Deal Gone Bad - A Thriller (Frank Morrison Thriller Series Book 1) (15 page)

“Somebody sure did,”
Morrison said. He paused for a beat. “And it’s annoying like hell.”

“Still want me to look at
the remaining two banks?”

“Yeah, ASAP. I bet the
same thing happened there too, but I need to make sure.”

“OK, I’ll split the job with
my guy.”

“He did great. You can
pass along my compliments.”

“Will do. At the same time
I give him his money.”

“Nice reminder. Don’t
worry. I’ll drop by tomorrow morning with the cash.”

“Pleasure doing business
with you, Morrison. Sleep tight.”

“And you, work hard.”

Morrison flipped the phone
shut and dropped it on the nightstand. Then he lay down and threaded his
fingers behind his head, staring at the ceiling.
Somebody did see through my
plans,
he thought.
Somebody really did …

*

With the massive propagation
of mobile phones, public pay phones had become a scarcity. An anachronistic relic
from a bygone era, just like the desktop computer and the TV antenna. What
little remained of them now tended to stand at busy crossroads or in front of brightly
lit and equally busy places like service stations and hotel lobbies. Exactly
the types of places that the head of IT security at Candela Bank wanted to
avoid at all costs. He didn’t want his face or his car license plate to be
captured.

The phone call he was
about to make had to remain completely anonymous.

He had to drive around for
a good twenty minutes before he found a pay phone that was discreet enough. It
was in fact so discreet that he had been driving by it twice a day for years on
his way to and from work without ever noticing it.

The phone booth sat on an
empty lot, vacated by a closed-down service station a long time ago. It was
perfect, planted on the right side of the lot, roughly a hundred yards from the
road, in the dark. There was no risk of a surveillance camera ever registering
his presence. Even his car parked in the shadows close to the phone would be
next to invisible from the road.

The head of IT security at
Candela Bank nosed his luxurious German sedan slowly into the parking lot. Wary
of rolling over shards of broken glass or sharp metal debris, he threaded his
way carefully to the booth.

There, he killed the
engine, turned off the lights and grabbed some spare change from the armrest compartment.

Up close, the sight of the
pay phone almost made him turn back and drive away. It looked horrible. Half its
glass panels were broken, the rest covered in graffiti. And it smelled even worse.
Reeked of piss from five feet away. But he didn’t have time to go out looking
for another one, which would potentially be just as bad anyway. And besides, he
figured he wouldn’t be there too long either, so he furrowed his brow and stepped
in.

Before reaching for the
set, he wrapped his hand in a tissue. Then he squeezed some quarters into the
slot and punched the phone number on the dial. He listened to the ring tones
with the set a good two inches away from his ear. It was that disgusting. Somebody
finally answered.

At the other end of the
line, the voice sounded surprised to hear from him. They hadn’t talked in a
long time.

A little more than three
years, actually.

“What do you want?” the
voice asked. It came from a respected citizen. A member of Acton’s community. Somebody
who championed all the local causes. Never missed a pancake breakfast at the
fire station or a bake-off contest for the Girl Scouts. A true pillar of
society.

“I think I should be the
one asking that question,” the Candela Bank head of IT security said. “What do
you
want? Why have you been nosing around my servers today?”

“Whoa, whoa. What servers?”
the respected citizen said. “What are you talking about?”

“There’s been an intrusion
into the bank’s system today. Somebody read the logs concerning four hundred
accounts. You know,
the
accounts.”

“What does it have to do
with me?”

“You were the only one who
knew of these accounts. You’re the one who tapped them dry three years ago.”

“Why would I go back in there
now? Why would I do that?” the respected citizen said.

“You tell me.”

“I’ve got nothing to do
with this. This is absurd. The operation went on three years ago. The deal has
been signed, sealed and delivered. It would be crazy for me to go back there.”

The head of IT security
went pensive. He thought as much. It would be crazy for anyone involved to go
roaming back in there, which is why the intrusion had brought him on the verge of
panic. “Then who’s doing that?” he asked.

“I’ve no idea,” the
respected citizen said. “I’ve no idea, but this needs to be taken care of. We can’t
have anybody sniffing around like that.”

