A Cadgers Curse

by Diane Gilbert Madsen

  We lay in each other's arms, drifting languidly in and out of sleep. When I opened my eyes, he was lounging on one elbow, watching me. I could feel his body heat as I traced the blondbrown hairs along his lower abdomen.

  "What are those black and blue marks from?" Scotty touched my leg where it was already turning a sickly purple.

  "It happened when I left Tom Joyce's." I thought I'd start my explanation short and simple, and kind of ease into the whole Burns artifacts problem. After my conversation with George Murray, I was now convinced that all the break-ins were related to the Burns artifacts, not to HI-Data. We knew who Jack McSweeney was, and I felt certain we'd be able to stop him and get the objects back. I wouldn't need to be looking over my shoulder every minute, worried about someone from HI-Data attacking me for reasons unknown. "See, Auntie... "

  Scotty suddenly jumped out of bed, clasping both hands over his groin.

  "Mee-oww," Cavalier squawked.

  "What happened Scotty? Are you okay?"

  "I think so." He uncupped his hands and peered at his privates. "Yeah, everything's still there. Cavvy gave me a cat lick. That's one rough tongue he's got."

  "Ohmygod" I tried not to laugh as I thought of all the stories about pets breaking up love affairs.

  "You and I are going to have a serious talk," I scolded the cat. "A good Cavalier doesn't do those things."

  Scotty's beeper went off again, this time scaring Cavvy off the bed. Scotty retrieved it from his pants pocket and came back to bed. He checked the displayed numbers, and when he looked at me, I knew it wasn't good news.

  "Hell, it's London. They've called twice. Better get ready for bad news.

  "What bad news?" I didn't need anymore of that today.

  "They probably want me back right away. God knows, I'm not ready to leave." He leaned over and kissed me as Cavalier stole back into the bed.

  "Ummm ... You are, I suspect, the best lover in the world."

  "Tell your cat it's you I love, not him." He stuck out his tongue at Cavvy, who blinked and pretended not to notice. "Why don't you figure out what you want on a pizza while I make my call. That way we can order-in and stay bare-assed all night."

  I jumped out of bed. "Like room service, huh?" If I wasn't going to have much time with Scotty, I'd make the best of what I had.

  We laughed as Scotty touch-toned the numbers for London, and I found the phone number for Mama Rosalie's. In Chicago, pizza is the king of foods. Thin crust, deep dish or stuffed, every neighborhood, no matter what its major ethnic group, has a mom and pop pizza parlor around the corner. I liked going out to Uno's or Due's, but my favorite for delivery was Mama Rosalie's, where she and several family members turned out a fabulous thin crust cheese with homemade Italian sausage and pepperoni.

  I was rustling up plates, silverware and napkins when Scotty, still in the buff, ambled in with Cavalier at his heels. I handed him a bottle of chilled Merlot and a corkscrew.

  "Say, what have you got on your dirty mind?" he laughed, catching the corkscrew handily. "Is this Merlot any good?"

  I giggled, setting out two wine glasses from the cupboard. "It's even better than good. It's reasonably cheap."

  He uncorked the wine and poured two glasses.

  "To you," he toasted, "and to Chicago."

  "To us," I toasted. After a sip, I asked, "So what did London have to say?"

  "They need me back right away. I'm really sorry, DD. They've set up connections between O'Hare and Kennedy, and thence to Heathrow. I'm booked out on the next flight." "

  I guess I was hoping you'd help me move into Tom's space." I tried my best to keep it light, but there was a big rock in my stomach.

  "DD, the only reason I got these two days was to meet with a Treasury Department contact here in Chicago. I should have told you yesterday I wasn't going to be here long." "

  I guess I expected it." Suddenly that headache started again. Maybe I did have a concussion. I searched for another couple of aspirins. "Why do you have to be so damn good at your job? If you were a schlep, you could stay awhile."

  "If I were a schlep," he leered and lunged at me, "you wouldn't give me a second glance. Admit it. Did I hear you say you're moving into Tom's bookshop? I don't know that much about your investigator's income, but can't you find something a bit bigger?"

