But on Sunday, Pierre-Gabriel still felt completely wiped out—his body was aching all over, and Tash had to nurse him. Her only breaks were when Pierre-Gabriel gave in to exhaustion, and she could exchange messages with Henri through Valérie, who spent the entire day at the hospital. Her favorite doctor was on duty.
Henri had recuperated fully from the coma, and the edema on his occipital region had disappeared completely. The exterior trauma was not as inflamed, and the hematoma on his forehead was still visible where the bandage didn’t quite cover it; it was a simple bump, though it had been hard. He hadn’t needed stitches. The most annoying thing was his four aching ribs, which didn’t allow him to cough or laugh. They would take longer to heal.
The doctor thought he could discharge Henri in a few days, but he required confirmation from the osteopath that his affected vertebrae were still in place after a final consultation. He insisted that Henri exert as little energy as possible, and he certainly couldn’t go to work.
Now, at last, it was Monday, and Tash was killing time in the kitchen, clearing up after breakfast, while Pierre-Gabriel was in the bathroom, getting ready in slow motion. It wasn’t Tash’s nerves but the leftover cold that didn’t allow him to move any faster. Normally he would have stayed at home to rest an extra day, but time was against him—and he had a lot to lose.
29
Jean-Philippe stepped out of the shiny black Citroën, using the door his driver had just opened after parking on the esplanade of the imposing crystal-tower headquarters of the bank. At large French companies, whether private or public, the directors’ cars are French. This isn’t a matter of nationalism but of image and principles, of setting the example of buying locally.
The driver waited for Morgane Duchène with the door open, a common occurrence since Maillard had finalized his divorce fifteen years ago. Except now Jean-Philippe didn’t offer his hand to help her out. At forty-two, she was still a woman who could stop traffic, the kind who doesn’t grow old, and the years slid by without affecting her. She looked thirty-five at most and was growing more beautiful.
It was very early, the air was fresh, and the sky was blue and completely clear, a total break from the hounding black clouds of the weekend.
Morgane had dropped by Jean-Philippe’s house at noon on Sunday without notice, as she usually did. They had decided at the beginning not to live together because people might talk, which he cared about so much, and now they didn’t because she wanted to maintain her independence. And her occasional lovers, suspected Maillard.
At the start of their relationship, he was almost twice her age. She was twenty-five, voluptuous and very sexy, and she knew what she wanted.
He met her when she was in the middle of a display of strength and character as a recently hired risk analyst. She had taken on the enormous challenge of beginning in specialized banking programming, right when that tool was being introduced to all the sectors and departments to an unprecedented extent. She put her heart and soul into defending her needs.
As the bank’s IT director, Maillard didn’t usually attend these kinds of meetings—that’s what his subordinates were for—but he wouldn’t miss one when the analyst’s name was on the list.
He’d wanted her from the first conflict. She knew what she needed and why, and she didn’t abandon the fight until she got what she wanted. She didn’t even have to do much to reach the post of risks director—she climbed the steps one by one until she achieved it in record time. And she stayed there, doing exemplary work.
Maillard was a man with his feet on the ground, serious and responsible. He was happily married to Natasha, Tash’s mother; it was a marriage without conflict, no ups and downs. His Russian-born wife had a strictly traditional upbringing in regard to marriage, so her attractive and brilliant husband could build his career without any family drama. If Morgane had not shamelessly interfered, Natasha would still be following the routine of her married life. She often longed for that domestic peace.
After she divorced Jean-Philippe and left for the United States, he moved back into the family home and still lived there. When Tash came to see him back then, she found her room as it was, and everything remained the same today. In fact, she lived with him for some time after finishing school, when she started to work in Paris; then she met Pierre-Gabriel and married him. Jean-Philippe still couldn’t understand what she saw in that bastard. Unlike her husband, Tash had never accepted any of the connections Jean-Philippe offered. Perhaps one day, Tash would open her eyes and come back home to change her life.
Jean-Philippe Maillard knew that his adventure with Morgane would end someday—the twenty-year age difference was too much. He had to acknowledge that he’d been thinking about that from the beginning, but they were still together, despite some ups and downs. He’d recently turned sixty-two and the downward spiral was visible, the years weighed on him more, and he had never been the kind to work out. He was three years away from retiring, while Morgane rejuvenated each year, and it wasn’t reasonable to think she’d stick around forever.
But in the end, Maillard was human—the only person he was close to was Morgane, and a few hundred million euros could be a more than reasonable motive for her to stay by his side. So, after weighing the pros and cons, he told her about the issue.
She was shocked. Shocked that he had told her about it, but especially that he’d decided to keep all the money.
