A Calculated Risk

by Katherine Neville

  In the United States alone, about three hundred trillion dollars a year are moved through the wire transfer systems in this fashion—more than the total assets of all the banks in the country added together. Those banks have no idea how much cash they’ve paid out until they close at the end of each day and add up the total wires they’ve received.

  There are also many countries whose governments are uneasy that money can fly across the border without passing the customs officials for taxes to be levied. Who knows whether some Iranian is moving money from Salzburg to San Jose a dozen times a day—and how can something be regulated that’s happening with the confidentiality of a gentlemen’s handshake in a private club? The rules governing banking have been around for aeons; the rules about wire transfers fill a three-by-five note card. If any banking activity needed better security, this was it. That’s what I was banking on.

  But like any banker with black ink in her veins, I never rushed blindly into new ventures. My grandfather, Benjamin Biddle Banks—Bibi—had taught me the rules of the game when I was four years old. “Always calculate the risk,” he’d said. Too bad he hadn’t followed his own advice. Bibi had owned a small chain of California banks he’d built from nothing. Though he was hardly in the same class as Wells Fargo, the Bank of America, or the Bank of the World, his little banks filled a need that no one else had met. Just after the great depression, when California was flooded with Hispanic migrant workers, Russian and Armenian immigrants, all looking for jobs, Bibi—through clever financing and unshakable principles—helped those people get on their feet, buy small plots of land for farms or ranches, and become the economic backbone that saved California from the fate suffered for decades by the rest of the civilized world.

  In the 1960s, when conglomeration became a household word and my grandfather’s chain went public, a group of midwestern businessmen quietly bought up his stock and—not so quietly—forced Bibi into a nonvoting, advisory job on his own board, where he could watch the blatant pillaging of the institution he’d spent a lifetime to build. He died within the year. That was the day I decided—bloodlines or no—that banking wasn’t the career for me. I went to New York, studied data processing instead, and became a high-priced Manhattan technocrat.

  It was the cruelest trick of a not-so-benevolent fate that the second company I worked for was bought in another leveraged buyout, just like the one that destroyed Bibi—but this time, by none other than the Bank of the World. I stayed for the transfer to San Francisco, because they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: money and power and the highest position ever held by a female executive—or any twenty-two-year-old—in the entire history of the bank. I was so impressed that I’d stayed ten years.

  But they still treated me as if I needed a teacher’s pass and an escort to go to the powder room. I’d sold my soul, and my grandfather’s hopes and dreams, for a lifetime of reflected glory and a bronze plaque with a title on my desk. Instead of reading “Verity Banks, Vice-President,” it should have read “The Whore of Banking,” I thought. But it was never too late to change the cards fate had dealt you. Bibi had told me that, too, and I thought he was right.

  Furthermore, I now had the right cards up my sleeve.

  My plan was to break through the automated security systems, get into the wire transfer system, and move some money to a place where no one could find it—then blow the whistle and point out to everyone how easy it had been.

  A banker’s first responsibility is to safeguard the money that others entrust to him. If I could cut through bank security like a hot knife through butter, and get my hands on actual dough, it would not only freeze the sneer on Kiwi’s 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 preventi
ve 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 terrific. I ordered one before I went back to my box, and was sipping the whipped cream off the top as I watched the gods walk over the rainbow bridge and enter Valhalla. The golden strains of music wafted over me and the whiskey warmed my bones. I mellowed so much that I nearly forgot about Kiwi, my aborted job, my ruined career, my failed life—my idiotic idea of retribution by showing up the entire banking system. Who was I kidding? But that was before I looked at the note.

  The crescendos of music were rolling over the footlights in waves as I glanced at the crumpled wet piece of paper containing those mail messages I’d printed off just as I’d left my office. There were the usual—my tailor, my caterer, my dentist, a few from my staff—and one that, the time stamp indicated, had come in just after I’d finished talking with Charles in New York. I could feel the slow, heavy throb in my ears as I read the last message:

  If you want to discuss your project, do call.—As always,

  Alan Turing.

  This was disturbing on two counts. First, Alan Turing was a pretty famous fellow—a computer wizard and a mathematician—and he didn’t know me from Adam. Second, he’d been dead for close to forty years.

  A DAY AT THE BANK

  An organized money market has many advantages. But it is not a school of social ethics or political responsibility.

  —R. H. Tawney

  It came to me in a flash that next morning after my night at the opera—as I stood drinking orange juice under a scalding shower—who Alan Turing, the phantom phone caller, really was.

  Turing—the real one—was a math whiz from Cambridge who went on to develop some of the earliest digital computers. In his short life, only forty-one years, he became one of the leading figures in British data processing, and was widely regarded as the father of artificial intelligence.

  Most computer types had read his works at some time or another—but I knew someone who was such an expert, he’d lectured on them. He was one of the foremost computer gurus in the United States—a technocrat of the first water.

  He’d been my mentor twelve years earlier, when I’d first gone to New York. He was the most reclusive person I’d met—a man of a thousand faces and as many accomplishments. I might know more about him than anyone else did, but what I knew could barely fill a page. Though I hadn’t seen him in years, and heard from him only rarely, he’d been the most important influence in my career and—other than Bibi—the largest in my life. His name was Dr. Zoltan Tor.

  Everyone in computers knew the name: Tor was the father of networking, and had written the classic texts on communications theory. So famous was he, that younger people, reading the classics he’d written, imagined him to be long dead. Though he was not yet forty, and in strapping good health.