“What if it’s the cops?” the
head of IT security said. “What if somebody tipped them off?”

“You’re the security
expert. Can’t you track where that intrusion comes from?”

“It depends. Sometimes we
can but not always.”

“But you have to try,
right? We can’t let that thing slip out. It’s too risky.”

The head of IT security
was sweating in the dirty phone booth. Like a chess player, he had begun
contemplating the next moves. And like in chess, they could bring him into
dangerous territory. “We … we might have to act on this, you know.”

The respected citizen understood
the cryptic message.

“Fine,” it said. “I’m
gonna take care of it if it has to go there. But you start by tracking down whoever
put his dirty nose in there and call me back, OK?”

The alarm on Morrison’s
phone woke him up at seven o’clock. It was only his second night in that soft
warm bed, but the hard prison mattress already felt like a distant memory. When
he got up, his head still buzzed from the deep sleep. He walked across the blue
room to the shower stall like a drone. Ran the water real hot and stepped in
for a long one. Another small pleasure he had almost forgotten. In prison, you
didn’t really linger in there. You had every reason to make it quick, especially
when you were a small guy.

After his long hot shower,
Morrison felt revived and ready to attack his day. He got dressed in his pair
of jeans and a fresh white button-down shirt. As he buttoned his shirt, he ambled
to the window and peered outside.

The big black SUV was
still parked at an angle in the driveway, two hundred feet down. Still
stubbornly blocking the way, it hadn’t budged an inch since Morrison had gone
to bed. Only now, the blond guy was not sitting behind the wheel but standing next
to the driver’s door, smoking a cigarette. Mike stood at his side, hands tucked
in his coat pockets. Both men had their backs to him. They stared down the hill,
their body language calm and relaxed.

So their worries had been
unfounded. Nobody had ventured on the property during the night to trouble them.

Morrison moved away from
the window, grabbed the car keys on the nightstand and left his blue room. He trotted
down the creaky staircase to the foyer, then came out the main door and slid
into the driver’s seat of his big SUV.

The clasp of the door must
have alerted Mike and the blond guy to his presence. Even before he started the
engine, they swiveled on their feet to face up the hill. Morrison covered the two
hundred feet in a few seconds. Crunched to a stop on the hard-packed gravel
close to the other Navigator and got out.

The blond guy’s eyes were hollowed
out. Face covered with a dark stubble. Hair misplaced from a lot of head scratching.
Morrison aimed his first words at him.

“Enjoy your night, buddy?”
he said. “I sure did enjoy mine.”

“Well, why don’t you try
it next time, smart ass?” the blond guy said.

Mike raised his right hand
out of his pocket. “Cut the crap, you two, OK? I don’t need that this morning.”

Mike was freshly shaven,
his hair all sorted out. He looked clean and rested. Already on top of his
day’s business. He nodded to Morrison. “Where you heading?”

Morrison preferred to stay
vague. “Got the ball rolling. Now I’ve got to keep it going,” he said.

“So you have something.”

“I do. But I’ll need
another chunk of money. Like 20K, right now.”

Mike nodded his approval
and motioned for the blond guy to go fetch the money in the house. “Bring it
back here,” he told the blond guy, “and then you can go to bed. Nothing will
happen now.”

“That’s right, be a good
boy and go get me my money,” Morrison said.

The blond guy made like he
didn’t hear him, got in the big SUV, turned it around and drove up to the
house.

Mike was only waiting for
Morrison and him to be alone to ask more questions. “So what’ve you got?” he said.

As he had planned,
Morrison told him all about Chelfington Bank, the first bank. About how, after
his arrest, nothing had happened there, no further withdrawals had been made
from the four hundred accounts. How he was now switching his gears to the other
four banks, taking them one by one, starting today with First Collins Bank.

“When will you have
something?” Mike asked.

“Don’t know,” he lied.
“You never know with these types of operations. Sometimes it’s fast, sometimes
it’s slow. You gotta get your nose in there and see.”

“What about the other
banks? Can’t you have a look at them in parallel? Would speed things up, no?”