Jean-Philippe explained his reasons. With the salary he’d been making for years, plus his official retirement plan (and the private retirement plans he’d probably set up at the age of ten), he had enough to end his days extremely comfortably. If the stolen money were added to the retirement bonus he would get—a frivolous three million, already negotiated and signed—it could be said with all certainty that he was set for life. However, if he revealed the mess Pichon had gotten him in, he’d be implicated, and everything would collapse like a house of cards. It was very likely the bank’s directors would decide not to make the scandal public for image reasons. It was embarrassing that for more than two decades, the bank’s other programmers had been incapable of detecting the diversion of millions from client and user accounts. In reality, the bank had not lost a single penny the whole time. That was very good for the bank but extremely bad PR, especially during a financial crisis. It would mean a succulent dish for the entire media, who would launch a deadly campaign against them.
And the first person responsible—the scapegoat, always necessary in these cases—would be Jean-Philippe Maillard, the man who did not have enough vision to keep one of his programmers from putting him in that position. He would have to resign and renounce everything he had achieved in all his years of hard work.
But that was the best-case scenario. Another theory could also take shape, a theory that would do wonders for the bank group: their IT director was in on it from the beginning, and Henri Pichon’s actions were encouraged and covered up by management. That way the bank would take on part of the responsibility, cleaning up the media scandal and moving the focus away from the ownership of the stolen money. And for this, the punishment should be exemplary: it was very likely a large part of his retirement would be spent behind bars.
It’s the route that he, Jean-Philippe Maillard, would have taken if it weren’t actually about himself.
Morgane listened attentively as Jean-Philippe explained that Pierre-Gabriel was the person who had casually discovered the clever diversion of funds but said it would be highly complicated to find out where the money had gone. She was even more attentive when he told her that on Friday afternoon, after finding out and analyzing the problem with his son-in-law, he had hired Silvano Garibaldi, an excellent programming expert, who had received all the necessary documentation and would study the problem.
Morgane became upset, and Jean-Philippe thought it was because of the risky situation, so he explained that absolutely nobody knew about this excep
t him and now her. Despite this, she still seemed nervous—and became even more so at the end of the day, when Garibaldi called asking to see her first thing on Monday because he had found something interesting that he preferred not to discuss over the phone.
In an impulse of the moral kind, and seeing the amount of stress the situation caused Morgane, Jean-Philippe didn’t tell her anything about the investigation and surveillance he’d ordered on Pichon and his son-in-law.
30
Maillard was shaken; he couldn’t get used to the piercing sound of the intercom that was integrated into his new office phone. They’d upgraded the entire telephone system in the building, and he still hadn’t found the time to get in touch with the operator who took care of the fine tuning. He would speak to his secretary and have her take care of it.
The doorbell interrupted his reverie. He’d spent half an hour in his huge office looking at the esplanade of La Défense without actually seeing it, as he was submerged in several complicated and worrisome thoughts.
He looked at the time on his table clock, a branded gift from a clever provider. It had a modern and discreet design, and it was by far the object that he looked at the most throughout the day.
Nine o’clock sharp, how punctual! he thought, pressing the button with the red flashing light.
“Yes?”
“Monsieur Silvano Garibaldi,” announced the neutral voice of his secretary.
“Tell him to come in.”
The door, which kept proportion with the rest of the room, opened, letting through a substantial young man, perhaps in his early thirties, who strode toward Jean-Philippe to shake his hand.
“Pleased to meet you,” he said emphatically as his colossal hand enveloped Maillard’s with contained force.
“Pleasure,” answered Maillard, taken aback by such ceremonious politeness, looking at the seemingly otherworldly giant who had just entered, traversing his immense office as if it were merely the size of a matchbox.
He was big in every sense of the word—tall, wide; arms like legs, ending in excessive hands; an immense, round face surrounded by hair so red it looked like a wig, something more apt for an eye-catching children’s toy. But what caught Jean-Philippe’s attention the most and eclipsed almost everything else were his eyes, a faded pale blue where you could read all the ingenuity and kindness of the world.
Although his physique was more evocative of northern lands, such as Ireland, Garibaldi was actually of Italian origin—from Lombardy, to be precise. Whenever he spoke more than a few words, a singsongy cadence could be heard in his accent.
Jean-Philippe and the Gulliver look-alike sat at the same conference table where the IT director had sat with Pierre-Gabriel on Friday to talk about the same subject.
Silvano opened his laptop while he began his report.
“While this piece of junk starts up, I’m going to give you a summary of the situation,” he said, opening a little spiral notebook.
“I’ll leave it in your hands,” Maillard felt obliged to reply.
Maillard had not met the IT expert in person until today, but he had spoken to him by phone on several occasions. He had been recommended years ago as an outstanding professional, and so far had managed to prove that his work was on par with his reputation. So Maillard tried not to judge him by his appearance.
The redheaded giant leafed carefully through the first pages of his notebook, running an enormous index finger along each one, following the Lilliputian letters meticulously and with extreme delicacy. Maillard had the feeling he was refraining from sticking out the tip of his tongue in concentration.
