and Morrison lost interest. He had noticed a pile of newspapers at the entrance and was about to go get himself a copy when his mobile buzzed. It was a text message from Johnson. And it turned out he had been wrong about his hacker friend still being asleep. The message read, Come over. And don’t come empty-handed.

  Morrison was relieved but also puzzled. He had planned to wait until seven or eight in the evening before calling Johnson up. But now, barely five or six hours after last speaking to him, Johnson was already contacting him? Morrison was curious. What could Johnson possibly have for him now?

  Fortunately, there was no need to kill time anymore, so he forgot all about the newspaper, got up and left the diner.

  *

  On the road, for all his eagerness, Morrison made sure not to push the Navigator beyond the speed limit, a good exercise in restraint. That SUV kept screaming for more. In the cockpit, he was so totally isolated from the outside noises and the ride was so smooth that he could’ve blipped the throttle to one hundred miles an hour without noticing it.

  He came back into Acton from the north. Two miles short of downtown, he should have made a right, but he kept going straight. Morrison had taken Johnson’s quip about not coming empty-handed to extend beyond the money, so he stopped at Elena’s, bought whatever he could find there at this late hour and drove back up Main Street.

  Two miles further, he made a left against the incoming traffic and threaded his way through quiet leafy streets.

  Johnson lived in a neighborhood that went back to the fifties. By today’s standards, the houses that Morrison saw all around were small and modest, but they had been the bedrock of a really strong middle class. Back when hard work and dedication were enough to get you a nice cozy home with a car port, a front lawn and a gleaming white picket fence. It all looked a bit quaint and dated now, but boy would Morrison have loved to grow up in a place like this instead of the dilapidated trailer park up in the Finger Lakes he’d had the displeasure of calling home.

  As far as discreet houses went, Johnson’s pick was near perfect. Plain bungalow. White siding. Black door. Original aluminium windows. Some details never failed to bring a smile to Morrison’s face when he went there. Like the low chain-link fence painted black. The driveway covered with a fresh coat of asphalt sealant, swept clean of any dust. The impeccable lawn cut short. The single row of flowers along the narrow sidewalk linking the driveway to the front door. Everything was neat and tidy but in a drab and plain way. A little old lady’s house, you’d think, not the den of a world-class hacker. Which was precisely Johnson’s intent. His rigorous pursuit of anonymity even extended to cars. He always drove something at least four years old and never an import of any kind. Right now, a white Chevy Cobalt was taking shelter under the car port. Morrison nosed his Navigator into the driveway and parked right behind it. Then he walked the immaculate concrete path to the front door. Johnson opened it before he could ring the bell. Of course, his hacker friend had seen him coming on his monitoring system.

  “What have you got for me?” Johnson asked.

  Morrison raised the bag from Elena’s. Johnson grabbed it, moved over and let him in. The hacker had a quick peek into the bag and said, “What, no cinnamon bun?”

  “Sold out,” Morrison said, “but I got you good stuff anyway.”

  Johnson dug for an apple strudel. He took a big bite and led him downstairs to the basement. Where the real action took place.

  The pirate’s lair consisted of one big open room, all neat and tidy, just like the exterior. Heavy curtains were drawn on the small windows so nobody could peer inside. In the center was a big wooden table with three laptops, two large computer screens and a multifunctional printer. All around the room, bookcases lined the walls with hundreds if not thousands of books. When he didn’t work, Johnson was an avid and eclectic reader. He had told Morrison that’s what he preferred to do above anything else. As a matter of fact, he merely performed hacking duties to finance his reading time. Morrison had been there a few times. He figured that basement was a perfect place for thinking and working. The atmosphere was hushed and quiet with nothing to distract from whatever Johnson had to do at the moment.

  They sat down at the far end of the room, where a sofa and a comfortable leather chair cornered a glass coffee table. There was a single book on it. Morrison picked it up.

  “What are you reading these days?” Morrison asked.

  “Inward Bound by Abraham Pais,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “A recap of one hundred years of physics up to the late nineteen-eighties.”

  Physics was not really Morrison’s cup of tea. He leafed through the book and saw all those complex-looking equations everywhere.

  “Looks interesting,” he quipped.

  “If I ever understand one-third of that book,” Johnson said, “I’ll be a happy man.”

  Morrison nodded and put the book down. Then he took the rolls of money from his pockets and laid them on the table.

  “Now for something more prosaic,” he said.

  Johnson bowed his head slightly while munching on his strudel. He didn’t bother counting the money. Didn’t need to. He had an implicit trust in Morrison.

