by Jim CaJacob
He woke up at quarter to seven. He decided he just barely had time to duck in the shower to rinse off the road grime. He carried an all-purpose blue blazer for just this kind of occasion – no telling what kind of evening Max had planned. The blazer went OK (at least in Val’s opinion) with his cotton slacks and plaid shirt.
He ordered a soda and bitters at the lobby bar. Max would probably want to drink, but Val thought it was respectful to wait. After about a half hour he saw Max hurrying across the lobby, shaking his head, his hands in palms-up, what-can-you-do posture.
“Val. I’m sorry. I thought the meeting would never end. Thanks for coming.”
“It’s no problem, Max. I absolutely understand. Sit down and have a drink.”
“At least one. So, you have news for me.”
“Yes.”
“I noticed in your voice mail you didn’t specify ‘good news’.”
“Right. I didn’t.”
“I see. I wish I could say I was surprised. Do you mind if we go somewhere where we can get a steak and a drink?”
“Sounds good to me.”
Max knew a place. They got a table in the bar. Max got right to the point. “What are we looking at?”
“We’re not absolutely sure about this yet, but it looks like your boys have tweaked some of the Bureau’s statistical programs.”
“Tweaked?”
“Sorry. The programs have been modified so someone can predetermine the answer.”
“Predetermine?’
“Say, for example, you want the result of index such-and-such to be 5% next April. With these changes you can do that.”
“Oh God. What indexes are we talking about here?”
“Just one. But the wrong one.”
“Don’t tell me.” Val waited. “OK, tell me.”
“The Consumer Price Index.”
“Holy Mother of God. Who do these fucking maniacs think they are?”
“I’m afraid I have one more bomb to drop, Max.”
Max stared vacantly ahead, slowly shaking his head no. “Go ahead.”
"They’ve rigged the CPI once already."
“Tell me you’re kidding.”
“I’m not kidding.”
“Can anything be done?”
“We think so. We hope so. It looks like our boy Josh Calder has convinced Scott Crane to do this more or less for fun. Scott is a typical hacker type, but not a bad guy. We think we can get Scott to reverse the process. In fact, we think we can do it without telling Josh.”
“Who else knows?”
“Just Wilton, Jenny and myself.”
The onion rings were cold by now, but Max munched one absent-mindedly. “OK, here’s what we have to do. I clearly have to talk to my friend in the Department. We’re going to have to take our lead from him. In the meantime, nobody, I mean absolutely no-fucking-body, must know about this.”
Val nodded.
“How sure are you about getting this other asshole to see the light and do the right thing?”
“Pretty sure.”
“Val, listen carefully. I understand this matter goes far beyond our consulting company. I’m going to ask you to take my word that we’ll come clean with the Department on this, and we’ll take their lead. I’m not at all sure how they’re going to want to handle this. Do you have any idea how much money changes hand every month based on that particular fucking number?”
“A lot. A whole lot. I bet I know somebody who could tell you.”
“Who?”
“Josh Calder.”
Chapter 30
They parked down the street, in a parking structure. They couldn’t find the attendant for a minute. He was hunched down in the front seat of an old Buick, barely peeking through the driver side window.
Val walked over to him. The guy was probably pointing a shotgun at him. “Where do we pay?" Val said.
“Just put the money in the slot. Five dollars.”
Val, Jennie and Wilton walked quickly down the ramp and on to the street. The club was a block and half away. How do people live here all the time? Val thought.
The club was surprisingly full. It had a smoky, old-timey, hard liquor feel. Val liked it. Scott’s group was in the middle of a set.
“Definite Phineas Newborn influence,” Wilton said.
Val had no idea what he was talking about.
“Most of the piano players in the late 40s and early 50s tried to sound like Bud Powell. Newborn had a more individualistic approach.”