“I don’t have an infinite
amount of resources. The last thing you want is to make a splash. You want to
go nice and slow, real careful.”

Mike shrugged. “Well,
whatever. It’s your call. I’m giving you a couple of days, but then you better
bring me something worthwhile.”

Morrison nodded. They
remained silent for a beat, then Morrison said, “Can I ask you something? That blond
guy. You really trust him?”

Mike frowned. “Yes, I do,”
he said. “Why?”

Morrison shrugged. He was
thinking about the young guy who had been strangled by this blond nutter.
Wondering if he should broach the subject. But he had to be careful. Didn’t
want to expose Laura. So he decided to go at it from a far angle.

“Well, obviously, you
didn’t trust that other guy,” he said, referring to the slicked-back hair guy
who had abducted him with the blond guy at the prison bus stop. The one Mike
had that blond maniac execute at point-blank range in front of him.

“That bastard got what he
deserved. Caused me a whole lot of trouble.”

“What did he do?”

“He lost his temper one
time too many.”

“And?”

“And he did something he
really shouldn’t have. Brought me some heat. Lots of it.”

“Like what? He killed
somebody?”

“Yeah, something like
that. He had to keep an eye on one of our guests, but he got into some sort of
argument with him and ended up killing the sucker. Dumbass. For all I care, he
can rot at the bottom of his hole for all eternity. Good riddance.”

Morrison flashed an inner
smile. The young prisoner. The blond guy had killed him, yet he had made the slicked-back
hair guy take the fall in his place. Son of a bitch. Slimy son of a bitch. That
blond guy was a snake.

“And this guy wouldn’t do stuff
like that?” Morrison said.

“Why? You got any reason
to doubt him?”

“No, no, nothing like
that. Just don’t like his guts, that’s all.”

Mike shrugged. “He does
what I tell him to do and he doesn’t bitch too much about it. That’s all I’m
asking for. Speaking of which, he’s got your money now.”

The blond guy hadn’t
bothered to use the SUV to come back. He simply walked the distance down from the
house to where they stood with the fat envelope in his hand. He looked really
tired. Totally beat. Who could blame him, after a full night of watch? The blond
guy handed him the money and turned around to walk back up. Morrison thought
about nagging him again, but he let it go. He had just learned something
interesting about that guy. Something he might use later on. That was already
enough.

*

At this early hour on a
Saturday morning, the country two-lane was deserted. Morrison hummed along in
the Navigator, right at the speed limit. His driving was relaxed. Purely
mechanical. It allowed him the space to think about his next move.

The previous night, he had
come back from Johnson’s with two potential suspects.

Logically, only Cowgirl or
Harris could have skimmed First Collins Bank and Candela Bank. It had to be one
of these two. He had been pondering this in bed for a long time before he could
find some sleep. And when he did fall asleep, he still hadn’t decided which one
of these two he would probe first. But now, on that clear blue morning, the
answer was obvious in his head.

He fished the phone from his
pocket and flipped it open. Punched the number with his thumb, half-looking at
the road and half-looking at the mobile. It rang for a while before somebody
answered. At the other end, the voice was still sleepy.

“Hey, Cowgirl. Hope I’m
not waking you up.”

She sighed. “You are,
Morrison, you are.”

“So sorry. Any way you can
forgive me?”

She paused for a second.
Then she said, “How about you come join me?”

Morrison smiled. “Just our
luck. That’s exactly what I had in mind.”

“Well then hurry up, cowboy.
I’m saving you the best spot here, right between the sheets.”

*

The head of IT security at
Candela Bank hadn’t pulled an all-nighter in a long time. Back in his junior
days he’d had plenty of them. But reaching the top of the totem pole had its
rewards. You could let the little guys suffer. Thank God the intrusion had
happened on a Friday night. If he’d had to face a regular work day now, he
would just collapse.

Hacking was just like
riding a bicycle. Once you’d mastered the technique, you’d never forget it. In
his day, the head of IT security had hacked or simulated hacks countless times.
That’s what he told himself. He would be fine. Still, after his phone call in
the disgusting booth the previous night, he had come back home a bit nervous.
He hadn’t hacked himself in a really long time. What if he’d forgotten how after
all? It was not like he could draw anybody else into this. He had to take care
of that task himself.