  But now that he’d phoned—after all these years—how long was my health going to last? Whenever Tor decided to involve himself in my life, I got into trouble. Perhaps trouble was not the right word, I thought as I stepped from the shower. The word was danger.

  Among Tor’s many accomplishments was his mastery of cryptography. He’d written a work about it that was committed to memory by all research associates of the FBI. That’s why I was nervous, because the book covered every aspect of the art of cracking computer codes, “hacking,” stealing information—and it told how such thefts might be prevented.

  Why was Tor/Turing phoning now? How could he have learned so quickly what sort of “research” I’d been up to last night? It was almost as if he could read my mind over three thousand miles, and already knew what I was thinking of doing. I decided I’d better find out—and quickly—what he thought about what I’d been thinking.

  But first I had to find him. Not simple, given a chap who didn’t believe in phones or mailing addresses, or in leaving messages under his own name.

  Tor owned a company through which he handled financial transactions; it was called Delphic Group, after the oracle, no doubt, but its number wasn’t listed in the Manhattan phone directory. That was okay because I had the number.

  Tor never visited his office, however, and when you called there, you got a strange response. I gave it a try.

  “Delphic,” the receptionist snapped, not lavish with information.

  “I’m trying to reach Dr. Tor—Dr. Zoltan Tor. Is he there?” Fat chance.

  “Sorry,” she said, not sounding it, “you’ve dialed the wrong number. Check your listing, please.” It was like the goddamned CIA.

  “Well, if you hear from someone whose name sounds like that, will you give him the message?” I said impatiently.

  “What message are you referring to?”

  “Tell him Verity Banks phoned,” I snapped, and slammed the phone down before she could ask me to spell or repeat it.

  The veil of secrecy that shrouded Tor’s life—more impenetrable than the security systems of the world banking community—was as annoying to me as, ten years ago, his constant interference in my life had been.

  Meanwhile, I had a job to do. It was nine o’clock by the time I’d dressed, gone downstairs, pulled my battered BMW out into the thick soup of San Francisco fog, and headed to work—keeping bankers’ hours. I made it a practice always to rise at the crack of dawn; but in winter, dawn doesn’t crack until eight-thirty. I had the oddest feeling that—late start or no—it was going to be a very long day.

  The banking profession was riddled with consultants as a leper was riddled with sores. At the Bank of the World, we had efficiency experts to tell us how to manage our time, industrial engineers who told us how to manage our work, and industrial psychologists who helped us manage our environment. I never paid attention to any of them.

  I wasn’t interested, for example, in those studies showing that bankers derived an aura of power from wearing gray flannel suits. I preferred to dress as if I owned the bank, and had only dropped in to see how my dividends were doing.

  I arrived at the office that morning wearing enough yards of midnight-blue silk to upholster a sofa. The garment looked like a simple tunic, but I’d been assured that the best minds of Milan had labored to exhaustion over it. So much for the dress code.

  My staff didn’t take such things seriously, either. As I stepped onto the thirteenth floor they were flying about in jeans and sneakers, wearing T-shirts that said things like “Good Thruput” and “Cold-Started.”

  I thought of the thirteenth floor as the trading floor. It was a rats’ maze of modular units supposedly designed to induce an “atmosphere of problem sharing”—all done in “tranquilizing” blue … against a backdrop of “exhilarating” electric-orange carpeting. As far as I could tell, the combination produced schizophrenia—but then, computer types aren’t all that normal, anyway.

  I had learned the way through the maze to my office, and I went in and closed the door until my secretary,
Pavel, could bring me a cup of coffee. Pavel was tall, dark, and handsome, with the manners of a diplomatic aide. He might have been a movie star, and was, in fact, studying by night to be an actor. He claimed that his job at the bank gave him exposure to life in its most primitive emotional state.

  Everyone I worked with knew about the “two-cup rule”: that I could not be communicated with until after two cups of coffee, or ten o’clock in the morning—whichever came first. Until then, I could receive, but could not transmit.

  Pavel tiptoed in with the coffee and closed the door softly behind him. He placed the cup before me on the desk.

  “Lukewarm, just the way you like it,” he promised me. “You have three meetings today. I put them on your calendar. And do you still want the small conference room reserved for four o’clock? You can just nod if it’s okay.”

  “Cancel the meetings,” I told him as he looked at me with wide eyes. “I’ve already had enough coffee this morning to float a kidney. Kiwi canceled my proposal last night.” Since no one knew about my job at the Fed, I thought it prudent not to mention that part.

  “I figured as much,” Pavel said in a breathless whisper, pushing back the rolled-up sleeves of his silk sweater. “I saw the shredded version in your trash basket this morning when I came in.” He took a seat opposite me. He looked so worried, leaning forward with his chin cupped in his hands, that I smiled. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  “A new proposal,” I said. “Bring me the red-tape file; I want every boring rule book at the bank.”

  Pavel grinned widely, and headed for the door, pausing only to raise his fist aloft.

  “Power to the plebeians,” he said. “Hoist them with their own horseshit.”

  Knowing the rules—in banking as in cricket—was the name of the game. Playing by the rules was something else again.

  Some people say that rules are made to be broken, but I’ve never thought so. Rules are like flagpoles in a slalom race: you observe their presence religiously, skirt around them as closely as possible, and never let them cut your speed.