A Calculated Risk

by Katherine Neville

  “And what was that?”

  “He said he’d sponsor my green card: a permanent resident visa. Without it, as a foreigner, I can’t work in this country, unless it’s under the table. But Karp’s business went belly-up, owing me half a million in royalties. All my profits went up his nose, but I couldn’t turn him in, since he was my official sponsor.”

  “You mean cocaine?” I said, surprised.

  “He’s got a hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year habit he can’t support, even on his inflated salary,” Tavish told me. “So he’s using his staff and the bank’s computer systems to churn out software that he sells on the open market. Though I can’t prove it, I believe his whole staff is moonlighting—that he pays them kickbacks. He’s asked me to do the same, or he’ll turn me over to Immigration.”

  “But you aren’t here illegally,” I said, “you’re on temporary visa—trying to get your green card. I saw your file only this morning.”

  “He no longer has a right to sponsor me. The firm he owned is technically defunct. In that sense, I’m at the bank under false pretenses as well. He supplied my references here, you see. If I were deported back to the U.K., I’d be fortunate to make a small percent of what I make over here for my technical skills. I’m not an ‘old schoolboy,’ you see—I’m just a working-class chap.”

  “You realize this puts me in a real bind,” I lied. (What an astounding miracle of good fortune this dinner had turned out to be.) “I can’t blow the whistle on Karp if we have no proof of his illegal activities—and if I tried, you might get deported, or terminated at the very least, for coming to the bank under false pretenses. But if I could buy some time by finding someone else to work for him—someone he couldn’t refuse—then we could work out the details later about getting you out of this jam.”

  “I’ve been thinking of nothing but that all day. I felt utterly sure he’d put up a fuss like this,” Tavish told me, “and I thought of the perfect person at last—someone who’s been wanting to get into that department forever.”

  “You know someone who wants to work for Karp?” I said, amazed. “Whoever he is, he must be firing on two cylinders.”

  “It’s a she,” he explained. “Her name’s Pearl Lorraine, and she manages foreign exchange for the bank. She’s an econometrician—a client of mine, since I’m supporting her systems. She’s brilliant—and black. He’d have to come up with some pretty good reasons to refuse her.”

  “Pearl Lorraine? From Martinique? She knows the exchange business far better than Karp, and has some computer background, too. But what does she think of the idea?” From what I knew of Pearl Lorraine, she wouldn’t make such a move without plenty of motive; she was widely regarded as the most militant career opportunist at the bank.

  “She says Karp is a bit of a Nazi, among other things; it seems he refers to his black employees as jungle bunnies, and brags that he hires only black female secretaries, because they have nicer derrieres.”

  “Good Lord,” I said, “if all that’s true, what makes you think she’d work for a guy like that?”

  “Simple,” said Tavish with a grin. “She’s better at foreign exchange than he is—she wants his job. And if you want to hit a home run, you have to be next up to bat when someone strikes out.”

  I agreed with Tavish that under our pressed circumstances, Pearl afforded the perfect solution. I decided when the cheese and fruit arrived that it was time to move on to the real topic of tonight’s dinner.

  “I’ll be leaving for New York at the end of this week,” I told Tavish. “The quality circle will all be on board by then—six of you—and there are a few things I’d like us to discuss before I go.”

  Tavish regarded me seriously over his silver fork, and nodded for me to continue.

  “First, I want you to crack the file that holds customer and correspondent bank account data—and then to hit the electronic funds transfer system.”

  “Wire transfers? Your own system?” said Tavish. “That must be the hardest system at the bank; you’d have to get in from at least two places—”

  “You need the test keys,” I agreed, “to get at the wire transfers themselves—and you’d need to know the customer account numbers and secret passwords to get money out of specific bank accounts.”

  “You mean, we should steal one test key for one day—just to illustrate it can be done?”

  “All those banks out there can’t change their keys daily,” I said. “There must be a program in the system that deciphers all the keys, and can somehow determine their validity even if they change without notice.”