So around midnight, he had
retreated to the basement with his laptop. Pulled the shades down on all the windows.
Lit up every fixture and got right down to work.

His first hour had been a
complete waste of time. With the logs from his own servers in hand, he wasn’t
sure where to start. He’d written a few scripts, poked around here and there
but couldn’t find a handle. Something solid to hold on to. This had tensed him
up even more. At the time, the temptation to calm his nerves with a glass or
two of scotch had been serious. But he had resisted it. This was no time to
dull his senses. He needed to remain sharp.

So he’d summoned the
courage to continue looking into this. By attacking the problem from multiple
angles. By trying to think like an intruder. In short, by doing what hackers
naturally do. And so it had all come back to him.

The second and third hours
had been much better. Once you found that initial breach, it was much easier to
force your way in. Just like for a tough crossword puzzle.

As he progressed in this virtual
maze, his confidence rose up again.

From the fourth hour on,
he was humming along. Making solid, steady progress every hour. Up to the point
where, after nine hours of continuous, feverish work, he now had an IP address
in hand. The IP address of the computer used by the hacker that had gone poking
around in Candela Bank’s servers.

A fantastic breakthrough.
He was really proud of having achieved it.

But it remained an
incomplete breakthrough. Now he had to find a way to match a real-life brick-and-mortar
address to that virtual one. And for this, he knew he would have to expose
himself a bit.

*

Morrison pushed open the
door into Cowgirl’s subtly white cocoon. She was half-sitting in her bed,
buried in a mountain of pillows, her hair undone. She wore a two-piece white silk
pajama of yet another shade of white—that one leaning toward pearl. With a soft
and luscious hue. Made her look like some precious jewel in a refined casing. Downstairs,
Morrison hadn’t needed to knock on the door or ring the doorbell. He had let
himself into the house without any obstruction.

“Are you crazy, leaving
your front door unlocked like that?” he said.

She raised her head and shrugged.
“Nothing ever happens in dear old Acton.”

“Any maniac could walk in
here and rape you just like that,” Morrison said, snapping his fingers.

Cowgirl rolled her eyes. “There
are no maniacs in Acton,” she said. “Only a couple of crooks and I know them
all. They don’t scare me one bit. Besides, I’m a big girl. I can take care of myself.”

Morrison frowned. “How
would you do that?” he said.

She extended her left arm
in a deft move to pull open the nightstand drawer. In there was a dull black
pistol, not very big. Probably a .22 or a .25. The kind of weapon specifically
marketed for women in the trade magazines and websites that catered to the more
paranoid crowd. Morrison thought this rage for guns was nuts. The vast majority
of people who owned them never used them. And those who did usually ended up injuring
themselves or someone close by accident. Cowgirl was well aware of Morrison’s
aversion to guns, so she wrapped her hand around the butt, took it out of the
drawer and aimed at him. Going straight for the groin.

“How about that?” she
said.

“Whoa, easy, Cowgirl,
easy,” he said. “That’s not funny.”

She thought otherwise. A
wide smile spread across her face. “You don’t know,” she said. “Maybe
I
want to rape you.”

While she kept the gun
aimed at him, she used her free hand to unbutton her shirt. Morrison could see
the tips of her breasts stick out of the silken fabric, the softness of her
skin around her bellybutton. She was relaxed, vibrant. Totally playful.

“Well, it can be done, my
dear,” he said, “but if you wouldn’t mind putting that thing down.”

“Aha. You come here right
now, Mr. Morrison, or I’ll shoot you, I swear.”

He skirted around the bed
to her side, leaned over her and took the gun away from her hand. Then he put
it back in the drawer.

“You shouldn’t play with
guns,” he said. “They’re dangerous.”

“Don’t worry. There’s a
safety catch on that thing, you know. It stayed on the whole time.” She reached
for his belt buckle, slid her fingers behind it and pulled him to the bed. “Now
come in here, cowboy …”