by Jack Batten
“In Beaulieu, across from the supermarket. Because he refuses to be seen entering this apartment or to have you be seen at his.”
“Seen by whom?”
“I just look after the quotes around here, and that one’s verbatim.”
“Well, keep the vodka chilled,” I said.
The sign across the front of the Café des Nations claimed that it had opened its doors in 1897. On the sidewalk under the sign there were four or five arrangements of chipped metal tables and chairs. They could have been circa 1897. I didn’t see anyone at the tables who looked like David Nestor, pudgy and under the legal drinking age. The legal drinking age in France was probably twelve and a half anyway.
I went into the cafe. The bar started immediately inside the door on the right and ran most of the length of the smallish room. The bar was zinc and unostentatious, a surface for resting glasses between drinks. More chipped metal tables lined the wall on the left. Overhead a big fan revolved in slow motion, leaving the thick cigarette smoke undisturbed. The customers were mostly men who had the blue work uniforms and browned faces of manual labourers. The house wine at the Café des Nations wouldn’t be Pouilly-Fuissé.
David Nestor was the only drinker with a table all to himself. It was the end table in the row on the left. Nestor also seemed to be the only drinker drinking coffee.
I sat at the table. “Is it the down-to-earth quality you like here, Professor, compared to the groves of academe?”
“This is the first time I have been in the place, Mr. Crang, and the last,” Nestor said. He was trying to sound angry. It came out prissy. “That was the point of meeting you where no one knows me. As I tried to make plain to Miss Cooke, I want the least possible connection with you and the disreputable contents of your disk.”
“How disreputable?”
“Don’t play dumb with me, Mr. Crang. Criminally disreputable.”
Even in petulance, Nestor’s chubby face didn’t show a line or wrinkle. His eyes were small, as if tiny buttons had been pressed into the flesh. His hair was straw-coloured, thinning, and combed flat on his scalp. It was like sitting at a table with the Pillsbury Doughboy.
“Obviously,” Nestor said, “what has occurred is that someone has diverted funds from a second party to his own use.”
“You can tell that from what’s on the disk?”
From the expression on Nestor’s face, I might have asked about the Pope being Catholic.
“All right, Professor,” I said, “I’m presuming on your good nature. There were strong indications to me that the disk’s owner had been up to a piece of flimflam. I’ll confess to that. But I have nothing on how or how much the man stole.”
“I prefer ‘divert’.”
“And I’ll respect your preference,” I said. “How much did he divert?”
“Twenty-three million dollars.”
“Hey, I nailed the figure exac — how much?”
“Twenty-three million.”
“Not three?”
“Twenty-three million.”
“Oh my goodness.”
I didn’t register that the bartender had come out from behind the bar and was standing at our table.
“M’sieur?” he said to me.
My eyes took in the bartender’s presence, but my mind was stalled back at the twenty-three million dollars.
“M’sieur?” the bartender repeated. He was a muscular Latin type and had a chunky gold chain showing through the unbuttoned top of his shirt.
“What do you want, Mr. Crang?” Nestor asked impatiently. “Beer? A glass of wine?”
“Something stronger.”
“Le monsieur désire une boisson forte,” Nestor said to the bartender.
“Ah, oui. Un pastis?”
“If it’s got a jolt, I’ll try it,” I said. “Oui, un pastis.”
The bartender left to pour my drink. Nestor drew a newspaper from below the table. It was folded around a plain brown envelope. The newspaper was Nice Matin.
“I want these off my hands, Mr. Crang.” Nestor shoved the Nice Matin across the table. “The optical disk is in the envelope with a printout of what is on it. And I assure you, this is the only printout I made.”
Nestor started to rise from his chair.
“Not yet, Professor,” I said, “I need some interpretation. How do I account for the twenty-three million? Come on, let’s kiss and make up.”
“The printout is perfectly clear on how the diversion was managed.”
“But I don’t know a modem from first base,” I said. “You’re the expert.”
Nestor hung in the air, half in and half out of his chair.
“Word has it,” I said, “where computers are concerned, you’re in the genius division.”
Nestor was wavering.
I said, “Who else has the erudition plus the pedagogical talent to explain the workings of the disk to a bumpkin like me?”
Nestor’s rump dropped back on the chair. “It was actually a rather ingenious piece of interception,” he said.
The bartender put a small, thin glass and a pitcher of water in front of me. The glass held one ice cube and a pale green liquid. I poured water into the glass. Its contents swirled in little clouds, like something inside a beaker from the laboratory of Count Dracula. I took a swallow.
“Anything happening to me on the outside?” I asked Nestor. “Fangs sprouting? Other weird growths?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Never mind,” I said. I had another sip. “This stuff tastes like licorice.”
“That’s what everybody says,” Nestor said.
“Then we should move to more original topics,” I said. “The diversion.”
“Yes,” Nestor said. He sounded instantly professorial. “It took only three minutes and thirty-seven seconds —”
“How do you know?”
“There is a timing device on the disk,” Nestor said. “Well, then, the diversion began at exactly eleven o’clock on the morning of March fourteenth —”
“Amazing.”