  “I was surprised to hear from you so soon,” Morrison said. “I thought you were a night owl.”

  “I still am,” said Johnson, who finished the pastry and wiped the crumbs off his fingers.

  Morrison looked puzzled. “Then how come?” he said.

  “My guy came back to me really fast. Woke me up, actually. He works during the day.”

  “Your guy?”

  “Yeah, I’ve outsourced a piece of what you’ve asked me. A smart man knows better than to want to do e
verything by himself, right?”

  “The same guy who checked the plate?”

  “Yep. He’s an up-and-coming. Quite good, actually.”

  “Why don’t you give me his number, then? He would probably charge me less than you do.”

  “In your dreams, Morrison.”

  That made Morrison tick. Not the money, of course. Johnson was worth every penny he paid him. No, what rankled him was the fact that Johnson was outsourcing some of his more delicate work. He didn’t mind it one bit for simple DMV checks. But to probe into their failed operation… He wasn’t very enthusiastic about the method. He would have preferred that Johnson keep that work closer to his chest.

  Johnson picked up on Morrison’s long pause. “I see what you’re thinking, Morrison,” he said, “but if you want to have results fast, and you told me you did, that’s the best way to go. Besides, the assignment I gave him was very specific. He doesn’t have a clue about the big picture.”

  “What have you given him?” Morrison asked.

  “Before you called me for that license plate this morning, I’d spent the night digging through some of the stuff concerning Chelfington Bank. I had to dig very deep. It was all buried way down there. But I was able to trace back some information and draw a simple schema of how I got into Chelfington’s servers three years ago. I gave some of that information to my guy and asked him to try to break in. Discreetly, of course.”

  Morrison knew his way around computers but compared to Johnson, he still felt like a jungle boy beating on a drum. How the hell did they manage that? First, they had to navigate huge networks. Identify which servers mattered and which didn’t. And once they knew where they were headed, they had to find a way to break in. Morrison looked up at Johnson with awe and amazement, just as gawkers probably did when Michelangelo painted his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. What Johnson did was just totally beyond him. And it all emanated from the basement of a little old lady’s bungalow in a quiet leafy neighborhood of Acton, NY.

  “And what did he find?” Morrison said.

  “Interesting stuff,” Johnson said.

  His guy had succeeded in breaking into a server that contained historical transactions going back ten years at Chelfington Bank. The bank from which Morrison and his crew had siphoned away two million dollars from two dozen ATMs in a little more than three hours. A flash operation that they had carefully prepared.

  Morrison had been in charge of the IT portion of that hit. He was the one who had hired Johnson and given him the specifications: target four hundred accounts linked to prepaid debit cards. Corporate accounts, not personal accounts. He didn’t want to go after mom-and-pop money. Each of these accounts had to contain at least ten thousand dollars. Then Johnson should waive the daily withdrawal limits on these accounts. And put their details on a USB key so he could pass the information along to his partners who would have fake debit cards made with them. Then foot soldiers would fan out with these and withdraw the two million dollars as fast as possible according to Morrison’s plan that tied each card to a specific amount. Nothing was left to chance. Everything was planned down to the last detail.

  None of the other four partners in the deal knew anything about Johnson. Only Morrison had ever had any contact with him. The others didn’t have a clue: did Morrison do all that by himself or did he have some help? To this day, he was pretty sure his partners still had differing opinions on the matter.

  So Johnson’s guy was able to track the accounts tapped at Chelfington and get some validations. In accounting, nothing was ever erased. Even when a mistake was made. Especially when a mistake was made. If you debited an account for amount X by error, you wouldn’t revert the situation by deleting the transaction, but rather by recording a new one with a credit that would offset the faulty debit. That way, you remedied the situation and still kept track of what caused it in the first place. The accounts that they tapped all showed such adjustments. In this case, the code referred precisely to “online and other types of fraud.” They all carried different amounts. That had been one of Morrison’s specs. Together, they came to a total of two million dollars. Not a cent more, not a cent less.

  “This is what we expected to find,” Morrison said when Johnson finished his recap. “But has he found anything that was not expected?”

  Johnson shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “I asked him to do an audit on two years’ worth of data. Starting with our deal.”

  “And he saw nothing,” Morrison said.

  “Nothing significant. Of course, there were traces of fraud here and there, as you would expect, but they were all individual occurrences. Nothing in scale and scope like what we had set up.”

  Morrison nodded. This was good. That meant nobody had used their breach to dig further into Chelfington’s coffers. He smiled at Johnson. “That’s good work, man,” he said. “Now you can have a look at the four other banks.”