  “Astounding,” said Tavish, “and impossible to believe. If there were such a sort of ‘decryption’ program, you could take money from any account you liked, and move it anywhere—assuming you had the account numbers.”

  I smiled, picked up a cocktail napkin, and drew a little diagram:

  “Each bank branch keeps a card like this. The number at the top is the location number; it tells us which branch is making the transfer. This first column has a special code for the current month, the second column shows the current day, and the third column is the dollar amount of the wire transfer. These four numbers—location number, month code, today’s date, and dollar amount—are the test key! Each key changes as the day and dollar amount change—that’s it!”

  “You’re joking,” said Tavish. “I work in foreign exchange systems; I don’t know anything about the bank’s branch operations. But if it’s as simple as all that, anybody could break into the system and rip off funds!”

  “Perhaps they have,” I said, sipping my champagne. “That’s what you’re supposed to find out. But of course, it may be more difficult than I’ve imagined; I myself haven’t seen the systems that decode these keys.”

  “How complex could it be, given input like this?” said Tavish, waving the napkin in excitement. “After all, they’re only programs in there, aren’t they? But if you are right about this being the way it really works, it’s bound to be a security horror beyond all imagining!”

  “Any regrets about signing on for this project?” I asked.

  “Lord Maynard Keynes was asked, on his deathbed, whether he had any regrets about his life,” said Tavish. “His last remark was, ‘I wish I had drunk more champagne!’”

  We drank to that.

  I’d neglected to mention to Tavish that Pearl Lorraine was someone I’d known for years. I knew her so well, in fact, that she was the one who drove me to the airport that Friday after my night at the opera—in her emerald-green Lotus two-seater.

  Everything about Pearl reeked of emeralds, from the improbably green eyes set in her jet-black face, to the skintight emerald suede pants she was wearing, to the real emerald pendant dangling in the cleavage exposed by her extremely low-cut sweater.

  Pearl was a racy lady but, to my taste, a bit too fast behind the wheel. Now I was wondering if she was trying to break the sound barrier as she whizzed past a blur of eucalyptus, shot into a gear I didn’t know existed, and took the freeway ramp on two wheels.

  “Gee, I’d have had you drive me to New York, if I’d known we could get there faster than by air,” I told her, gripping the door with my fingernails.

  “Sugar, don’t buy a fast car if you can’t drive one,” she said, then hit her horn and sucked some paint off a taxi that was crawling along at eighty. “Besides—I took off work early so we could take some time, sit down, have a drink, shoot the breeze. You’ve become such a hermit, I never see you anymore.”

  “I think we’ll have plenty of time for all that,” I assured her. “We’ve just passed the international date line. Looks like they don’t have remedial drivers’ ed in Martinique.”

  “When the world loves a wise-ass, sweetheart, you’re going to be on top,” she informed me blithely as we screeched up before the gate. Pearl leaped out as the dust was still settling, tossed her keys and a ten-dollar bill to the astonished porter, and gave him her dazzling smile. “We’ll get the bags.” Sh
e bustled me inside.

  “They have valet parking?” I asked.

  “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” said Pearl, maneuvering me into the lounge—a nightmare of Polynesian bric-a-brac that looked as if it had been designed by a team of Mormon architects from Guam.

  Pearl had ordered Bloody Marys and was already munching her celery stick when I returned from checking my bags.

  “Thanks for getting me into the job with Karp—that wet fish,” she said between crunches. “Anytime you want a return favor …”

  “Let’s wait till you’ve been there a few weeks; you may want to pay me back differently,” I told her as I tentatively took a sip of watery tomato juice. “Tavish told me you wanted to work there—to take over Karp’s job—though I can’t imagine why. I heard he was a bigot. This isn’t some sort of vendetta? But that hardly seems your style.…”

  “Sue him for discrimination, you mean?” Pearl laughed, and flagged down the waitress for another round. “Of course not; I hate that stuff—mingling with lawyers and all. I’ve always thought there must be some reason why the French words for ‘attorney’ and ‘avocado’ were the same. No, I don’t give a fig about Karp. It’s power—reins, sweetheart—that’s the name of the game. I have a master’s in economics—and that means I can add up the digits on my paycheck. Karp earns twice as much as I do, but all he produces is trouble. Before I’m done, I’ll put his ass in a Singapore sling and shoot it into outer space.”

