Phoenix Rising

by Nance, John J. ;

  The managing director would see to everything else.

  Friday, March 24, 9:50 A.M.

  Hong Kong

  As far as Elizabeth could tell from outward appearances, there was nothing unusual about the International Trading Bank of Hong Kong. It was simply a small commercial bank mostly focused on international finance. But a bank, she reminded herself, somehow associated with Irwin Fairchild.

  The assistant manager of international banking greeted her warmly when she walked into his office unannounced and asked to see the operation.

  The need to see the place in person was strong, even though she knew it would tell her little about the motives behind the sudden offer. Elizabeth had pulled her hair back, worn dark glasses, and presented herself as Ann Murphy, a wealthy widow from Atlanta with money to invest and the need for a correspondent bank in Hong Kong.

  As she expected, a low-level administrative assistant was assigned to show her around. It took only a few dozen technical questions about the bank’s computer banking system to bore the man beyond tolerance, causing him to pair her off with one of the bank’s computer programmers as he fled to “other duties.”

  Elizabeth found herself enjoying the company of the programmer—a young Hong Kong woman who seldom got to meet the bank’s customers in person. They sat side by side before a computer terminal in the woman’s small office as she explained how the system could be used by a customer with a home computer as easily as a bank officer could access all the files from halfway around the world.

  “So,” Elizabeth asked, “I could call from Atlanta using my computer, and move my money around, right?”

  “Yes,” the woman agreed with a broad smile, “from anywhere in the world. It’s a simple menu-driven program, even for our internal usage. With the proper passwords, our officers can get to anything they could access here in the building.”

  The technician’s fingers flew over the keyboard, and instantly a page of entry codes and passwords appeared next to a list of employee names.

  She pointed to the screen and turned to Elizabeth. “My department is the only one that can open these security files, of course. But everything else is safely available on line because we use a three-tiered entry-code sequence that’s impossible to break.”

  She deleted the security-code display as she reached for a ringing telephone, and then excused herself for a minute, leaving Elizabeth alone with the computer terminal.

  Elizabeth had quickly memorized the keystrokes the programmer had used to open the security file. She reached up now to the keyboard. The possibility of searching ITB’s files from a distance with her laptop computer and a telephone hookup was too enticing an opportunity to pass up.

  She scanned the doorway, listening for footsteps. There were none.

  Elizabeth repeated the keystrokes, delighted that after a brief pause the entire list of internal security access codes and passwords reappeared.

  She looked at the empty doorway again across the desk, listening to the small noises from the hallway with the care of a cat calculating the moment to pounce—her left index finger positioned above the Delete key in case she had to go back to a blank screen and look innocent.

  But for the moment the hallway was empty of all but the distant sound of rock music.

  With her right hand, Elizabeth took a pad of yellow Post-it notes from the woman’s desk and rested it on her knee, using a pen to scribble down the code and password sequences for two of the names listed. She was on the third group when the sound of footsteps reached her ear.

  Suddenly the technician was back in the doorway, smiling at her guest as she moved back into the office, unaware that the internal security codes were showing on her screen.

  Elizabeth froze, afraid to push the Delete key for fear the noise would reach the woman’s experienced ears. Her right hand held the pen and notepad on her knee, all in plain view if the woman came back around to her chair—which was where she was headed!

  Elizabeth stood up abruptly, keeping the pad and pen out of sight behind the desk as she gestured down the hallway.

  “A young man came in here just a minute ago looking for you,” she fibbed.

  The programmer looked confused and came to a halt.

  “A tall man? Balding and tall?” she asked Elizabeth.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh! Excuse me a minute.” She was beaming from ear to ear, her face turning beet red as she gestured shyly behind her. “That’s my, ah …”

  “Boyfriend?” Elizabeth offered with a sly grin.

  The woman nodded and laughed self-consciously as she stepped from the room.

  The second the footsteps had faded down the hall, Elizabeth finished copying the last few digits and hit the Delete key as she slipped the pad and pen in her purse. She had adopted a slightly bored expression by the time the woman returned.

  “So, was he the guy looking for you?” Elizabeth asked her, smiling.

  “I know he was, but he wouldn’t admit it. He’s shy.”

  Elizabeth excused herself politely after another half hour with the programmer, and returned to the hotel room at last to connect her laptop computer to the phone line.

  Her entry to ITB’s main computer was almost instantaneous. As the programmer had said, everything was done with easily understood menus.

  For a half hour she navigated around the different files, slowly figuring out the organization plan—thankful that the English language was the bank’s official tongue. She downloaded several telephone lists to her hard disk before finding the one listing that promised to hold the names and stock-ownership interests of the officers. With two short commands on her keyboard, the file poured through the phone line and into her computer’s memory. She paused to open it and take a peek.

