“What do you mean ‘don’t know’?” asked Mike. “You know me.”
“With all due respect Mike,” said Ben. “We don’t know you very well, do we?”
“Well I trust Mike,” said Jim defiantly. “And besides, with the new job I hope to land and a little more income, all I need is a little bridging loan to get me over the next few months.”
“Exactly,” said Mike.
“Don’t count your chickens before they hatch,” cautioned Ben.
“They haven’t hatched,” said Jim. “But they are pecking through the shell right now.”
The waitress arrived with the lunches and placed them in front of Ben and Jim.
“I’ll let you have your lunch,” said Mike, writing a phone number on a napkin. “Call my uncle when you have a chance,” he said. He passed the napkin to Jim, who, without looking at it, folded it and placed it in his shirt pocket.
Once Campanelli left, Ben looked back at Jim. “You’re not going to call his uncle, are you?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” said Jim.
“You don’t know who these people are,” cautioned Ben. “I mean, who would want to lend money to someone who couldn’t get a bank loan?”
“I’ll only call as a last resort,” he assured Ben. Jim didn’t like Ben’s meddling. He might, after all, have no choice but to contact Mike’s uncle.
“I know you don’t want me to give you advice on this,” said Ben. “But even if the uncle does lend you the money, this is only a short term fix. You know that right? I mean, he can buy you some time but you simply don’t have the income to sustain this crazy lifestyle of yours.”
“I know that, Ben,” said Jim. “You think I don’t know that?”
***
Back at the CCRA offices Jim and Ben returned to their desks. Having trouble concentrating on his work, Jim decided to get a cup of coffee to bring back to his desk. On the way to the elevator Jim took the long route past Ben. Ben saw Jim walk by, jumped out of his chair, and ran up beside him.
“Jim, don’t deal with Mike’s uncle,” pleaded Ben, walking quickly beside him. “There’s got to be another way!”
Jim stopped in the corridor and turned around to face Ben. “I don’t have another choice,” said Jim.
“You think your only alternative is to deal with some Toronto mobsters?”
“What?” asked Jim, incensed. “Just because Mike’s Italian doesn’t mean that his relatives are in the mob.”
“Okay, okay,” conceded Ben with both his hands in the air. “I got carried away. But, Jimmy, you don’t know these guys. Maybe I can help. I could loan you some of the money you need. And maybe your Mom can help.”
“No way!” objected Jim. “There’s no way my Mom is going to find out about this.”
“Just don’t do anything rash,” pleaded Ben.
“I won’t,” said Jim. “Don’t worry about that. I haven’t even decided to call.”
“Good,” said Ben, relieved. “But I think it would be smart to give me the uncle’s telephone number.
“Why?”
“Just in case you aren’t thinking clearly later,” said Ben.
“I’m not going to call, Benny,” said Jim. “Don’t’ worry about it.”
“That’s good,” said Ben. Then get rid of the phone number.
“Fine,” said Jim curtly. He reached into his shirt pocked and retrieved the folded napkin that held the telephone number. He crumpled it into a ball and looked for a garbage can to throw it into. He spotted a garbage can at an empty desk and threw the crumpled ball into the can.
“Satisfied?” asked Jim.
“Relieved,” said Ben.
“Good,” said Jim.
Ben turned and began walking back to his desk Jim followed behind him but quickly detoured past the garbage can. He quickly reached into it, retrieved the crumpled napkin and stuffed it into his pant pocket. He then caught up to Ben.
Ben turned around. “Did you hear about the finger?” he asked.
“No,” said Jim.
“They cut the minister’s finger off too,” said Ben.
“Gee, I never had any respect for politicians but this guy didn’t deserve to lose and ear and a finger. And it’s probably not over.”
“It may have never begun,” said Ben.
“What do you mean?” asked Jim.
“There’s speculation that the whole thing might be a hoax.”
