Insecure

by Michael Shevlin

  But no. It was like a garage without the cars. Bits of computers lay everywhere, spewing their innards across the floor like extras in Platoon. The ceiling lights were those paneled squares that were only partially working and ancient angle poise lamps from various sources provided the only additional light. It was if they didn’t know what they were doing and so proceeded to break what they had in order to fabricate something that would work.

  What was even more disturbing were the Gollum like men (exclusively) that leered at us as we passed. They looked as if they hadn’t seen sunlight in weeks and seemed to be clad, to a man, in polyester. They were all tapping away at screens in silence. It appeared at first glance as if they were just writing lines and lines of code, there were no windows, controls or tools like Word – just white letters and numbers against black.

  We negotiated the labyrinth and arrived at a workstation with two screens and a bearded man who seemed to look relatively normal. However he was wearing a holster for his phone, but in this place it must be a totem of seniority.

  ‘This is Leon,’ said Henrik, ‘he speaks English. This is Klaus and James.’ Leon just nodded and smiled. ‘He’ll take you through the system, it should take no more than half an hour.’

  ‘Great,’ said Rich and I in unison.

  ‘I’ll leave you in Leon’s capable hands,’ said Henrik and left. I was a bit worried by this, as I didn’t think we could find our way back and also I was worried what the scary men in the basement would do to strangers. Leon, still quiet, watched Henrik leave. I sensed that Leon would quite happily slit Henrik’s throat given half the chance.

  ‘You had the demo?’ asked Leon with a contemptuous smile. He was English, London most probably.

  ‘You’re English. How’d you end up here?’ I asked.

  He snorted, ‘I thought it would be glamorous to work abroad.’

  ‘Oh well…’ I said, not sure what to say to that.

  ‘The demo was a bit shit really, I didn’t get an idea of what it can do.’ Said Rich.

  ‘It’s quite simply really,’ said Leon, ‘but when they sell it, they make it out like it’s sooo complicated and sooo sophisticated,’ he sneered. Leon has some real issues, I think.

  ‘He,’ said Rich jabbing a thumb in the direction Henrik went, ‘seems like a bit of an asshole.’ I raised my eyebrows at Rich but Leon laughed. A silent laugh that only adult players of Dungeons and Dragons ever do. I couldn’t wait to leave this place, I felt as if I was stepping a few rungs down Jacob’s ladder.

  Leon seemed to soften his bitterness a bit, ‘ he’s alright once you get used to him, but he’s not one of us.’ I hope he wasn’t including us two in this particular fraternity.

  ‘Okay, so in a nut shell what can we do with this?’

  ‘Okay,’ Leon cracked his knuckles like a prize-fighter, ‘each system comes with two screens. This is the banks accounts and investments on this screen and these are the customers account numbers – it’s just a BACS transfer system but on a bigger scale…’

  We sat through a very technical but very thorough guide to transferring money from a bank to a customer. It was easy, but there were a couple of little quirks that I wrote down. If we managed to get access to the mainframe in the bank then this was going to be a piece of cake.

  ‘…and that’s about it, simple really.’

  ‘What if a transfer doesn’t go through?’ asked Rich.

  ‘It will,’ said Leon with a slight sneer.

  ‘But what if it doesn’t?’

  Leon sighed, ‘this is the whole point of this system, it’s not like a civilian bank, it goes through instantly.’

  ‘Wow,’ I laughed in a light hearted way, ‘first thing I’ll do is transfer a couple of million to my own account.’ Rich laughed and gave me a soft punch. God, he could really ham it up sometimes.

  ‘Everyone says that,’ said Leon smiling a tight smile, ‘but the system logs the account numbers. Where it’s gone and where it’s come from, it’s all in the log.’

  ‘I’ll just delete the log!’ I laughed. Rich laughed too.

  ‘Well, technically, you can – you need an admin password, you can edit it and change it, but it won’t do you any good.’

  ‘But there’s no trace of my transfer,’ I said. Rich sat forward.

