Deal Gone Bad - A Thriller (Frank Morrison Thriller Series Book 1) (5 page)

Segregation of duties. A
principle of paramount importance in business. In order to achieve efficiency
in your operations as well as curtail the possibility of fraud, you must never
entrust any employee with too many responsibilities. For example, the guy who
placed orders should never handle the reception of goods. The guy who approved
the expense accounts should never perform any audit. And the guy who handled
the books should never be allowed to write some checks. If you failed to
strictly adhere to these principles, you were simply asking to be robbed blind.
In any case, all Fortune 500 companies respected them, as did any manager with
an ounce of common sense. You couldn’t fault Morrison for a lack of common
sense. Early on, he couldn’t see why he wouldn’t apply these sound principles to
his operations too. So he always made sure he did.

One way he did was by
hiring the right people for the right tasks. Very precise and specific tasks,
always. Without involving anyone else. Without giving a bit more information
than was absolutely required. That’s how he had handled his guest. Morrison
looked at him as he made his way to the booth.

Since he had last seen him,
the man had piled on twenty pounds. At least. He appeared more out of shape
than ever. For one thing, his face was pale. His eyes were hollowed out and
dark. Hair longer than he cared for. Clothes ruffled and faded, in bad need of
a fresh wash. Some things remained exactly the same, though. The sly grin. And
the fast-talking voice.

“Well, well, well, who
have we here?” he said as he sat down. “Franklin Morrison in the flesh.”

Morrison bowed his head.

“Johnson,” he said, “it’s
great to see you. Thanks for making it on such short notice.”

They shook hands above the
table. Johnson stared down at the slice of pie and the steaming cup of coffee.
“Nice touch,” he said. “You have a good memory.”

Then Johnson picked up his
fork and attacked the coconut cream pie with a passion.

“I remembered it was your
favorite breakfast,” Morrison said.

Johnson was the type of
guy who would only get bigger as he got older. No wonder, with a diet like that
and an occupation like his. Slouched behind a computer for hours on end. He was
a night owl. At this hour, his day was only beginning.

In four quick shuffles of
the fork, the pie was gone. If the coffee wasn’t so hot, Morrison suspected
that Johnson would’ve slurped it all just as fast. For his part, he ate his
cannoli like he had all the time in the world. One small nibble at a time.

“When did you get out?” Johnson
asked.

“This morning,” Morrison
said.

Johnson made a face.

“You’ve chosen me to have
your first dinner with? I’m touched. But I’m also puzzled. Why?”

“I might have something
for you.”

“What, so fast?”

“It’s not a new deal.”

“Then what?”

“It’s about the deal that
got me busted.”

“What about it?”

“I have a good memory. Do
you?”

It was a loaded question.
Morrison knew Johnson had an excellent memory. In his line of work, you really
needed to. Almost without noticing it, they had started to speak in a lower
voice.

Johnson said, “Depends
what for.”

“If I asked you to perform
an audit, would you still have enough information to do it?”

Johnson shrugged. He said,
“When you got busted, I destroyed everything. All the code I had created. All the
user IDs. The passwords. The list of proxy servers I used. Everything. I sent
all my setup to oblivion. Flushed it down the toilet as hard as I could. Twice.
Burned all the bridges. I’m running out of metaphors here, but I think you see
my point. All that stuff’s gone and I haven’t thought about it for a second
since.”

“It’s all right. That’s
what I would’ve expected from you. But could you trace it back?”

Johnson sighed. “Why? That
was three years ago. The whole deal went sour, that’s too bad. But we got away.”
He tilted his head. “Of course you got busted, but fortunately I wasn’t, thanks
to you for this by the way. And nobody else was busted either. So, overall, for
a failure it wasn’t too bad.”

“Who said anybody else was
involved?”

Johnson flashed a wide
smile. “Come on, Morrison. You’re too smart to want to do it all by yourself.
And you’re too smart to tell me who else was involved, but there must’ve been. Since
nobody else was arrested with you, that means you kept your mouth shut. A lot
of people should thank you, and again I do. But you should move on to another
deal. There’s no shortage of ’em.”

Johnson was a smart guy.
Morrison liked dealing with smart people. They could usually deliver without
making too much fuss about anything. They wouldn’t involve themselves with
unnecessary crazy complications. Like guns for instance. If you gave Johnson a
gun, he wouldn’t know what to do with it. Would probably shoot himself in the
foot by accident. And the thing with smart people is that when the time comes,
they can usually handle extra pressure without crumbling. Morrison felt it was time
to crank it up one bit.