***
Back at his apartment building, after retrieving the mail from his mailbox on the main floor, Jim went directly to his apartment. Taking a beer from the refrigerator he retreated to his server room, stepping over the various envelopes scattered over the floor from the previous night. While drinking his beer he logged into his server and checked his e-mail, leaving most of the reading until later. He then opened the envelopes he had retrieved from his mailbox.
Just as the previous day, about half of the envelopes he opened were bills and the majority had “Final Notice” or “Overdue” stamped in large red letters across their pages. Having finished his beer and having placed the bottle on the desk, he then picked up the myriad envelopes on the floor. He also opened these envelopes, removed from them any statements, and stacked everything in neat a pile on the desk. The new mail he put in a separate pile on the desk.
Eschewing the computer, probably because it was the computer that had gotten him into this mess, Jim grabbed a pad of paper and a pen. He wrote out the amounts due from the statements on the pad and then totalled them long hand. After totalling his debt, he wrote the sum at the bottom of the pad of paper. He circled the amount. As of this minute Jim owed $25,231.78. But that was only the debt he knew about. He would never dig himself out of this pit he had made. He grabbed the two stacks of envelopes sitting in neat piles on the desk and threw them at the walls. When the envelopes and papers finally stopped falling, everything was covered in paper.
“Shit!” Jim swore out load and thumped his fist on the table. The empty beer bottle jumped, fell over and rolled off the desk. It landed on the floor with a smash, fragmenting into a half dozen pieces.
“Shit!” he swore again but he left the beer bottle where it was. He shoved the pad of paper to the side, out of the way of his keyboard, and finished reading his e-mail. There was nothing interesting there. He ran his fingers through his hair and found that he had been sweating profusely. He also found that his hands were wet and a little shaky. He looked at them, disgusted at himself. He needed a break, he thought.
He left the server room, entered his bedroom and started to remove his clothing. As he removed his shirt he subconsciously checked his shirt pocket before he threw it on the floor. There was nothing. He did the same as he removed his pants, this time finding the crumpled napkin he had been given by Mike. Not thinking about it, he threw the crumpled napkin on his night table. He then took his shower.
Fifteen minutes later, refreshed after his shower and dressed in pyjama bottoms and a robe, Jim heated up a pizza and watched some television. After two frozen vegetarian pizzas, six beers, and one and a half viewings of “A Few Good Men” on TBS, he had pushed his financial problems to the very back of his mind. He stayed clear of the server room for the whole evening, not wanting to revisit his finances. Finally, ready for bed, Jim returned to his bedroom and threw himself into bed. He fell asleep quickly, eased into unconsciousness by the beer. Unfortunately, once the alcoholic stupor wore off, he did not sleep well. He tossed and turned fitfully all night, barely managing any meaningful sleep.
At 2am, realizing that sleep would elude him for the whole night no matter what he did, Jim returned to his server room. He logged into his server and brought up his custom and very private menu. Labelled at the top of the screen was his signature screen titled “White Cell” with a caricature of a human white blood cell. The rest of the screen was filled with various icons, including those for police, power, gas, banking, computing, construction, government, insurance and education. There was als
o an icon labelled miscellaneous. Jim clicked on the icon for banking and a new screen appeared with icons for at least 50 banking institutions. Jim clicked on Bank of Montreal icon. Another screen appeared with the bank’s operating units. He then selected the Mastercard logo.
The next screen asked Jim to enter a Mastercard number. He entered his own. His name, address and current balance of $7930.03 appeared on the screen along with two option buttons. The first option, called “Transactions”, would allow him not only to view his latest transactions, but also to change the value of each transaction. The next option, called “Payments”, would allow him to make a fictitious payment to adjust his balance due. Jim pressed on the balance adjustment icon and then entered a payment of $7500.00 and then pressed the commit icon. The balance on the screen changed to $430.03.