  Leon shook his head slightly, ‘it’s in both computers, where it goes is in this one and where it’s from is in the receiver. They both have logs and they’re both locked.’

  ‘But…’ I was about to say that we just delete the log anyway: the receiver doesn’t care where it’s come from, I supposed.

  ‘I know what you’re going to say – but a bank strictly controls all it’s assets and a flag will come up if money goes missing without authorization, even a few thousand. Also, large amounts like that can easily be traced back to the bank making the transfer – all of this was set up ages ago to stop this.’ Said Leon. I could hear Rich quietly sighing in my left ear.

  ‘So it’s totally impossible?’ I asked. Leon shrugged and nodded.

  ‘Even with an admin password - an admin password! - you can only change one side of the transaction, ‘ he laughed his silent laugh, ‘you’d be shocked at how many people ask me if there is a way of doing it, and I have tried and tried to figure it out.’

  ‘I bet you have,’ I said quietly.

  ‘That’s all I do all day,’ he tossed an empty plastic cup at one of the screens, ‘try and break this bloody thing.’

  A soft drizzle had started to fall as we waited for our cab. It was late. I didn’t think anything was late in a country obsessed with clocks and watches.

  Rich tapped a couple of cigarettes out of a pack and handed me one, ‘we’re right fucked now, aren’t we?’ I drew in the smoke and thought about it for a minute and realized that yes, we were pretty much shafted. I thought It would be as easy as moving money from my Paypal account to my current account and with my super-user admin password I could make the transaction disappear in a puff of smoke like a binary magician.

  ‘Rich, I honestly don’t know what we should do next, should we tell Barney?’

  ‘I don’t know, I think we should keep a lid on this for a while, we need to think.’

  I was worried that if we told Barney about this setback then we might be in more trouble than before.

  ‘Let’s just do the fucking job, transfer the money to him and let him worry about the consequences,’ I spat out. The sense of deflation hung over us. The same Passat that took us here swung into the car park, our ride back to Zurich.

  We sat in silence watching the scenery roll by as we heading back into the centre of Zurich. It was quite a pretty city really, with that chocolate box charm that Switzerland seems to have copyrighted - as they should do, they make an awfully large amount of chocolate. Rich’s phone rang.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, nodding, ‘we’ll sort out the money when we get back to the UK and organize the transfer…oh, we’re in Switzerland…Zurich…oh really?...I’ll just ask my brother.’ Rich covered the phone. ‘It’s Raymond, he lives out here – randomly - and wondered if we fancied going over to his house tonight.’ I shrugged and nodded. ‘That’d be great…six?...oh, okay then, sounds fun…you’ll text me it?...great, see you then’

  ‘What’s going to be fun?’

  ‘We’re going to do some puzzles.’

  ‘Eh?,’ Rich shrugged and I turned back to looking out the window, we were now getting close to the hotel. ‘Wait, could we stop here?’ We had just passed a taxi rank. Our driver pulled over quickly and we sat idling at the kerb for a minute while I fumbled for some cash. Rich looked at me quizzically.

  ‘Would you like a receipt?’ asked the driver, ‘I can give you a receipt for both journeys…’ he shrugged with his face.

  ‘It’s okay, we don’t…’ I stopped, my mouth open. The cabbie just helped me figure it out, how to transfer the money without being caught. He looked at me like I was a mental health risk. I Smiled and dug in my walle
t for some cash to pay him, I handed him a hundred Swiss franc and Rich and I got out of the car.

  ‘You have no twenty franc notes?’ asked the driver.

  ‘Give us a second mate,’ I said. Rich tugged my sleeve and we walked out of the driver’s earshot.

  ‘Why have stopped, what’s wrong?’ asked Rich.

  ‘I’ve fucking cracked it, Rich,’ he frowned, ‘I’ve only gone and fucking cracked it.’ I told him what we were going to do.

  ‘Fuck me,’ he said pushing his hand through his hair, then he laughed. ‘Fuck me. You should have got into crime a long time ago, Dan, you’re genius at this.’ I looked down at my feet, embarrassed. ‘I’m not saying that it’s not going to take balls to pull it off, but…fuck me.’