“What is?”
“That you have all this exact data.”
“Mr. Crang, I haven’t got near to describing anything remotely amazing as yet.” Nestor laid his plump forearms on the table. He gave me a schoolmarmish look. “Furthermore, if you expect me to continue, you will have to stop interrupting.”
“Promise,” I said. “I’m all ears and no mouth.”
“Very well.” Nestor unpursed his lips. “The money came from the account of a company called ErnMax, the twenty-three million dollars. At the time I’m speaking of, March fourteenth at eleven a.m., a transfer was taking place. You will have heard of Cayuga & Granark, I suppose, the trust company. Well, they had the twenty-three million in an account at their Toronto office. They were moving it by computer to another account in a Swiss bank. In Zurich, as a matter of fact, but that isn’t entirely relevant because the money didn’t get there. The person who made the diversion tapped into the Cayuga & Granark computer precisely at the moment of the transfer of ErnMax’s twenty-three million.”
“You can call him Jamie,” I said. “Less troublesome than repeating ‘the person who made the diversion’ each time.”
“Yes, all right.” Nestor didn’t appear to mind the interruption. “Well, this is the stage where it becomes quite clever on the part of, ah, Mr. Jamie. You see, no one could simply break into the ErnMax account. There were safeguards in the form of entry codes. I’m keeping this very simple, Mr. Crang, but basically ErnMax had four entry codes. They were changed at regular intervals. Two codes were new each day, the other two each week. You follow me?”
I nodded.
Nestor went on. “And before anyone could access the account, he would have to know the entry codes for that particular day and that par
ticular week.”
“Which the man we’re calling Jamie, mostly because that’s his name, knew.”
Nestor smiled. “No, he did not.” The smile was owlish. It added ten years to Nestor’s face. “Mr. Jamie knew the first three entry codes. That’s clear from the material on the disk. He didn’t know the fourth code. And this is where I give him high marks as a programmer. He used his knowledge of the first three codes to run through all possibilities until he arrived at the correct fourth code. And he managed it in three minutes and thirty-seven seconds. Very impressive piece of work.”
“But morally reprehensible.”
“Oh, of course. I was only speaking of technique.”
“Understood,” I said. “What was Jamie’s move after he cracked the code?”
“He diverted the twenty-three million dollars to a numbered account at the Banco di Napoli in Monaco.”
I took a long swallow of pastis.
“Whew,” I said.
“Quite,” Nestor said.
A man standing at the bar was staring at me. He had bushy black hair and a heavy drinker’s flush. He was wearing a sweater that had Pittsburgh Boomers spelled across the front. The sweater rode over a bulging gut. Pittsburgh Boomers? Pittsburgh had the Pirates, the Penguins, and the Steelers. No Boomers. The French love sweaters and T-shirts with American sports logos, but they keep getting the names wrong. French jeans don’t fit right either. The guy was still staring.
“But,” I said to David Nestor, “wouldn’t someone on Cayuga & Granark’s computer take notice that funny things were happening to the ErnMax account?”
“Well, right now, of course, I’m sure the trust company and the ErnMax people are aware that the Zurich account doesn’t record a twenty-three-million-dollar deposit.”
“That wasn’t my question,” I said. “I’m talking about the three minutes and thirty-seven seconds of diversion on March fourteenth. During that period, could there have been a tipoff to Cayuga & Granark? Some sign that the Zurich transfer wasn’t proceeding according to plan?”
“Oh, definitely. When the Mr. Jamie person made his interception, there would be a very perceptible voltage drop in the Cayuga & Granark computer. That would be enough to warn the operators of the unauthorized entry.”
“Then what are we missing?”
“Missing?”
“Jamie got his hands and his computer on the twenty-three million. But I’m certain C&G doesn’t yet know as much about the diversion, or where the money’s gone, as you and I sitting here on the Côte d’Azur know.”
“Hmm, yes. Well, there might have been a way of concealing the interception. But I can’t think how.”
“Maybe I can.”
The guy in the Pittsburgh Boomers sweater had his hand on the bartender’s shoulder. His other hand was pointing in my direction. The bartender shook his head, as if to say that, as far as he was concerned, I was a stranger in these parts. That didn’t stop the Boomer from continuing his vigil on me.
“Suppose,” I said to Nestor, “a breakdown happened at C&G’s computer at eleven o’clock on March fourteenth.”
Nestor started to answer. I stopped him. I hadn’t got the memory straight in my head. What had Trum Fraser said when we had lunch at Coaster’s? The company’s computer had gone on the fritz. The crisis had lasted a few minutes before order was restored. The date of the breakdown seemed to me about right, two or three weeks before Trum and I had had lunch, which would place the computer trouble close to March fourteenth.
“Yeah,” I said to Nestor. “Theorize with this, Professor. C&G’s computer malfunctioned, and Jamie made his entry simultaneously.”
“The computer was down?”
“Whatever term you people use.”
“Well, a large corporation such as Cayuga & Granark protects itself against all eventualities. If the main computer went down, a backup would take over.”
“But there’s a transition period from the main to the backup?”