Jim smiled and leaned way back in his executive chair. Until yesterday he had only ever used his White Cell program to probe systems. Yesterday, for the first time, he had affected one of those systems by fixing Ben’s traffic ticket. Today he had successfully used his program to adjust a credit card balance. Jim was pleased that his untested program had worked flawlessly. He was also relieved that he had a means to fix his financial problems. Jim’s whole face, which until now had been constricted with tension, relaxed, and a large smile appeared across Jim’s face.
He sat there for a long while and relaxed enough that he seemed just about to fall asleep. His eyes became very heavy and began drooping on their way to closure. Then, suddenly, his eyes opened wide. His smile turned to a frown. Subconsciously he had been thinking about how he had created this ability to make fictitious payments to bank accounts and was no longer confident in his ability to create a program without having thoroughly tested it. He was thinking that he had finished writing this software over six months ago and that he had long ago forgotten how he had programmed the software to perform such a fictitious payment.
He sat up and changed screens on the computer, now looking at the complex source code of his program instead of the simple user screens with icons. The code was immense. He decided to change tact and switched back to an administrative screen where he could look at the bank logs. In order to avoid being caught the fictitious payment would have to have come from somewhere. From where had he taken the money? He could not remember. He began looking through the logs to see where the money had ostensibly come from and then he really started to panic because it looked like he had done very little to mask the transaction. It looked like the $7500.00 payment was merely logged as a cash deposit at his local branch. Cash was definitely the best way to deal with a fictitious payment because there was no way to verify the transaction in a completely electronic way. But the bank’s audit procedures would easily find the branch short by $7500.00, and would have no difficulty in targeting the amount as Jim’s cash payment. Questions would be asked and Jim would be under suspicion. The bank would have a hard time proving that Jim had deceived them but this was a loose end that Jim could not live with.
He then dug deeper into the transaction. He was convinced there was no way he would leave such a large loophole in his program. He felt he must have done more to hide the payment and that it was just not immediately obvious. Was it possible he had done such a good job that he himself could not find the trail? He retrieved some coffee, a mug and a coffee maker from the kitchen, setting it up in the far corner of the server room. He made himself a large pot of coffee and then continued looking through the Bank of Montreal database for other adjustments. He just could not find any. He knew he had been smarter than this but he was now getting very frustrated. He was also getting very concerned. What if he was wrong about himself?
Finally, he gave up on the banking logs and returned to looking through the text of his program. He knew this would be a massive undertaking. Over the years his programs had grown to hundreds of thousands of lines of code. He was gazing at the screen, face contorted while unconsciously pulling out his hair when he found it. And then he started smiling again. He was indeed smarter than he had remembered. In addition to the fictitious cash deposit, the program had created hundreds of smaller inter-branch transfers that left his branch with a $7398.01 surplus. He had not found these transactions in the bank logs because these transactions were all performed under other customers’ accounts. The branches on the other side of the transfers had shortfalls anywhere from $25 to $500 but the total of their shortfalls was $7398.01.
The cleverest part of the trail was that Jim’s branch also had a shortfall, but of only $101.99. If Jim’s branch had balanced, that very fact would have caused it to stand out. Jim’s branch would have been the only branch, out of all the branches with the small transactions, to balance overall. Something else that Jim discovered he had done was to create additional transactions between the other branches that were being used to cover the trail. There were, in fact over three thousand fictitious transactions spanning a period of about a week. It would be virtually impossible for anyone to decipher this maze of transactions because no branch was short more than $500 and Jim’s branch was only one of hundreds of potentially problematic branches.
Jim leaned back in his chair and placed his hands behind his head. He had done it. Tomorrow he would deal with the other banks. Jim went to bed, proud of his accomplishment, unfettered by previous debt worries, and confident he would sleep like a baby.
***
For the second time that night, Jim fell asleep right away. But, just like the last time, he did not sleep soundly, tossing and turning in his bed soon after falling asleep. Stubborn, determined to get some rest despite his sleeplessness, he remained in bed for what seemed like a long while. After an hour without sleep he looked at the time on his bedside table clock. It was 3:30am. He grunted and tried again to get comfortable in his bed. He tried and tried to get to sleep but nothing helped and he continued to toss until the sun began to rise.