  ‘It’s so simple, I didn’t know why I didn’t think of it before.’

  ‘Why’d you stop the cab?’ asked Rich.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t want to go back to the hotel because I thought that if we went to Raymond’s it would be better in disguise…we don’t want to give him away’

  ‘Good thinking, but we’re a bit early – shall we grab a beer?’

  ‘Good idea,’ the cab driver tooted his horn. I walked over to the cab.

  ‘Sorry, mate.’ He just looked a bit bored, more than anything else.

  ‘I don’t have change for such a large money,’ said the driver, his English – for once – letting him down.

  ‘Will a cab be hard to find in an hour or so?’ The driver looked out of the window, considering this.

  ‘Ya, in this weather, you might be waiting a long time.’ I took out my wallet and gave him another four hundred Swiss francs.

  ‘Okay then, can we hire you for the night?’ He took the money and turned off the engine. ‘Wanna beer?’ He smiled and got out of the car.

  Rich looked at the driver and me and gave me a look. ‘He brings us luck.’

  CHAPTER 11

  The route to Raymond’s wound up through forests and mountains. We drove for about an hour. Lothar, our driver, was a quiet family man making a hard living as a cab driver and was only too happy to have an easy night and planned to work on his laptop finishing a dissertation on fashion retailing. Cab drivers, strippers and barmen: always more than the sum of their parts.

  We eventually arrived at large, traditional chalet style house. It didn’t seem to have any overt security – which I was surprised at – but had a large driveway that had a good collection of valuable metal parked back to back. Maybe Raymond was entertaining, or he was a serious petrol head.

  ‘Okay Lothar, we’ll see you later,’ I said. Lothar nodded and switched off the engine. He reached for his laptop in the passenger footwell. ‘If we come out running, then just go, don’t ask questions.’ He stopped mid reach.

  ‘He’s just joking,’ said Rich.

  ‘You English,’ muttered Lothar, ‘always joking.’

  We stepped out of the car and climbed up to the house, the gradient was pretty steep. The house seemed much larger close up, and the roof cast a deep shadow that was quickly illuminated by a couple of softly cast security lights. We searched the door and porch for a knocker or bell but found none. The door was opened by a man, maybe in his late forties, wearing chinos and a black cashmere turtleneck.

  ‘Ya?’ he said. I was expecting welcome, or hello or come in, have a drink but the guy seemed pretty frosty.

  ‘We’re here to see Raymond,’ said Rich, ‘he’s expecting us?’ he added.

  ‘Do you have a card?’ asked Mr Frosty.

  ‘What, like a business card?’ asked Rich. He looked at me. I pulled out my wallet and dug through the myriad compartments. I had an old, well thumbed business card tucked in next to my Oyster card. I gave it to Mr Frosty who almost held it by the corner lest it give him scurvy.

  ‘If you could wait a moment,’ said Mr Frosty and he shut the door. Rich and I stood facing the door for a moment.

  ‘He’s not very accommodating, is he?’ I said, ‘see how he looked at my card? Wanker.’

  ‘Who is he? A manservant or something like that?’ asked Rich.

  ‘Do people still have manservants?’ I asked turning to Rich. The door opened again, but this time Raymond stood there, looking relaxed in his civvies. The smile quickly slid off his face.

  ‘Yes?’ he said, a crease of irritation on his forehead.

  ‘Raymond, it’s us, Rich and Dan?’ Rich said. Raymond’s face suddenly smiled again, he looked at us questioningly.

  ‘Oh shit,’ I said, ‘we can explain this.’ I looked down at my clothes.

  ‘It’s very effective,’ said Raymond, ‘I really did not recognize you at all.’ He looked us up and down, shaking his head and smiling. ‘Where are my manners? Come in.’ He stepped back and we walked into the entrance hall.

  The hall was minimal, with just a large modern painting on one wall and polished wooden floors reflecting large, floor to ceiling doorways. ‘Please,’ said Raymond leading us through one of the doorways.