But before he could do so,
the waitress came over with more coffee. Both men kept silent as she refilled the
cups to the brim, then dropped a little container of half and half on the table
for Johnson.

After she left with her
steaming pot, Morrison said, “New deals will have to wait. I have to get to the
bottom of this first. This is not up for debate.”

Johnson sighed again. Obviously
this didn’t please him. “You’re gonna have to be more specific. What exactly do
you wanna trace back?” he said.

“You remember how we
structured the deal?”

“Yes. We had five banks
lined up. You wanted access to prepaid debit card accounts in each of them. Change
the account limits so we could withdraw a total of two million dollars from each
of these banks for a total of ten million.”

“That’s right,” Morrison
said. “Now, how much did I have with me when I got busted?”

“According to the papers,
you had two million dollars in that car.”

“Exactly. For once, the
papers were right. What does that tell you?”

“The end of the world is
near.”

Morrison cracked a grin.
“Dickhead.”

Johnson said, “You only
had time to flush out the accounts of one of the banks. Chelfington Bank.”

“That’s right. Now what I
want to know is what happened to the accounts at the four other banks. They
were all ready to be tapped from my part of the operation. You had the codes
set up and everything. So, has anyone managed to?”

Johnson shook his head. “No
other bank made the papers. It was just Chelfington,” he said.

“Doesn’t mean anything,” Morrison
said. “Chelfington made the news because I had fake magnetic cards and material
made out for their accounts. It was all seized up at the same time I was
arrested, so of course it made the news. But if somehow someone managed to tap
the other banks, you wouldn’t necessarily know about it, right? It’s
embarrassing for banks to be defrauded. It happens all the time but it’s not
supposed to. The whole banking system works on trust. Confidence. So when
they’re hit and it stays quiet, they won’t be the ones to shout it out from the
rooftops. Wouldn’t look good on them.”

“I told you, I destroyed
all the codes. Everything. The minute I heard of your arrest.”

“You deleted the list of codes
and passwords that you kept, but you didn’t reverse the setup, right? You didn’t
log on to those banks’ servers to put everything back as it was before?”

“Of course not. I didn’t
have time for that.”

“So someone knowing these
codes and passwords could still have accessed the accounts.”

“It’s theoretically
possible, yes. But the question is for how long? When Chelfington made the
news, other banks probably took a deep look at their operations. They could’ve used
the hint to spot our setup pretty fast.”

“True,” Morrison said. “But
we’re talking about four banks. Two million dollars each. That’s eight million
total. Don’t you think it’s worth a little extra investigating?”

Johnson wasn’t thrilled
with the assignment. To soften the blow, Morrison offered him a sweet retainer.
The money would come from Mike’s pocket anyway. Morrison didn’t care. They
shook hands on the deal, then Johnson drained his second cup of coffee and left
the restaurant.

Morrison stayed behind to
finish his own cup and read the paper for a while. The kind of quiet, pleasant
moment he was so happy to renew. At nine thirty p.m., he realized he was the
only customer left. The old couple and the lone woman had gone. The Korean owner
and the waitress were probably anxious to close up for the night. He signaled
for the check.

The waitress brought it
out to him. He dropped a couple of bills on the table and asked, “Is there still
a waitress here called Sara? Redhead. Medium height. Rather cute.”

She shook her head. “No,
sorry,” she said. “I’ve only been here for six months and I don’t know of any
redhead working here. But I can ask Mr. Kim if you want.”

Morrison waived off the
proposition. “No, it’s all right,” he said. “Never mind. Thanks.”

He left her a nice tip and
walked out.

Outside, the air was cool.
He had been right about buying a light jacket. He felt full from his big meal
so he decided to go for a walk.

Starting north, he settled
into a nice even stroll, taking in the few changes that had occurred here and
there on Main Street during his absence.

As far as he could see, he
was the only person walking downtown at this hour. Very few cars were parked in
the angled spots, and just a lone car passed by from time to time. Dear old
Acton. Just like it used to be. Morrison decided he would walk the half-mile to
the town square, sit on a public bench to gaze at the stars for a while, then
come back to the Navigator and call it a day.

On his way, he passed by
the Chelfington Bank building. It was closed, of course, but the lobby was lit
up like a stage, as was appropriate. Basic security measure. Make sure
everybody can see from the outside, so a bum wanting to stick up customers coming
in to make a withdrawal would have no place to hide. Inside, a long accordion
door fenced off the bank’s public area so that you would only be able to access
the three ATMs sitting there. Purely out of habit, Morrison peered at the ATMs.