“Shit!” cursed Jim Kincaid out loud when he saw daylight start to peak through his bedroom window. He found nothing more infuriating than a whole night without sleep.
He looked at his clock and saw that it was 5:37. When he saw the time he knew his attempts at sleep were futile and so he sat up in bed and turned on the television. The television was tuned to an American news broadcast, the news announcer in the middle of a report on a subway train derailment in New York City.
“… and, remarkably, only one person is dead, although many are seriously injured,” said the announcer.
“Remarkable,” echoed a second announcer.
“And now a story from London, England,” began the first announcer. A picture of a young man with very English features was thrown onto the screen behind the announcer. “The trial of Nigel Waterford began today in London. Mr Waterford is accused of embezzling over one hundred million pounds from his employer, HSBC Bank.”
“Isn’t HSBC is one of the largest banks in the world?” asked the second announcer.
“That’s right,” said the first. “And even though the trial is in its second week, the money remains missing,” he said.
“And the money was stolen by a simple programming change?” asked the second announcer.
“Correct. The defendant was a programmer at HSBC in London who redirected the funds to his personal account in the Channel Islands.”
Jim turned white and did not even wait to hear the rest of the broadcast. It was as if this news broadcast had been written as a warning for him and him alone. He jumped out of bed and ran into his server room. He immediately logged into his Bank of Montreal Mastercard account, swearing at himself. He had promised himself he was not going to use his computing talents to become a criminal and yet that was exactly what he had become. He had talked himself into something insidious. He had thought of himself as Robin Hood, stealing money from the bank for a laudable purpose. But watching the news broadcast made him realize that he was just a thief. This was not like his previous hacking efforts where he was just helping people. Now he was nothing more th
an a common thief.
He used his program to reverse the Mastercard payment and reverse all of the smaller inter-branch transfers. He then returned to bed and fell asleep almost immediately. No tossing. No turning. Just peaceful slumber.
Then, less than an hour later, at 7:00am, he was suddenly awakened when his alarm went off.
Chapter 9 - Making Contact
Wed May 5th
Eyes closed, Jim tried to silence the alarm buzzer by hitting the alarm clock button with his fist. He missed on his first two attempts then, on his third try, he did manage to knock a crumpled ball of paper off his night table and onto the floor. On his fourth attempt he silenced the alarm buzzer. Jim lay in bed for another ten minutes before he finally stumbled toward the bathroom. Half asleep, he cut himself shaving, and then took a long, hot shower. The lack of sleep along with the previous night’s payment antics had completely drained him. His usual hot shower, though relaxing, only drained him further. After drying off, he wrapped a towel around his waist and walked back to his bedroom. As he started to put on his shirt he noticed the crumpled white ball on the floor. He picked up the napkin and looked at it briefly after he had smoothed out the wrinkles. Shrugging to himself, he folded it and put it in his shirt pocket. Wearing only a shirt, he walked to the front door and opened it, picking up the newspaper from outside. He then went to the kitchen to leave the newspaper on the breakfast table and then returned to his bedroom to finish dressing.
After dressing Jim decided to check his e-mail before returning to the newspaper on the breakfast table. Walking into the server room, he froze. He could hardly see anything in the room. There were envelopes and statements strewn all over the floor and most of his desks and keyboards were also covered with paper. He had forgotten about the mess. Instead of checking his e-mail, Jim turned on his heel and went back to the kitchen where he filled a glass full of orange juice. With his juice in hand he then sat down at the table and read the paper, pushing the problems in the server room to the very back of his mind. Those problems would still be there later. As Jim read one of the front page headlines, “Finger Not A Hoax”, he muttered out loud to himself. “So what?” he asked. He was in a vile mood.
White Cell Page 10