  "I will. Soon."

  He caught me round the waist, and we were in the midst of another romantic interlude when the doorbell rang.

  Scotty rushed to the bedroom, grabbed his pants and jumped into them while hopping to the door.

  "Stay in the kitchen," he called as he zipped up and opened the door to Mario and our pizza.

  I was hunting for salt and pepper when Scotty burst into the kitchen, his hands full of money but no pizza.

  "Look. This is all I've got." He opened his fists on bills and coins all picturing the Queen of England. "I knew I wasn't going to be here long, so I didn't exchange for much American money. Have you got anything?"

  Me and money is a long story. I never carry much cash. I use credit cards because my tax-man, Stan, advises me it keeps my records straight. Of course, I have to pay them off in full at the end of every month or he'll flay me alive. All this ran through one track of my mind while the other track mentally added up what cash I kept for emergencies.

  "There's some in my purse," I started out to the hall when he grabbed me by the waist and pulled me back into the kitchen.

  "Mario's out there. Keep your naked buns in here and tell me where your purse is. I'll get it."

  I was certain he'd found it when I heard everything fall out of it onto the hall table. I shuddered.

  "Dammit, Scotty, be careful. There's valuable stuff in there."

  "Yeah, like hundred dollar bills," he called from the hall.

  "Right" I laughed. "I don't even know whose face is on a hundred. Ben Franklin? Bill & Hill Clinton locked in a heart shape? Obama?"

  "Never mind. I found a twenty," he said.

  While he settled with the delivery boy, I tried to control my pizza pangs, imagining that first bite. As soon as he closed the door, I joined him. But the pizza sat there while we both stared at a stash of hundred dollar bills spread out on my hall table, half in, half out of an envelope that had fallen from my purse.

  "Where'd they come from?" I asked.

  Scotty snapped one of the bills, then snapped it again.

  "Where'd you get this, DD?"

  "I don't..." I picked up the envelope that still contained a few cascading bills. "This is the envelope from Marcie at HI-Data. I thought her lease and tax returns were in it."

  "There was nothing in it but this money," he said.

  "Wow. Marcie must have meant to try and buy me off. I was going to go through it that night you arrived, but we went to the Bears game and then we ... Remember?"

  He unscrewed and removed a lampshade from one of the lamps in my living room. Under the exposed bulb, he scrutinized one of the bills, turning it from side to side.

  "This stuff is dirty, but it's good," he said, still eyeing the bill. "I've never seen anything this good."

  "Good?"

  "Good counterfeit. If it weren't for the watermark and how the paper feels when you snap it, I'd never know. This paper doesn't have fiber thread in it. Watch."

  He snapped the bill crisply, and it ripped cleanly in half.

  "Don't do that," I shrieked.

  "It's not real money, DD."

  "I can't believe it." I rifled through several bills, still upset about the torn hundred. I don't see that much cash that I can feel comfortable having it destroyed before my eyes.

  "Scotty, all the serial numbers are different. And look, these two are from different mints."

  Scotty shook his head. "What you mean, DD, is that the bills are from different banks. The mint isn't involved. All U.S. currency is printed by the BEP, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and each bill has one of the twelve Federal Reserve Bank locations on it."

  He c
hecked each bill, one at a time. "You are right though, different issuing banks. As good as they look, nonetheless they're all bogus. Tell me now, you say you got this envelope from Marcie at HI-Data? Who is she? Sit down. You can fill me in while we eat."

  FORTY

  I PICKED OVER A slice of pizza and watched Scotty finish the rest. My appetite vanished with the torn, fake hundred-dollar bill. All my aches and pains returned with a vengeance.

  What did a computer expert like Scotty know about money? And what had Marcie been doing with all those bills? Did she really believe she could bribe me? She was living like she had struck it rich with her new Porsche, expensive clothes and that expensive apartment. When Sparky told me about Marcie's off-shore calls, I'd suspected drugs or industrial espionage.

  Scotty interrupted my thoughts. "I'm going to let you in on something I'm not supposed to talk about."