“I’ll be brief,” announced Garibaldi moments later, looking Maillard straight in the eye. “I’ve been studying all the programs and routines you sent me on Friday afternoon. I have to admit that the programming is good and has certain aspects of genius to it, as well as touches of romantic humor, which I’ll talk about later so we don’t lose focus on the subject that concerns us here.”
He paused for a few seconds, looking at Maillard with his frank gaze, seeking his approval. As Maillard was silent, he continued. “When I say ‘genius,’ I do so first thinking about how one man alone, without any help, dreamed up a programming labyrinth to divert, in my humble opinion, hundreds of millions of euros using the bank’s systems of compensation and fraud detection.”
Maillard’s face gleamed in agreement and impatience to hear the rest.
“And second, that despite creating nine hundred forty-six routines and subroutines, he had only five of them in operation. The rest are just red herrings.”
Maillard cringed. “What do you mean, only five are in operation?”
“Strictly five, no more and no less. Obviously, I’m not talking about the programs of transactions, closings, etcetera—only about the routines themselves. Of course, this amounts to the same thing. What difference would it make whether he’s robbing the bank with five routines or with nine hundred forty-six? The fact is that he’s doing it. And he must be sending the money, penny by penny, to some financial haven.”
“Which one? Have you found the accounts, something that could lead us to them?”
“That’s what I wanted to see you about. When the temporary accounts where he stores the pennies reach a certain amount, he empties them with a transaction to one or several accounts whose digits are located in files that are generated at the time of the transaction. And I can only check this on-site. If you could facilitate a terminal and an access key to your transactions system, I will try to verify where and how they’re generated.”
“Right away,” said Maillard, springing up and heading toward his desk.
Even though he had the highest authority in the banking IT department, that did not mean Jean-Philippe had access to everything. First because he didn’t need it—his function was not to go into the computers. In fact, although he had studied IT and a bit of programming, he had never participated in any other project that wasn’t required in a college course. And second, the security protocols would not have allowed him access. The only thing he could do was request a temporary pass that would be recorded along with the reason for the request.
So he requested it by email, as the protocol required, but with a reason that would have surprised more than one person: he asked that Pierre-Gabriel have total and indiscriminate access to the transactions system from then until one o’clock that afternoon.
Five minutes later, his email notified him that he had the access codes available.
Jean-Philippe clicked on an icon, and a white screen appeared with the logo of the banking group and a box where he typed the username and password he’d just received.
“Here you go,” he said, giving the chair to Garibaldi.
The giant sat down and started to move through the maze of the bank’s IT network, meticulously writing down lowercase words and symbols in his spiral notebook. Overcome by the events and the technology, Maillard went back to his favorite pastime. The esplanade shone with virginal whiteness under the morning sun.
An hour and a half later, Garibaldi gently placed his stylographic pen on his notebook. His normally clear gaze was full of doubt and confusion. Maillard could see there was something wrong before Garibaldi opened his mouth.
“I don’t understand—there’s nothing here of what you sent me, and the programs have disappeared. I found only the ones concerning the transactions, but there’s no trace of the routines and none of the files responsible for creating the accounts where the money was diverted.”
“That’s impossible. I copied them personally on Friday. You must be mistaken.”
Silvano Garibaldi rose and calmly offered Jean-Philippe the chair so that he could verify the disappearance.
Indeed, Garibaldi was right.
Maillard leaned over to pick up the phone. He pushed a button.
“Maillard here. I wa
nt you to extend the access I requested earlier to the security backups of the last two weeks.”
There was a silence during which Maillard was incensed.
“Forget the stupid protocols and do as I say. Now!”
And he hung up.
In a moment, they were checking the security backups.
“I can’t understand it,” said Maillard, seeing that the security backups didn’t have a trace of Pichon’s programs either. “This is witchcraft. How is it possible? What the fuck is going on?”
“There’s an explanation,” ventured Garibaldi.
“I’m listening.”
“The programmer who set up the whole embezzlement process could have modified the security backup procedures. Any novice could do it. All it requires is having authorized access to the daily nocturnal backup tasks.”
Maillard sat down in one of the chairs at his conference table, exhausted and shattered. He couldn’t understand. He tried to think, to analyze the situation.
Garibaldi looked at him, not really understanding his chagrin. For the IT expert, this was about catching a programmer guilty of stealing, and there was no more evidence. So he felt obligated to tell his client.
“I think your fraudulent programmer has outsmarted the bank and gotten away. There is no evidence. What you gave me a few days ago could have come from any computer, and it could even have been created with the sole purpose of framing him. On the other hand, there are no grounds for a formal accusation. What has been stolen? Who has filed an accusation? Where is the money? The only thing we know is that sometime between Friday afternoon and this morning at nine, someone deleted everything to reestablish a normal situation, and we can’t prove that the theft ever happened.”
Maillard shot back over to the phone.
“I want the full list of everyone who has access to the partition and the processes we talked about earlier. Email it to me immediately. And it’s confidential, understood?”
The Penny Thief Page 8