Val couldn’t tell if this was Wilton’s own opinion, or word-for-word plagiarizing of something in a jazz magazine he had read somewhere. Wilton had plunged himself into the study of American culture with a vengeance. He was always asking Val about Edward Hopper and Grant Wood and Aaron Copland and Mark Rothko. Val had at least heard of most of these people, but usually knew little more about them than their name.
“Do you like jazz?" Val asked Jenny.
“I don’t mind it,” she said. “Like most things, a little goes a long way with me. It was all over the place at Berkeley.”
“Probably not too much of it in Stillwater,” Val said.
Jenny usually ignored him when he teased her about her hometown. But tonight she was apparently more sensitive. “Heard from mommy dearest lately, Valentine?”
Val shook his head.
They lucked out and got a good booth that was far enough from the bandstand for them to talk. They reviewed their plan and waited for the band to take a break.
Scott walked through the place, shaking hands and chatting for a minute at a few tables. He came to their booth. He stopped and looked with a half smile frozen on his face.
Val said “Hi Scott. I bet I look familiar, right? I’ve been doing some work at the Bureau. I think we’ve run into each other. These are my friends Jenny and Wilton.”
“Hi. Thanks for coming. How’d you hear about the gig?”
“I don’t know. Somebody at work mentioned that you play jazz. We’re always looking for something to do on the road. This seemed more interesting than bingo night at the VFW. Hey, sit down for a second, will you? Buy you a beer?”
Wilton slid over to make room. Scott said “OK, for a second. But no, I don’t drink on the gig. This stuff’s hard enough to play.”
“Scott, I can tell you have listened to a lot of Herbie. But I hear some Phineas Newborn in there too,” Wilton said.
“You do?” Scott looked at Wilton again. “Phineas Newborn, huh? I do kind of dig him.” He put his hand on his forehead, smiled and shook his head.
Jenny leaned forward. “Scott, we have to admit we have another agenda. We’d like to buy you breakfast so we can ask you a few questions about work.”
“On a Friday night? Saturday morning, that is.”
“It’s a special favor, we know,” Val said. “But I can promise you it won’t be a waste of your time.”
“Yeah sure, I guess. I gotta get back up there now, though. Any requests?”
The three others looked at Wilton. “You know Ruby My Dear?" Wilton said. “Thelonious Monk?”
Later they followed Scott’s directions to the diner. It was the kind of place that hits its stride at three thirty in the morning. There was foot-thick pile of sliced potatoes and onions on the grill, being fragrantly sizzled into home fries.
Scott showed up. His tie was loosened but he looked otherwise wide-awake and excited.
On the way over Jenny had counseled Wilton that this was a business meeting. He’d have the chance to chat about jazz later.
“What’s up, guys? Val, Jenny and Wilton, right?”
“Right. Scott, we won’t waste your time. We’ve been brought in by the company to QA your team’s work.”
“The “company” as in the CIA?”
They laughed. “No, Scott, the company as in Marx, Barnes & Adams. Our mutual employer.”
“You guys work fo
r MBA too?”
“We do,” Val said.
“QA, huh? Are you guys technical?”
“To varying degrees,” Jenny said. Val thought he caught her glancing at him. “In general we’re pretty competent.”
“Competent enough to have noticed some possible anomalies,” Wilton said. Val wondered whether Wilton picked phrases like ‘possible anomalies’ because they were difficult to pronounce, or if it just seemed that way.
“Anomalies? Like bugs?”
“No, in fact your team’s code seemed exceptionally clean of bugs,” Jenny said. “Our compliments.”
“Thanks. I guess. What anomalies?”
Val leaned forward. “We think you know, Scott.”
“It’s obvious who knows how to code on your team,” Wilton said. “I think your friend Josh spends a little too much time on the phone to get much else done.
“Scott, it’s not our style to confront. But we have a job to do. We can’t prove anything yet, but we think something is going on with your code,” Jenny said.
Scott didn’t play the incredulous part too heavily, Val noted. He just sat and listened.
“Scott, believe it or not we’re here to help you. Help you avoid making a big mistake. While there’s still time.”