  When I’d first met Pearl in New York ten years earlier, her father had been a top broker of African and Oceanic art, a field just entering its golden era as museums clamored for the goods he’d collected over the past forty years. He’d started from nothing as a runner—some say smuggler—and he died when Pearl, only twenty, was an economics major at NYU. There she’d acquired her taste for salty Yankee slang, fast cars, hard-driving feminism, and the color green, which she said reminded her of money. Papa had left her plenty of green. That had helped, more than all her education, to break down the doors in her ever-upward quest for power.

  Though Pearl was more aggressive than I, we had this much in common: money was far from what we were after.

  As if she’d read my mind, she said: “It’s not the money, it’s the principle. I mean the ethical kind—not the kind that earns interest. What difference does it make if I’m rich and don’t need the job? No one at the bank except you knows that anyway. I deserve that job, and Karp doesn’t. I’ve been running foreign exchange for years, and made millions for the bank. If I were only after money, I should have retired when I stepped off that boat from Fort-de-France; I’d have saved myself ten years of hassles.”

  “Sure, but how do you plan to get his job by going to work for him, when before, he had to keep you happy by providing systems for you?” I wanted to know.

  “He’ll slip up eventually,” Pearl said with a mysterious grin as our second round of tomato-flavored water arrived, “but I always keep a banana peel in my back pocket, just for such contingencies. Now, let’s get off this topic; I want to know how long you’ll be in the Big Apple, and what you’re going to do. After all, it’s practically our old hometown!”

  “A week is all I have time for,” I told her.

  “Get real,” said Pearl, crinkling her nose. “Why don’t you take time off—hang loose? Everyone knows you’re a slave driver, but why drive yourself this way? Hit the theaters, buy some exotic rags, meet new faces, eat designer food—get laid—you know what I mean?”

  “Don’t you think this conversation is rather personal?” I said.

  “We’ve known each other ten years,” Pearl informed me, “and besides, I’m not known for my discretion. I wasn’t born in a gray flannel suit—with a pencil between my teeth, and my legs cemented together—as you were. I may be fucking men over at the office, but I assure you, I find better uses for them after the five o’clock whistle blows. You, on the other hand, are starting to resemble a Buddhist monk!”

  “I’m going to New York on business,” I said flatly.

  “Bah—this quality circle stuff is hardly business. Why did you set it up in the first place, when you’ve got a five-million-dollar division under your thumb? I know all about it—you’ve pissed off every manager at the bank.”

  “I have an excellent reason,” I told her calmly. “I’m going to knock over the bank.”

  “My ass,” said Pearl, sipping her drink with aplomb. “I’ll eat this emerald first.” She studied me, tapping a long red fingernail on the table. “By God, if I didn’t know you better, I’d think you meant it,” she added.

  I let her stew awhile before I said quietly, “I do mean it.”

  “You can’t be serious,” said Pearl. “You, the quintessential banker—‘Woman of the Year,’ ‘Girl of the Golden West’—you’re going to toss away everything your granddaddy ever wanted—”

  She stopped in her tracks and gave that a little thought.

  “By God, maybe you do mean it,” she said in amazement. “Making up for lost time and past injustice … But what on earth could drive an ice cube of virtue like you over the brink—that’s what I want to know.”

  Just then, they called my plane over the intercom. I rose and tossed some money down for the drinks.

  “Did you ever wonder, Pearl, why banks have so many educated, qualified, dedicated, ethical, and relatively underpaid middle managers like us—when at the very top, there’s a bunch of ignorant, greedy, boorish, self-congratulatory snobs, who are only concerned for their own well-being?”