  We entered a huge room that used the entire height of the house and had a mezzanine level overlooking the main area. The middle of the room was dominated by a central fireplace that had a magically suspended flue taking the smoke away. Raymond was entertaining, there were maybe twenty people lounging around the fireplace.

  They looked very European. The English would either turn up at something like this very smart – in a suit or a dress – or too casual. The people here looked smart-casual – in that the men wore trousers and they tucked their shirts into them and wore loafers. The women wore dresses and boots and wrappy-aroundy-scarfy things. They just looked European.

  When we entered, they all gave us the once over. ‘Everyone?’ announced Raymond, ‘this is Richard and Dan from London, they came in disguise.’ To illustrate this, Rich pulled his beard off. A handful of people clapped, as if this happened all the time at Raymond’s parties. ‘If you’ll excuse us?’ announced Raymond again.

  We walked through the room grinning at people as we passed. I felt like a pet monkey. We went into another hall, through a doorway down a flight of stairs into a basement. Unlike every other basement I have ever seen this one was meticulously clean with shiny concrete floors and recessed lighting. We passed a rack of skis and snowboards and some glinting mountain bikes on racks before entering another ante-room which housed a white Land Rover Discovery.

  We got into the Land Rover and Raymond started the engine. He pressed a button on the dash and the garage door slid open. ‘We’re going for a little drive, It might get a little bumpy.’ The car rumbled out of the garage and Raymond spun the wheel quickly and directed us up a small gravel track at the rear of the house through a small copse of conifers.

  We climbed, and I had to hang on as the Land Rover bumped off the gravel track onto more of a muddy trail. We left the trees behind and I looked behind and saw Raymond’s house spilling light out and saw how remote it was. The trail dipped and we entered another glade of trees. The trail rose again and Raymond had to switch to lower ratios to keep our momentum. We rose and fell so much that I could almost not make sense of where were going any more and started to feel disorientated. Raymond tutted a bit.

  ‘The rain had made it a bit slippery,’ he said. The wipers efficiently kept the screen clear, but in the full headlights the rain almost looked liked flurries of snow.

  ‘Is this all yours, Raymond?’ asked Rich.

  ‘Not all of it, no. But I have another place a couple of kilometers up this trail and the land nearly joins,’ he said. He spun the wheel quickly and we bumped onto an old road that was almost as bumpy as the trail we had just left. ‘Sheisse,’ said Raymond under his breath, ‘I should have brought waterproofs.’

  We eased to a stop outside another chalet style structure, but this was more modern, made out of concrete not wood. It had a long barn extension off the back and a couple of small outbuildings.

  ‘What was this?’ I asked.

  ‘It was someone’s attempt at a ski chal
et, built in the 1970’s,’ he glanced at us in amusement, ‘you said you would explain the disguise?’

  ‘We had to do something in Zurich, something that we needed to keep quiet about…’

  ‘…we just wanted to keep a low profile.’

  ‘There is a low profile,’ smirked Raymond, ‘and there is a disguise. We’re you followed here?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ said Rich quickly, ‘we spotted our tail back in Zurich.’

  ‘Would you like the tail dealt with?’ asked Raymond. I suppose that this is how people die in this business, just one chance offer, someone accepts and then suddenly a mother is without a son.

  ‘No, no,’ said Rich, ‘you’re alright, we know who’s following us.’ Rich nodded sagely.

  ‘Is it your boss? Mr Gibbons?’ he chuckled, ‘though obviously not Mr Gibbons himself.’

  Rich looked at me and I nodded, what the hell. ‘Yes, it is. A couple of his guys, they think we’re still back at the hotel.’

  ‘It’s no matter then,’ said Raymond, ‘you will get drunk tonight, make a scene back at your hotel and they’ll just think that they missed you.’

  ‘They’ll definitely not tell Barney they were asleep on the job,’ I said.

  Raymond smiled his assent, ‘Gentlemen, let’s go have some fun.’