  “I will,” Johnson said. He paused for a beat, then added, “And you expect we’re not gonna find anything, right?”

  Morrison nodded. “Right,” he said.

  But privately, he was not so sure.

  Chapter 21

  Morrison decided to stick around while Johnson got busy on his assignment. The hacker occupied a central position at his big table under a bright neon wash. The rest of the basement was sparse and dark, except for a discrete cone of light projected by a reading lamp in a corner. That’s where Morrison retreated. He sat in a comfortable chair with a book he’d picked almost at random from Johnson’s huge library. He enjoyed it, but it was not an attention grabber. His gaze kept shifting between the pages and the hacker’s table.

  Johnson had seriously gotten to work. He typed on his various keyboards in short frenetic bursts, peppering them machine-gun style. He used all three of his laptops and kept going between them in what appeared to Morrison as a random sequence. Knowing Johnson, it was surely a highly efficient and focused process. But for all his drive and energy at his desk, Johnson also seemed annoyed. He kept sighing. In a very discreet way at first. But soon, it became more and more audible. He even started to hit the keys with some brutality.

  When Johnson turned his head in an impatient gesture for the fourth or fifth time, Morrison asked, “Am I bothering you?”

  Johnson swiveled his chair to face him.

  “Yeah, a little,” he said.

  “Didn’t know you were so sensitive.”

  “It feels like you’re watching over my shoulder.”

  Morrison raised the book. “Just reading,” he said.

  “I know, but I’m used to working all alone in here.”

  “Want me to go?”

  Johnson tilted his head. “Don’t take it bad, Morrison, but I think it would be better, yeah.”

  Morrison knew where his interest lay. If Johnson was going to work more efficiently all alone, he certainly wasn’t going to stand in his way. He had a quick look at his watch. It was now 6:00 p.m. anyway.

  “OK, no problem,” he said. “Call me when you find something.”

  “Sure,” Johnson said. He nodded in his direction. “You can take the book with you, if you want.”

  Morrison closed it, got up and aimed for the staircase. Johnson swiveled back to face the wall of computer screens again.

  Before he left the room, Morrison said, “Have fun, man.”

  Johnson nodded and grinned. “Thanks, Morrison, I’m already having plenty.”

  Chapter 22

  Morrison left the house and got back to his Navigator. He had planned to stick around longer, until 7:00 p.m., but this was fine. He could now head straight to his next port of call. Most likely, there would be some waiting around to do. But a bar was just the right place for that anyway.

  As he threaded his way out of Johnson’s quiet neighborhood, Morrison saw that the driveways all around had filled back up. This was Friday. After a long week of hard labor, the workers had retreated home for their much-needed two days of re
spite. Johnson aside, the people who lived there wouldn’t be sitting around to earn their money. They wouldn’t be at the top of the food chain. Their position would mean they worked harder, faced tougher constraints and were subjected to more uncertainty than the average person. They had to scratch and scrabble. The mortgage, the car payments, the grocery bills. All carried a steep price. Morrison felt deep sympathy for them, but at the same time, he didn’t understand how anybody could subject themselves to such a regimen. He led the life he led in part because he needed to exercise full control over his own destiny. He relished that. Even if it meant he was at risk of losing his freedom from time to time.

  Morrison merged back onto Main Street and headed downtown through a thin trickle of traffic. There, he found an angled parking spot not too far from Flanagan’s Bar.

  He was not a regular at that bar. The few times he’d been there, he’d found the place OK.

  But he knew it was the haunt of the person he wanted to see next.

  Morrison pushed through the door and walked across a creaky old wooden floor up to the counter. The place was like a million other bars all around the state: brick walls, massive wooden posts and beams. Thin strips of clear maple or cherry wood on the floor, polished to a smooth, dull finish by years of stepping and stomping. Flatscreens above the central bar and on the walls. Hushed conversations mingled with a mix of classic rock songs from the last forty years. It felt cozy and comfortable the minute you walked in.

  He perched up on a stool, locked his feet on the foot rail and dropped his jacket on the stool next to him. There were two other patrons beside him at the angled bar. Two men, each sitting alone. He ordered a pint of IPA, took the book he’d borrowed from Johnson from his jacket pocket and got right back to it.

  While he was reading, he could hear the comings and goings. Friends greeting each other. Sudden bursts of laughter. All in all, not a very busy place, but not a dead spot either. He kept on reading without paying too much attention to his surroundings, only raising his head to order another beer.