  The short list of names of the principal stockholders was arranged alphabetically. Elizabeth stared at it in disbelief.

  Irwin Fairchild’s name was not there, but another name was: Nicolas Costas.

  Elizabeth felt a bit lightheaded. Nick Costas, the American-born son of a wealthy Greek shipping magnate, was the most hated man in American aviation—a two-legged scourge whose mere name could incite a riot among the employees of any U.S.-based carrier. She knew his face from newspaper and magazine photos. Short and stocky with silver hair and the incongruous look of a loving grandfather, Costas was hated and reviled in airline circles. For years he had been a respected legend on Wall Street for his devastatingly successful attacks on organized airline labor. Brilliant, heartless, and determined, even she had once defended him during a heated dinner-party discussion, describing his amazing ability to pull massive amounts of financing from thin air to build an empire.

  That empire had crumbled by 1990. The memory of her defense was now an embarrassment.

  Nick Costas owned over eighty-five percent of ITB! Which meant that Nick Costas had to be behind any loan offer from the bank.

  The image of Irwin Fairchild popped into her head.

  “Where Nick Costas slithers, Irwin can’t be far behind,” Elizabeth muttered to herself, sending another fusillade of keystrokes into the telephone line as she probed deeper into the stockholder lists.

  But Fairchild was not listed, nor was the name of his company.

  Elizabeth sat back for a second, trying to figure out what Costas’s ownership meant. Could ITB’s sudden interest in offering money to Pan Am be an innocent commercial transaction? Or was Costas himself trying something? There was a resonance to the idea that Nick Costas could be trying to manipulate them, but how and why?

  Her curiosity surged to new heights, propelled by the feeling that there was information in the bank’s computer that could be invaluable to Pan Am. It was an unfocused gut feeling, almost a premonition, but it drove her as she hunched her shoulders over the small laptop and began typing.

  She reentered the main account listings, using the bank’s internal search routines to look for any occurrence of the last name Costas.

  There were
dozens of Costas accounts: checking accounts, investment accounts, savings accounts, transfer accounts, and more. As rapidly as she found them, she copied the files to her hard disk without examining them, then went back in search of more until the Costas name was exhausted.

  The menu prompt returned again.

  ENTER SEARCH NAME:

  On a hunch, she typed the name FAIRCHILD and hit Enter.

  That’ll be a waste of time, she chided herself.

  The word WORKING appeared again.

  Suddenly, listings for two checking accounts under the name of “Fairchild, Irwin B., New York, New York, USA” appeared on the screen.

  A cold feeling began creeping up her back as she stared at the listings. She gave the command to copy the files to her disk.

  But if she had uncovered a rat’s nest, what other parts of it should she document?

  Creighton MacRae believed some huge European company was behind the sabotage effort—a company big enough to try to corner the North American market. She tried searches for various corporate customers of the bank then, looking for companies headquartered in various European cities, and pulling in long lists of corporate clients in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Brussels, Rome, Madrid, Copenhagen, and Amsterdam.

  She had finished the latest file transfer when the screen to her computer suddenly changed, and a new message generated from the ITB computer took over:

  YOU HAVE EXCEEDED ENTRY TIME OR DOWNLOAD ALLOWANCE—ENTER APPROPRIATE EXTEND CODE.

  Elizabeth stared at the message for less than a heartbeat before recognizing what was about to happen. The bank’s computer had probably been programmed to embed a security destruct program whenever data was downloaded to a distant computer. It had been triggered now. If she broke the phone connection without the host computer sending the right sequence of machine language to disarm the program, it would work like a virus and destroy her data.

  But if she couldn’t figure out the right code sequence to cancel the program, the only hope was to locate that particular security program on her disk and kill it before it activated.

  Heart pounding, she triggered a pop-up window and guided her computer to display a directory listing which she searched as fast as possible, looking for the one file with a name she didn’t recognize.

  There was nothing she could identify.

  She returned to the main screen as the message changed:

  ENTER EXTEND CODE WITHIN THIRTY SECONDS.

  She could snap off her computer and the data would be saved, but when she started it up again, the program would be triggered and every scrap of data would be lost. It could take a computer technician weeks to decipher everything on the hard disk manually.

  The codes!

  She had placed the piece of paper with the purloined entry codes next to the computer. Now she pulled it to her, remembering a strange reference on the bottom of the security screen that had said something about inverting the codes.

  She had entered 3376 for the last of the three required code sequences. She had less than fifteen seconds now. Would it be the first string or the second or third that she should invert? What had it said?