Scott sat silently, looking down at the Formica table. The waitress walked up, took a look and retreated.
“Scott, we could discuss the X-11 modules in some detail if you would like,” Jenny said.
Scott was shaking his head slowly.
“I promise you we’re not cops. The company really hates to be embarrassed. Especially in public. It’s best for everybody if we can clean these things up quietly. But we need your help to do that.”
“It was that obvious?" Scott said.
“Not at all,” Jenny said. “Quite the contrary. We had to dig hard. And as Val said, even now we can’t prove anything.”
“What now?" Scott said.
“We’d like to get together for a more detailed review,” Wilton said. “I think you can really teach me something.”
“Do I have an alternative?”
“Honestly, yes. You can deny everything. You can force us to spend time and the company’s money digging. It may take a long time. But, we’re not the kind of people who quit.” Jenny paused, eyebrows raised, lips apart. Val thought she was the most determined person he had ever met, and it came across.
“I can see that. Can you give me until Monday to think this over?" Scott said.
“Sunday afternoon, maybe,” Val said. “Remember, we’re looking for low profile. And Scott, please don’t get clever and skip out on us.”
“Not my style. Besides, I have another gig in two weeks. Hey, two gigs in one month. Maybe I’ll be able to fall back on my music career after all. What time Sunday?”
Chapter 31
The security guys were used to programmers coming and going at all hours. This one, a thin young black man with a nametag that said Raymont, had a small TV under the sign-in counter. He established no direct eye contact.
It took Scott a few minutes to log on. Wilton and Malcolm borrowed chairs and squeezed on either side of Scott.
Scott opened up his editor program, which he used to change source code. He blurred down through the program using the Page Down key.
“The first thing I did was identify some variables that had been set that were no longer being used,” Scott said. “There were several.”
“That was smart. No reason to call attention by setting up new ones,” Wilton said.
“Right. Here’s the one I used. It was in the original code but had never been used.”
“This is embarrassing,” Malcolm said. “I have a feeling it’s going to get worse.”
“Hey man, not really,” Scott said. “Believe me, everybody throws theory out the window when it comes to getting the code out. Besides, I’m not sure there was much theory when this original stuff was written. No offense.”
“None taken, Scott,” Malcolm said. “I was just thinking. John Van Neumann first proposed a digital computer with stored programs during the World War II. I’ve been here twenty-seven years. That’s half the history of computing.”
“Twenty-seven years ago my father was carrying human fertilizer in buckets out to the farm fields from the village every day. That was his job. He was a double Ph.D. before that.” Wilton said.
“The Cultural Revolution, right?" Scott said.
“The Great Leap Forward,” Malcolm said.
“My parents told me during that time everybody thought there was a big famine going on in the U.S., too,” Wilton said. “I was here two years before I believed everybody when they told me different. I’m so lucky they got out and moved to Taiwan before I was born. What’s going on here now, Scott?”
“OK, here’s where it gets a little cute. The poor guy who wrote this code, and it’s a pretty good bet it was a guy” Scott glanced over his shoulder at Malcolm, “had to try to decipher the professors’ statistics formulas and make sense of them in Assembler calling FORTRAN subroutines. He did what I would do. He took every formula and broke it down to its lowest level components, then stored each of these as a variable. Then he built the formulas up layer by layer. Not that efficient, but a lot easier to debug. I ‘borrowed’ some of the variables to do the work we wanted done. To tell you the truth I was surprised, actually I was shocked, that Wilton here and his crew noticed anything.”
“Just lucky,” Wilton said.
“I don’t think so,” Scott said. “This is good for me. I guess I was getting cocky.”
“Funny, I’ve never had that feeling,” Malcolm said, smiling.
“So where do you plug the number?" Wilton said.
“You don’t already know?" Scott said.
“Well, I had a guess.”
“I didn’t,” Malcolm said. “All the code in this area is a swamp for us. We just leave it alone and hope to not screw anything up. You guys are amazing.”
