Deal Gone Bad - A Thriller (Frank Morrison Thriller Series Book 1) (10 page)

It was Morrison’s turn to
start skating. He didn’t want to let on that his presence there had been forced
upon him. He said, “I needed a place to find my feet. I won’t stay there very
long anyway.”

“Maybe you know what
Junior is up to these days?”

Morrison shook his head. “Not
really. He seems to be pretty busy, but I just mind my own business.”

“He didn’t offer you to
partner with him in any way?”

“Listen, Harris, a little
over twenty-four hours ago, I was still in prison. All I want right now is to
enjoy my freedom.”

Harris took another sip of
bourbon, then he asked, “Aren’t you interested in looking into our failed operation?
Don’t you think something fishy could’ve happened?”

That’s exactly what Morrison
had started to do, but he didn’t want to admit that to Harris. On the other
hand, he couldn’t tell him what he had really intended to do upon his release
either—leave the state and go where that key hidden in his shoe would open the
door to a fresh new world for him. So he kept on skating.

“I want to look ahead. I’m
ready for a new start.”
Damn right I am,
he thought.

“You lost three years and
all your money over that deal,” Harris said. “And still, you don’t want to look
into it?”

“I prefer to forget about
what I’ve lost and focus instead on what I’ll gain.”

Harris shook his head. “You’re
too smart to leave all those rocks unturned, Morrison, you’re too smart.”

“And you’re too damn nosy
with your questions, Harris. I’m hungry, now. Why don’t we go have something to
eat?”

Harris didn’t want to go
to one of his regular hangouts in Acton with him. Morrison understood that
perfectly. It was only common sense. He had a public persona to protect. So the
two men agreed to drive up in their respective cars to a small diner they knew
in a nearby village.

There, they enjoyed a pleasant
lunch. Relaxed and casual. Just like the simple fare filling their plates. They
got to reminiscing about the good old times, as you did in these occasions. They
had worked on a number of deals together and had always gotten along pretty
well. But that was already some time ago. Given their present circumstances, the
relaxed attitude remained on the surface. Underneath lay a deep bedrock of
suspicion. Clearly, Morrison didn’t fully trust Harris. And he sensed that
Harris felt the same about him. This also extended to the other partners in
their deal gone bad. Mike aka Junior and Tommy were wary of him. Harris was wary
of Junior. Morrison was wary of everybody. A thick, dark cloud still hovered
over that rotten failed operation. The only missing input being Cowgirl’s. Morrison
hadn’t seen her yet, but he bet she had reservations of her own too.

At the end of their meal, Harris
drained the bottom of his beer mug and asked him, “What are you going to tell
Junior when you go back to his place?”

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 …”

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
everything 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.