by Tony Wiley
This had been expected. After all, once Morrison was arrested, the whole operation died right there, no?
Johnson downloaded the details of all these accounts to his laptop. Copied them on a USB key.
Then he continued browsing through the archives.
What about the days that followed Morrison’s arrest? he thought.
He retrieved data for a first batch of accounts and looked at it. Hmm, he thought, that’s strange. He retrieved another batch. Saw something similar to the first batch. Then he retrieved all the remaining information concerning the four hundred accounts and performed a quick analysis.
That’s strange, he thought. Really strange.
He downloaded all the information to his laptop. Made copies on the USB key. When he was sure he had everything he needed, he proceeded to erase every trace of his presence. Disconnected every session he had opened in the First Collins Bank landscape and modified every log.
When he was done, he grabbed his mobile phone and typed a text message for Morrison.
Come here now, man. You’ve got to see this.
Chapter 26
Cowgirl’s room was nicely done.
Almost everything in it was white. But not just plain white. Two or three different shades. Very subtle variations. Very pleasing to the eye. Only the bedside tables offered a flash of discreet color. There were two of them—unmatched—simple low tables made of clear natural wood. The whole setup gave the room a kind of contemporary Scandinavian feel. As far as Morrison could tell, the rest of the house was done in a similar way. But he hadn’t had much time to notice. When he and Cowgirl had gotten there, they had immediately rushed upstairs to the bedroom.
What had happened in that big king size bed had been completely at odds with the calm and subdued atmosphere of the room. The sheets were sweaty and messed up. The bedspread had long fallen to the floor. And the pillows lay scattered all over the place, as if a bomb had exploded at the center of the bed.
Which it kind of had.
Morrison lay on his back, staring vacantly at the ceiling, still panting. Cowgirl was at his side. Lying on her flank, out of breath. Her right leg arched across his body. Morrison gently stroked her thigh. It felt firm and muscular under his hand. Just like the rest of her body.
“God, you’re on fire,” she said.
Morrison smiled. “You’ve done nothing to put it out. Quite the opposite.”
“Damn right,” she said.
Morrison chuckled. “That’s what three years of abstinence will do to you,” he said.
“You didn’t slip while you were in there?” she asked.
Morrison shook his head. “Nope.”
“Not even once?”
“No. That’s not for me. Although plenty of the others did. There’s a code, you know. Like it’s accepted. But it’s not my thing.”
She kissed him on the cheek. Fondled a lock of his hair. “Something tells me it was worth the wait,” she said.
He turned his head toward her and smiled. “Damn right. Like you just said.”
She chuckled. They remained silent for a beat.
Morrison was spent. They had been riding the mattress for a while. Now was the time for a little rest, for a quiet talk and for catching up.
“What have you been doing these last years?” he asked.
She sighed. “I don’t want to make it worse for you, Morrison, but I haven’t done much. I’ve just been enjoying my freedom.”
Like the others, she thanked Morrison for his discretion. If he had ratted her out, she would not have had such a pleasant time. She told him she had spent the majority of her days taking care of her stable. She now had four horses of her own and kept another half dozen in pension, mainly for city slickers who spent their weekends upstate. She also gave riding lessons and competed in the odd event here and there. All in all, she had a nice little business going, centered on the horses she so dearly loved. Not enough to make a good living on, though. For that, she depended on some funds she had amassed in previous successful operations. Some of them with Morrison. But her stable provided her with a nice comfortable front, and she had spent the last three years quietly enjoying it. Away from the life.
“You haven’t worked on a single deal since the bust?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for your release.”
Morrison was taken aback. “Really?”
“Yes. I don’t care too much about the others,” she said. “I didn’t want to get involved in anything else with them.”
“I’m sure they’d be delighted to hear this.”
“But it’s true. Seriously, Morrison. You’re the smartest. By a mile. And since you’re now broke, I knew you’d be eager to get something going. So I was happy to wait.”
“Do you have something in mind?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe something along the lines of our busted operation. Sheriff Sanford only got you by pure dumb luck. There’s still good money to be made that way, right? Don’t tell me you haven’t considered it.”
“You’re right, I have. But have you kept in touch with the others?”
She pulled a face. “Barely. I see Harris every now and then, but it’s more because of his wife. She’s a rider, too. Tommy’s still inside, of course, so I haven’t seen him in a long time. As for Mike, well, I prefer to stay away. He kind of gives me the creeps.”
Morrison frowned. “How come?” he asked.
“I hear all these rumors,” she said. “Apparently, he’s bought all these guns. And recently, he’s started to hire some of the foot soldiers we used. But it has nothing to do with ATMs anymore.”
“So what is he up to?”
“I don’t know. The only thing I know is that he feels he needs guns to pull that off. And we never felt that way in our operations, right?”
“Right,” Morrison said. “Right …” He was about to ask her another question when he heard a muted buzzing sound. His prepaid. It was in his coat pocket somewhere on the floor.
She turned to face him. “You’re not gonna pick that up, are you?”
He moved sideways from under her. She let him go and rolled on her back with a sigh. He got up.