Nestor’s owlish smile spread across his face. “Yes, I see what you’re getting at,” he said. “That’s very shrewd.”
“Not of me. Of Jamie.”
“When the backup computer was taking over, during that short period, it wouldn’t be possible for the operators at Cayuga & Granark to record the drop in voltage.”
“Or to record the fact of the diversion? “
“The diversion would in effect be masked,” Nestor said. There was a note of admiration in his voice. “An arrangement like that would require impeccable timing.”
“That’s been a specialty of Jamie’s,” I said. “So far.”
There was a telephone next to a video game at the end of the bar. No one was playing the video game, but someone was making a phone call. The Pittsburgh Boomer was talking rapidly into the mouthpiece.
I said to Nestor, “So we can assume that C&G’s computer people were oblivious to the diversion during the three minutes Jamie tapped in.”
“And thirty-seven seconds.”
“Them too.”
“As I say, the coordination …”
“Would have to be perfect,” I said. “Sure. Let’s give Jamie perfection right down the line, just for the sake of our theory. My next question is this, would the C&G computer itself, either the main one or the backup, record the diversion even if the operators didn’t notice it?”
Nestor needed time to think about the question. He made faint humming noises as he thought. His gaze floated somewhere over my right shoulder.
“No,” he said. His eyes focussed back on me. “In all probability, given a transfer between computers at the same time as Mr. Jamie’s interception, the diversion wouldn’t show up on the trust company computers.”
I patted the copy of Nice Matin that was folded around the brown envelope. “It seems to me we’ve got an exclusive in here,” I said.
“If you mean Mr. Jamie’s disk is the only record of the diversion,” Nestor said, “that appears to be true.”
“Jamie is his first name.”
“Oh.”
“And I won’t burden you with his last name.”
“Thank you.” Nestor nudged the Nice Matin closer to my side of the table. “You know, Mr. Crang,” he said, “your, um, theory is intriguing. But it leaves unanswered questions.”
“Well, yeah, a loose end here and there probably needs tying up.”
“Much more than a loose end. For instance, how was Jamie certain that the trust company’s main computer would go down when it did, at exactly eleven o’clock on March fourteenth?”
“He couldn’t induce the breakdown from his computer at home?”
“Hardly.”
“Let’s see,” I said. How had Trum Fraser put it? Some kind of massive short circuit? “How does this strike you, Professor?” I said to Nestor. “A short circuit in the computer?”
Nestor got a pitying look on his face.
“On a really large scale?” I tried.
Nestor shook his head. “And don’t tell me about an act of God either,” he said.
“You got any ideas?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s patently clear.” Nestor sounded superior. “Your Jamie had assistance. Someone else downloaded the system just before Jamie made his entry.”
“Downloaded? That means putting the main computer out of operation?”
“Roughly.”
“Okay,” I said. “Jamie and a confederate synchronized their watches. At a couple of minutes before eleven on the morning of the fourteenth, the confederate commenced sabotage on the main computer. Two minutes later, Jamie tapped in.”
Nestor nodded in a way that conveyed wisdom. “That’s the scenario I had in mind,” he said.
“Could the computer be sabotaged in two minutes?”
“Downloaded?” Nestor raised his eyebrow
s. “Probably in less than two minutes. But you would have to find the confederate and ask him.”
“I will.”
“You know who the confederate is?”
“I’ve got a choice suspect.”
“Really?” Nestor considered that for a moment. “Well,” he said, “I think you’ve probably told me enough, Mr. Crang, especially about personalities.”
I smiled charmingly at Nestor. He smiled back owlishly.
“How about a drink, Professor?” I asked. “Celebrate the evening’s accomplishments.”
“That might be nice. A Perrier for me, please.”
I looked up for the bartender. The guy in the Pittsburgh Boomers sweater had his back to me. He was offering a glad hand to a man who had just come through the door. I recognized the newcomer. He was the junior of les frères Clutch, Emile the Stove.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
If it was possible for a man with the contours of a kitchen appliance to look natty, Emile Clutch pulled off the feat. He had on a three-button single-breasted glen-plaid jacket, a white shirt with French cuffs, a wine-red tie in a Windsor knot, and grey herringbone trousers. Mike Rolland must have put Emile on a generous clothing allowance.
But money couldn’t spruce up Emile’s face. It was broad and flat and battered. The features were crammed towards the centre, leaving vast areas of forehead and jaw. His eyes had the warmth of two stones.
“Professor,” I said to Nestor, “I don’t want you to panic.”
“Do I have reason to?” he asked quickly. He was panicking.
“Someone has come into the cafe who isn’t altogether friendly to me and my good works.”
“He wants the optical disk?” Nestor slapped both hands on the table. “This is exactly the sort of trouble I wanted to avoid.”
“I think what happened is Mike Rolland —”
“Don’t mention names.”
“— Mr. X did the French equivalent of putting my description on the street, and Pittsburgh Boomer over there got lucky.”
Nestor started to turn his head toward the bar.
“Don’t turn around, Professor,” I said. “Keep your eyes on me. That’s right. Pretend we’re a couple of guys having a time on the town.”