  "I'm listening."

  "All right. I've been in London doing classified work for the IMF-the International Monetary Fund-not for some multi-na- tional conglomerate like I told you. I'm working on a top secret project at the Bank of England that's part of an IMF agreement."

  "Are you saying you're CIA?"

  "I'm not spooky enough for that." He smiled, but I didn't.

  "Go on." This was my day for surprises.

  "This all started in the late seventies when the International Monetary Fund became concerned that new technologies would permit wide-spread duplication of major world currencies," he said. "And that's exactly what happened."

  "Don't holographs and micro-printing and all that stuff make it more difficult to counterfeit?"

  "Those 3-D images work for plastic credit cards, not on paper currency. And for money, the newest generation of color copiers is just the tip of the iceberg. It's now possible to make almost exact copies of just about any paper document. And all of this sophisticated technology is getting cheaper by the minute, available now in your local drug store with the cameras, watches, and deodorants."

  "Sure you're not CIA?"

  "I promise," he said. "You just got a peek at how good this new counterfeit currency can look. Believe me, the stuff comes out looking so real, you can't spot it except for the paper. Hardly anyone can. These copy machine counterfeit bills amount to half the bogus bills out there-and that's happened in just a few years." "

  I guess that must be why every supermarket around now has one of those stubby black pens that they use to see if bills are real or not," I said.

  "You bet," Scotty agreed. "They use that little black pen on all the fifties and hundreds they get. If where they touch the bill turns yellow, it's okay. If it turns brown, it's suspect and they'll investigate more. If it turns black, it's definitely counterfeit, and they get to arrest the shopper and put the groceries back on the shelf. "

  "What if the shopper got it from someone else?"

  "You know what I mean. They get to take him in custody and grill him until they find out where the bill came from. But it's gotten that common even in grocery stores that they have a protocol to handle it. Now imagine the consequences if a lot more of this stuff got into circulation. Things are bad enough in today's world economy, but dumping a lot of counterfeit bills into it would inflate the money supply and there'd be a train wreck in the global economy. Believe me, we'd be plunged into a depression like we've never seen.

  "What do you have to do with all this? Are you sure you're not CIA?"

  "I've been working on a computer system to get the bogus currency out of circulation. It's based on the intelligence technology used by the military."

  I didn't relax hearing that. Military Intelligence is little better than the CIA, but I smiled and said, "Computers Save the World, huh?"

  "Why not? I got involved when the Pentagon had crates of satellite and aircraft intelligence photos piling up because the experts couldn't analyze them fast enough."

  My headache was gone again, but my head was whirling. "All right, if you aren't CIA, are you FBI or IRS or something like that?"

  "DD, I'm a computer hacker. True, I'm the best, but nothing more. Now, want to hear the rest of the story? Or we could go back to bed."

  "Okay, let's get back under the covers. After all, isn't that what operatives do best? But no fooling around till you tell me everything."

  We evicted the cat from the warm spot. Snuggling close under the covers, I tried hard to concentrate on what Scotty was telling me.

  "What we needed was a way to quickly figure out precisely what was happening on the surveillance photos so if necessary immediate countermeasures could be taken," he explained as his fingers began to explore and our legs entwined. "That's why surveillance photos were so important."

  "Scotty, you promised we weren't going to fool around until you told me all about this."

  "Want me to stop?"

  "No, but..."

  "How about if I just do this ... real slow?"

  I slapped his roving hand but moaned with pleasure at the same time.

  "Where was I?"

  "Surveillance"

  "Right. We developed a scanning and analyzing system, both the hardware and software, to extract all the meaningful information from those bales of photos. HI-Data was a part of the project"

  "Oh?"

  "They were responsible for a lot of the digitized high-speed scanning technology. Suddenly we were in real-time analysis of what was happening, and that's why we were able to kick butt in Iraq and invade Baghdad so quickly."

  "What does all this have to do with counterfeiting? I don't get it."

  "You're going to in a minute," he laughed and kissed me.

  "Scotty ..."