“That’s rude, Morrison. Where are your manners?” she said.
Her half-joking tone couldn’t conceal that there was a layer of truth underneath her comment.
“Sorry,” he said. “I have to take this.”
He bent forward to pick up his jacket and retrieved the mobile phone. He flipped it open. It was a message from Johnson.
Come here now, man. You’ve got to see this.
He folded the phone shut.
“Sorry, I have to go,” he said.
Cowgirl rose on her elbow. “You’re kidding me,” she said.
Morrison started to roam the floor to pick up his clothes.
“It’s business. I really have to go.”
“Are you gonna come back after?”
“Maybe, but I can’t promise.”
He put his underwear back on, and his jeans. Then he sat at the edge of the bed to put on his socks. Cowgirl moved lazily toward him, her naked body luscious and warm. He would’ve loved nothing more than to stay with her, but he couldn’t.
“Where are you sleeping?” she asked.
Knowing her opinion of Mike, Morrison thought it was better not to tell her he was staying over at his place yet. It would open the door to too many questions too soon. He was still trying to find answers to a lot of them himself. So he chose to be elusive.
“I’m crashing at a place a bit out of town,” he said.
She sighed. “Well, it’s too bad, Morrison. I could’ve used a warm body all night.”
Morrison put his shoes back on. He could feel Cowgirl’s breasts pressed against his back.
“We can do this some other time,” he said. Then he grinned and added, “I don’t mind one bit.”
She chuckled and gave him a weak slap on the back. “I bet you d
on’t,” she said.
Morrison got back on his feet, put his shirt on and grabbed his coat. Then he leaned over her and paused to admire her beautiful naked body.
“It was great,” he said, bending to kiss her. “See you, Cowgirl.”
Chapter 27
A car sat in front of the little old lady’s house. A beat-up Chrysler with a missing hubcap on the left rear wheel. A short man with big broad shoulders was walking back toward it swinging an empty pizza delivery bag from Miss Italia. The kind that is insulated to keep the contents warm. Nice touch, thought Morrison. For the night had gotten really cool.
Johnson opened the door for him.
“I hope you’ve got enough for two,” Morrison said. “I’m starving.”
“There’s plenty. Ham and cheese. That work for you?” Johnson said.
“I fed you earlier, you feed me now. We work really well together, don’t you think?”
“Like twins joined at the hip. Hey, why don’t you go grab two beers and join me downstairs?”
“Sure, good idea.”
Morrison walked over to the kitchen and opened the fridge. There wasn’t much in there. A real bachelor’s fridge. It only contained processed packaged food. Nothing fresh. No trace of fruits or vegetables. The healthiest-looking thing in there was the carton of skim milk in the door, but it was surrounded by beer cans and bottles of soft drinks. Morrison grabbed a couple of Genesees and went downstairs.
Johnson had opened the box and was already scarfing down a slice. He looked pale and tired.
“Man, you look like shit,” Morrison said.
Johnson looked up at him and conveniently decided not to mention the strain that the power failure had exercised on him during his hacking binge. He said, “And you just look great, Morrison. What have you been up to while I was busting my balls?”
Morrison refrained from telling him. Instead, he dropped the two beer cans on the table and picked up a slice for himself. “So you found something,” he said. “Let’s hear it.”
Johnson nodded to the computer screens. “Have a look at the left one first,” he said.
And while Morrison shifted his gaze to the glowing screens, Johnson started summing up his findings.
“Those are the records of First Collins Bank,” he said. “For the four hundred accounts that we had prepared. You’ll notice that in the days leading up to and including the day of your arrest, no withdrawal was made from them. I mean, you’ll see some here and there, but they weren’t withdrawals that you had planned to do. Just regular stuff from the account holders.”
Morrison browsed through the screen. What he saw concurred with what Johnson was telling him. OK, that was good. He had expected this.
“Now, have a look at the screen in the middle,” Johnson said. “That’s where it becomes interesting.”
Morrison took a second bite of pizza and shifted his gaze to the screen. He hooked on the first line. Nothing much there. Then the second. Nothing much there either. Then on the third one. Holy shit, he thought. He rushed through the following lines. After a few more, his mouth gaped open.
There was a clear trend. A distinct pattern.
Johnson stared at him. “I know, I had the same reaction myself,” he said. “In the two days that followed your arrest, nothing happened. No withdrawals, no deposits, nothing. But on the third day, you see a whole bunch of transactions happening, all made in the space of a few hours. And when you compare them with the amounts that you had planned to withdraw from every account, you have a perfect match. For a total of two million dollars.”
Morrison was flabbergasted. “Did you know anything about this?” he asked.
“Of course not,” Johnson said.
Morrison believed him. Obviously. If he’d had anything to do with this, his audit would have come up empty-handed. He was a smart guy. He would have fudged the results and presented them in a convincing way to cover himself, hoping that Morrison wouldn’t inquire further. But instead, he showed him, in great detail, all the amounts that were withdrawn from each account. So Johnson couldn’t possibly have anything to do with this himself.