Then a broad smile illuminated
his face.

Sons of bitches
, he thought.

He went to the heavy glass
door, pulled it open and got in.

The three ATMs faced him. Standard
Wincor Nixdorf models. At the time of his arrest, they were still fairly
recent. But now they were four or five years old. The industry would consider
them old trusted hands. Morrison scanned them. The three machines were
identical. Their left-center section featured an oversize screen with two rows
of buttons on either side, a keypad underneath and a cash dispenser squeezed in
between. On the right side, the receipt printer headed a column also comprising
the card reader and the deposit slot. Nothing fancy. Just sturdy and reliable
equipment. Time tested. Proven. Cheap to operate. Exactly what all the banks were
looking for. Keep your fixed costs to a minimum so that you can maximize your
profit margins. Since all three machines were identical, Morrison picked one at
random to have a closer look. He went for the one in the middle.

He had read somewhere that
when faced with a similar choice, more than eighty percent of human beings
would make the same one. The study had been conducted on three continents among
a diversity of age and socioeconomic groups, but the end result was the same.
There seemed to be some deeply embedded reason for choosing the option in the
middle, like a kind of self-preservation rationale. The farther you were from
the edges, the farther you were from outlying dangers. It’s almost as if the brain
instinctively perceived the middle as safer and therefore opted for it in disproportionate
ways.

Up close, the keypad
looked a bit worn out. On heavily used ATMs, they were changed regularly so
that they always appeared fresh and crisp. This one would probably be done soon
as part of the maintenance cycle. But the slightly polished and glaring keys were
not what stood out the most about the ATM. At least not to him. For the average
customer, that would definitely be it. But the eyes see what the brain knows.
And his eyes were well trained to recognize this.

The card reader. Its front
surface, where you inserted the card, sat exactly flush with the rest of the
apparatus. Usually, you would find it slightly recessed, two inches or so below
the rest of the interface’s surface. Morrison stared at it for a moment. It was
very nicely done. The ATM’s color was a half shining silver. The card reader had
been done in the same exact color. A professional job. With serious research.
You rarely saw a match that perfect.

Morrison retrieved a
tissue from his pocket and covered his hand with it. It wasn’t time to start
leaving prints everywhere. He squeezed the tip of his fingers in the crease on
top of the card reader and did the same with his thumb underneath it. Made sure
he had a firm grip. Then he pulled. At first, nothing budged. The card reader
was set firmly into place. He repositioned his fingers to gain more leverage,
then went at it again. He felt the reader give way a bit. Kept pulling. Then it
popped right out, all at once, like a tight cork from a good bottle of wine.

Morrison turned the device
around in his hand. The shape of its back portion was a perfect match for the
ATM’s real card reader recess. It had been put in place with strong double-sided
adhesive tape. Two strips: one at the top, one at the bottom. Across all its
width. There was also a tiny fiberoptic camera embedded in the reader on the
left side, where the ATM keypad was positioned.

Morrison grinned.

Classic ATM skimming
equipment. A purpose built card reader installed in front of the real ATM card
reader so that unsuspecting customers would have to slide their debit card
through it. The counterfeit reader would skim the precious codes found on the
card’s magnetic strip and store them up in memory. The fiberoptic camera would
capture the user’s fingers punching the PIN on the keypad and
voilà
. You
left the equipment in place just long enough to gather a few tens of sets of
codes, then you uninstalled it, no trace left of the device ever having been
there, and went back to your base to extract it all. Once you matched the cards’
magnetic tape info with the PINs, you had everything you needed to start
tapping the unfortunate customers’ bank accounts. When the equipment was that
well made, all customers fell in the trap. You really had to know a lot about
security not to.
Nice job
, thought Morrison.
Looks very professional.

But it still represented
competition. However crude it was.

He checked the two other
ATMs over. The same type of card reader had been overlaid on them too. Morrison
dumped the one he had just extracted in the garbage can, but he left the others
in place.

An interesting thought
flashed through his head:
There’s a better way to get rid of these than to
do it myself
. But first, he had to leave the bank lobby and get back to the
Navigator.

He would make his phone
call from there. It was safer that way.

He turned around and proceeded
toward the heavy glass door. Pushed it open with his shoulder. Stopped in the
doorway. He had to wipe his prints off the handle. That installation had
nothing to do with him but, hey, you could never be too careful. He was about
to head back south along Main Street when he heard the voice.

Low and deep. An annoyed
rumble.

It came from behind.

And it said, “Just what
d’ya think you’re doin’ here, little shit?”