  "The problem is you're irresistible. Okay, okay. The point is that now we're trying to apply the same methods to scanning and analyzing paper currency. My job has been adapting this system to spot bogus money when it comes to the central bank so we can get it out of circulation."

  "So that's what you've been doing."

  He gently kissed and caressed the lowest curve of my stomach. I wanted more, but I knew I needed to understand what he was telling me. "You promised."

  He sighed. "Getting back to the money, my dear, if we must, you see, scanning converts the signal, the light signal, off the dollar bill into digits. It digitizes it. We take this composite signal with all the little flaws there may be within the dollar bill and idealize it down to the perfect dollar bill so we can weed out the fakes"

  "Like Plato's ideal," I said, realizing how Joe Tanaka's technique to clean up distortions in the digital signal might well apply here.

  "This technology was developed from spy satellites. It's the source of the digitized imaging that HI-Data is working with. It's gone way beyond that now. There are improvements I can't talk about that are top secret. The jargon that's grown up around the technology sounds like gibberish to most people."

  He kissed me again.

  "Speaking of top secret," he whispered. This time our bodies strained against each other and desire took over. The cat jumped off the bed as we made love surrounded by visions in my head of hundred dollar bills floating around like green sugar plums.

  FORTY-ONE

  WE LEFT OUR WARM bed at 3:45 a.m., an action never taken of one's own free will. After a quick shower, we pulled on heavy clothes and went out to the car. As to which of us was more cold and tired-me, Scotty, or the Miata-it was a toss-up.

  "You never explained what the spare tire is doing on the right front wheel," Scotty said as I unlocked the car.

  I finally told him what had happened to the new Michelin tire he'd given me for Christmas. I also told him what Dieter and I suspected.

  "Now I'm worried," he said. He grabbed the flashlight from the glove compartment, got under the car and then checked under the hood and in the trunk. Satisfied, he tossed his suitcase behind the front seat, and we finally got in.

  In spite of the frigid temperature, the Miata started without so much as a cough. Traffic was almost nonexistent except for
the drunks, so we sped down the Kennedy Expressway to O'Hare.

  As we turned onto the airport exit ramp, I began to tell Scotty my suspicions about Ken and Frank, but he was intent on having me meet with his top-level contact Harry Marley at the Secret Service Forensics Lab. He said last night that he'd been working on a computer system based on military intelligence technology to get bogus currency out of circulation. I couldn't get over the fact that he apparently had top-level government connections. I wasn't sure I liked that.

  "DD, are you listening to me?" he asked. "I'm convinced the counterfeiting is connected to HI-Data, and I insist you get help." "

  I wasn't eager to comply. I had no desire to be in contact with the Secret Service and maybe the IRS or ATF, all CIA surrogates. If the hundred dollar bills were counterfeit, I was sure I'd be the one the government would target when they saw them.

  I want to ask you a question about Frank," I said.

  "Don't change the subject, DD. By the way, now that we know each other a lot better, when are you going to tell me what the DD stands for?"

  "It stands for DD. And I do have some important things I want to go over with you."

  Scotty frowned. "I'll be in England, worried sick about you. I know you can take care of yourself. But this is urgent. Promise me you'll see Harry today."

  "Scotty, even if he agrees I didn't have any part in the counterfeiting, I won't understand a thing he tells me without you to interpret. He'll just punch my name into the Big Computer as a suspect."

  "What Big Computer?"

  "You know, the Central Storage Computer or whatever it's called. Everybody knows the feds have one that continually up dates your permanent record. What if he gets something on me? I'm the one who should be doing the investigating, not the other way around."

  "DD, Harry's my friend. You'll like him, I promise. He won't think you're stupid. This technical stuff changes daily. Nobody understands it all unless they work with it every day. Even Harry has to be continuously briefed. He's not, as you delicately phrase it, a'tech- no-poop' either. So don't worry. He's not going to arrest you. Why not talk to your friend Tom about counterfeiting? He seems to know a lot of things, and I'm sure he'll advise you to see Harry, too. Now promise, or I'll stay here until you do. Wait... that's not a good threat."