“Had you shared that information with anyone at the time?” Johnson said.
Morrison shook his head. “No. Not at all. None of my partners had any exposure to this. I mean, they don’t even know you exist.”
“Right, and we’re gonna keep it that way.”
“Of course. But what about you? Has anyone else seen this?”
Johnson shook his head. “No, three years ago, I worked on that setup all alone. There was no sidekick. Nobody else saw any of this.”
Morrison cracked open a can of beer and took a long drag. His mind was racing. “Where was the money withdrawn?” he asked.
“Manhattan,” Johnson said. “In a string of ATMs in midtown.”
“And it took whoever did this three hours?”
“That’s right. Just a tad under three hours between the first and last withdrawals, actually.”
Morrison made some mental calculations. Four hundred accounts were targeted. Withdrawing money took maybe two minutes from the moment you slid the debit card into the slot to the moment you received your cash. The average withdrawal was five thousand dollars by account. Since the average ATM carried around one hundred thousand dollars, that corresponded to twenty withdrawals by ATM max. Forty minutes spent at each ATM. If they had all happened in midtown, you could probably add at most another five minutes on average to go from one ATM to the next. They’re pretty close to one another in that part of Manhattan. So that meant withdrawing one hundred thousand dollars would take maybe forty-five minutes. Two million dollars were withdrawn, so that was forty-five minutes times twenty. Nine hundred minutes, or fifteen hours. If the action had taken place in about three hours, that meant there had been a minimum of five foot soldiers involved, but more likely eight or nine. You never wanted anyone to linger too long at any one ATM. Might arouse suspicion. Draw unwanted attention.
Morrison shook his head. That wasn’t an operation you could improvise. Certainly not a spur-of-the-moment thing. “What about the other banks?” he asked.
“Don’t know yet,” Johnson said. “My guy is working on Candela right now. I haven’t heard from him yet.”
“But you can start working on the two others right now, right?”
Johnson rolled his eyes. “Christ, man, give me a break. I’m not charging you enough to rush that much,” he said half-jokingly.
But Morrison took him dead serious. “How much do you want?” he said. “Just tell me, it’s yours. I need all the info on this ASAP.”
Johnson was good. Morrison knew you didn’t argue with good people. You paid them what they wanted. Period. Because they could always go someplace else. And besides, he would just have to tap Mike for more cash anyway.
“Make that another twenty,” Johnson said.
“OK, you got it,” Morrison said. “Do you think your guy will have something tonight?”
“Don’t know. I’ll check on him later.”
“Good. You do just that. And in the meantime, get started on the other banks, all right?”
*
The server room at Candela Bank hummed with quiet efficiency. In there, the temperature was a cool sixty-eight degrees—perfect for the stacks of high-speed computer blades. It enabled them to breathe properly and perform thousands of operations every minute in an orderly and dependable way. Regular banking transactions, like deposits, withdrawals and interest calculations of all kinds. But also security operations. Banks did all sorts of monitoring. Candela Bank was not different.
When a new user session performed a query on a list of four hundred accounts that had been attacked three years before, a piece of software specifically designed for this purpose kicked into gear.
It gathered the list of accounts that had just been queried, assembled all their details, added the date and time.
Then it sent an email with an urgent message to Candela Bank
’s head of IT security.
Chapter 28
Morrison headed back to Mike’s compound in the big black Navigator. He drove at a slow and cautious pace. During his visit to Johnson’s little old lady’s house, the weather had started to change. Sudden bursts of wind had made their appearance, along with noticeably warmer, more humid air. A rainstorm in the making, perhaps, with the night sky quickly filling up with static and the promise of a show of thunder and lightning. Or just one of those violent air mass movements that come and go from the south, so typical of late spring. Morrison was driving slowly because the wind was catching on the big surface of the SUV and rocking it in uncomfortable random jerks. This was no time for speeding. But he also took his time because he had to think about what Johnson had just told him.
Someone had withdrawn two million dollars from First Collins Bank three days after his arrest. Morrison looked at the clock on the dashboard. It was 11:30 p.m. A smirk appeared on his face. Three years ago, he had been arrested at roughly the same time. Only a couple of miles away from where he was now, on top of that.
Now, he was wondering. What exactly had his partners been doing during these three days? The official version was that they had all laid low. They had severed every tie that could have linked them to the failed deal, then went about their business as if nothing had happened. Avoided arousing any form of suspicion.
But now Morrison knew that at least one of them was lying.
Those two million dollars hadn’t vanished from First Collins Bank’s coffers by themselves. Somebody had had to make all the preparations and then pull the trigger. What puzzled him was that nobody except himself had possessed the necessary information to tap all these accounts. It had been his responsibility to put that in place. None of his partners had any data on First Collins Bank. Morrison was due to share the detailed data with them the night of his arrest, and in turn they would’ve had twenty-four hours to put the plan into action and withdraw the money. The same as they’d just successfully done for Chelfington Bank the night before. The overall plan had been to hit five banks in five days. Only problem was, the plan had been halted after day one.