by Chris Knopf
Omni chose that moment to bring me the gnarled remains of a stuffed dinosaur.
“She wants you to throw it to the bow,” said Natsumi. “It’s taken me weeks to keep those things out of the water.”
The trick was repeated about a dozen times before she had enough, stopping amidships to chew on the slobbered fabric. I continued the story.
“Standard practice in any audit is checking with the recipients at the end of a disbursal to make sure they got the money they were supposed to get. It’s impractical to check with everybody, so they pick a sample of recipients, say 10 percent, at random, and survey them. But what if your recipients are impoverished people in remote areas with shaky communications and minimum financial sophistication? And what if there are thousands of them? Not really a problem if all the recipients you manage to reach report receiving every penny of the money promised, standard audit procedure confirms that all the money’s been disbursed.”
“But it hasn’t,” said Natsumi.
“No. Because two-thirds of the people on the list of recipients don’t exist. The proper information was there, in rigorous detail, but none of it was real. Joselito wrote a software program that generated thousands of these phony approved loans, each with their own account number. These accounts were labeled with their own special code, so when the time came, Joselito could punch in a few commands and transfer the orphaned money however and wherever he wanted.”
“And Strider figured this out,” said Natsumi.
“All she did was double-check the contact information, confirming the business registrations, addresses and telephone numbers. It only took uncovering a half-dozen phantom borrowers to realize what was up. Once she isolated the special tag on each of the fake accounts, she had the whole thing.”
I was doing the talking, but everyone was looking at Jersey, who seemed to be bursting at the seams to chime in. So I let him.
“Joselito labeled all these phony accounts to make it easy for the computer to go in there and scoop out all the embezzled money,” he said. “It made it just as easy for Strider to write a command that transferred that same money into the accounts of legitimate borrowers, in equal amounts spread out across the entire program. With a friendly note that said, ‘Please accept this one-time gift from the People of the United States of America, who wish you long life and prosperity.’ ”
We raised a toast to Strider, along with the heartfelt hope that she continue to evade capture, and if not, that she’d plundered enough bank accounts to afford a really good lawyer.
WE GAVE Jersey and Desiree our big V berth and set ourselves up in the cockpit with pillows, quilts and the dubious attention of a small mutt. I was happier for it, to be in the warm air driven by the persistent trade winds that I’d thought about every day and night from the moment the mercenaries took it from me.
And that night, the gentle slap of the bay waves against the hull spoke to me as a whole man. Having lived in every world outside of the one I was born into, I knew with utter conviction that this was the one I would always long for.
Whether they let me stay here or not.