Wilton and Scott stared straight ahead, a little embarrassed.
Scott continued, “So anyway, like most of these old programs this one is looking for a deck of parameters. Some of these fields are also no longer used. I break the month and rate apart, invert the segments, and put them in those pad fields.”
“A person would have to be very suspicious to find any of this,” Malcolm said.
“Then you reassemble the input variables when you run the formulas, right?" Wilton said.
“Right. Here where you take the reciprocal. I move the value into this local variable.”
“Sweet,” Wilton said. “Oh, sorry Malcolm.”
“Don’t apologize Wilton. I understand. Our friend here is gifted. I also think he’s seen the error of his ways, right Scott?”
Scott said, “I don’t know about you guys, but coding has always been kind of a game for me. I should have known better when Josh suggested this, but it seemed like an interesting challenge. Plus I thought this was a good way to get my message out. Bad idea.”
“So we don’t have to tweak the program?” Wilton said.
“Not really. If you just omit those input parameters, the program runs normally,” Scott said.
“Wait. Wouldn’t the problem still be there? Couldn’t someone fool with the code later?" Malcolm said.
“I thought about that,” Wilton said. “Why don’t we put a few lines of code that will ABEND if any of those parameters are populated?.”
An ABEND – abnormal end – was a standard mainframe error message. Scott typed for a few minutes. He looked over his shoulder at Malcolm. “How do we test this?”
“Did you test before?”
“Not really.”
“And I suppose you’re going to tell me that your documentation is incomplete.”
The three programmers laughed.
“I think we’re done here,” Malcolm said. “I think the CPI is i
ts boring old self again.”
Chapter 32
For a change, Mona was home before Josh. She made sweats and stocking feet look totally New York, sitting at the table with one leg curled under her. “Hi hon,” she said.
Josh walked over to the glass table. Mona had a stack of catalogs. She was looking at one about the Seychelles.
“What’s up? Are we going on vacation?" he said.
“No, my silly boy. We’re looking for residences.”
“Residences?”
“Josh, dear, people like us don’t live in one place anymore. We’re citizens of the world.”
Mona was definitely watching too much TV.
“Oh really? Where, pray tell, will we be setting up housekeeping next?" he said.
“Josh, dear, don’t be sarcastic. It ages you. Of course we’ll want a little pied à terre in Paris.”
Josh had no idea what the thing was that they wanted in Paris, but kept his mouth shut.
She saw through this weak attempt. “A small, but choice, place to spend a couple nights when we’re passing through. The best places are on the Île St. Louis.” She pronounced it ‘aisle saint lewis’. Josh was pretty sure that wasn’t right. At least he admitted he didn’t speak French.
“Of course,” he said. Where else?
“Well, we should have an island getaway, right?”
They had gone to Sybarite, a singles resort in Jamaica a couple winters before. Mostly they had gotten drunk and gotten high. Mona wasn’t into water sports and it was too hot and sweaty to be outside during the day. Josh remembered the sex being disappointing and missing email.
“Manhattan’s an island,” he said. “So’s Long.”
“Really, Josh, your humor is escaping me tonight. As usual. Finally, I was thinking about Portillo.” This rhymed with ‘pillow’.
“Where’s that. Let me guess. In the Catskills?”
She ignored this. “No, dear, it’s in Chile” (pronounced as in ‘con carne’). “It’s a ski resort. I thought it would be more practical than Aspen or Gstaad (“Guh-stad”) since it’s south of the equator. We could get down there to ski to escape the heat of summer.”
“Very practical.”
She got up, walked to him, put her arms around his neck and looked up at him. She seemed shorter than usual because she was in her socks. “Josh, dear, you know I’m high maintenance. You know it and you love it. We’re not ordinary people, you and me. You’re going to make a lot of money and I’m just the girl to spend it for you. Just enjoy the ride.”
This was a more honest appraisal of their relationship than Josh had been able to summon up lately.