  It was the longest admission I’d ever made to Pearl—or anyone else—of how I felt, and she looked at me with wide eyes before she replied.

  “Okay—why?” she said.

  “Shit floats,” I told her.

  Then I left to catch my plane.

  THE MACHINE AGE

  The machine discipline cuts away that ground of law and order on which business enterprise is founded.

  What can be done to save civilized mankind from the vulgarization and disintegration wrought by the machine industry?

  —Thorstein Veblen,

  THE MACHINE AGE

  It was nice to fly on the bank’s credit card, because I always flew first class, but on most airlines, even first-class food was enough to gag me. So I usually brought a picnic basket packed by my local trattoria, Vivande.

  This time, the lifted napkin revealed a treasure trove of culinaria: cold caviar and white bean salad, a wedge of pancetta layered with crushed figs, a bitterly lemon tart, and a split of Verdicchio to wash it all down. I sat back, plugged into the Mozart track on my headset, and tried to erase all thoughts—but my mind kept moving back to my newly hatched scheme. And to what would happen with Tor.

  Though I’d launched the quality circle with fanfare, piqued Pearl’s interest, and was now en route to Manhattan to initiate my mission, I knew it was still not too late to kick everyone off the bandwagon if I decided to get cold feet. At least, it wasn’t too late now. After I’d met with Tor, it might be.

  Many years ago, he’d pulled me out of some sticky situations. But I’d known him long enough to realize that, even then, it had been his involvement that had stuck me there in the first place! Asking for Tor’s assistance with a computer problem was like getting Leonardo’s help in sketching: it seemed invaluable—until you got the bill.

  And I knew that Tor believed in collecting his accounts receivable. For the first time in the many years since I’d last seen him, I had the sick and giddy feeling that I was standing with one foot perched atop the “debts called due” spindle, and the other on a roulette wheel. Not the favorite position of one who likes to remain in control.

  When I’d met Zoltan Tor twelve years ago, I had been a computer bunny of twenty, fresh in my new job at Monolith Corp., one of the largest computer vendors in the world. Knowing nothing at all of the DP business (I thought IBM was the name of a clock and Honeywell that of a thermostat), I instantly received from my firm an impressive
title, and was sent—as a “technical expert”—to install large-scale mainframe systems.

  Naturally, it was quite a scramble to bone up on the myriad subjects my clients believed I already knew. Running at a hectic pace, I took prolific notes at each account, raced back to my office to find experts who’d help, and returned to the clients the next morning with the answers. I was always terrified of being unmasked, but for several months this routine seemed to be working. Then the rug was yanked.

  One Monday, I arrived at my office to find my boss, Alfie, a flabby, whining fellow who disliked me, standing at my desk with lips pursed and hands on hips.

  I’d been hired by someone higher up than Alfie and thrust on him as a trainee. He hated nothing more than training people he thought had better connections than he had; so instead of training me, he expended all his efforts trying to show up my incompetence. The more often I performed to the letter those assignments he threw at me, the more infuriated he became.

  “Verity, I’d like to see you at once in my office,” he said in a sneering tone, looking around the suddenly silent floor to be sure everyone was noting my discomfort.

  Alfie’s glass-walled cubicle at the rear of the floor afforded him an overseer’s view of the galley ship of desks, ranged in long, straight rows across the floor. From behind, he could make sure that each programmer was hard at work. If he ever caught us whispering to one another, he tapped a bell on his desk; and he counted the lines of code each of us pumped out every month, tacking those statistics to the bulletin board at the entrance, with little gold, red, and green stars affixed—it was just like kindergarten. Each hour of the day, like clockwork, a shopping cart moved around the floor; as it passed we were to drop our coding sheets and punched cards to be sent for processing. We had two potty breaks a day and a half hour for lunch; any other absences resulted in docked pay.