  Ten seconds left, she calculated.

  Go with instinct! she told herself. The third sequence felt right.

  Elizabeth typed in 6733 and hit Enter, expecting the worst.

  The screen went blank and her heart sank. Then her own hard disk revved up again, indicating that something was happening.

  Suddenly the normal prompt was back!

  She paged carefully through the files and the data, finding it all there. She quickly ended the session, commanding a disconnect—relieved to be finished.

  ITB’s computer shot back a parting message:

  THANK YOU MR. LEE. YOU WERE CONNECTED FOR 58:04 MINUTES, AND YOU WERE CALLING FROM 521-3838.

  Elizabeth stared at the screen for a few seconds before understanding its meaning. She grabbed a book of matches and checked the hotel telephone number against the number on the computer screen.

  They were the same!

  Elizabeth felt her stomach tighten and her throat go dry.

  The computer thought it had been dealing with Mr. Chong Lee, an ITB loan officer. But it had the number of the hotel she was in. The computer programmer would surely remember her visit, though she’d used the name Ann Murphy to cover her tracks.

  But even if someone found out immediately that Chong Lee wasn’t calling from the Conrad Hotel, she told herself, they wouldn’t be able to pinpoint her.

  Elizabeth removed the phone cord from the computer and began looking through the downloaded files—relieved that she was dealing with only her computer now.

  The Fairchild accounts appeared on screen with all the details of deposits and checks over the past year. She paged through the listings, quickly learning where to look for the dates and amounts of checks, and noticed that a flurry of activity had occurred in early March. There was one very large deposit for two hundred thousand dollars on March 10. Interestingly, a check for the same amount had cleared on March 13.

  The computer listed the payee of the check as Fairchild himself.

  Where was I on March thirteenth?

  She had arrived in New York looking for an eighty-five-million-dollar loan the day before, on March 12! The coincidence was titillating.

  Each check and each deposit had a corresponding tracking number. On a whim, she switched to the long list of Costas’s checking accounts and tried a universal search for the tracking number of the two-hundred-thousand-dollar deposit to Fairchild’s account, fully expecting nothing to match.

  The computer chattered away quietly to itself for nearly a half minute as it compared the number she had entered against every other string of numbers in the subdirectory, then stopped.

  The listing for a particular check appeared on the screen, a debit on one of Nick Costas’s checking accounts at ITB for exactly two hundred thousand-dollars. It had been deposited directly into Irwin Fairchild’s checking account!

  There was no doubt. The tracking numbers were identical.

  Elizabeth got up and paced around the plush hotel room for a few minutes. Beyond the plate-glass windows, Hong Kong harbor bustled in the distance. Junks and smaller watercraft skittered like waterbugs among the ocean liners and freighters against the background of blue skies and distant hills, but Elizabeth was focused instead on the realization that Nick Costas himself had made at least one large payment to a man she had caught interfering with a pending Pan Am loan.

  She fairly lunged for the telephone. It was 2:00 P.M. in Hong Kong and midnight back in New York where Creighton MacRae was staying.

  He answered on the first ring, and she let the story of ITB’s loan offer and Nick Costas’s ownership of the bank tumble out. MacRae said nothing until she was through.

  “Elizabeth, Jack and I were successful in tracking computer transfers from your debtholders and the lessors of your fleet.” She could hear his hand rubbing his head and eyes and brushing the phone in the process. “We spent two days risking prison to run computer searches on perhaps millions of transactions, but we distilled a major provable pattern of offshore monetary transfers. We also tracked telex records and telephone and computer hookup pathways to the same place. None of it would make any sense if you weren’t being buggered.”

  “I didn’t follow all of that, Creighton. You found offshore money transfers to our lenders?”

  “Hear me out. During the last year, each time the debtholders made large advances to Pan Am under the revolving credit agreement, those very same sums of money were imported from a single offshore bank.”

  “What?”

  “That’s right. Your debtholders aren’t really your debtholders. They’re nothing but a conduit for someone else who’s providing the money, but without any security. Sound a bit fishy, that?”

  “Good Lord!”

  “You are sitting, aren’t you?”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a bank right t
here in Hong Kong.”

  He let her make the connection.

  “ITB?” she asked at last.

  “The same.”

  She told him then of her raid on ITB’s computer, impressed that he remained silent until she was through.

  Creighton’s voice was in her ear again, carrying a new and urgent tone. “Elizabeth, get the hell out of there. Now! Come back to New York, and I’ll help you take this to a judge.”

  “I need to check with Jason Ing first, because—”

  He cut her off.

  “I’ve been talking to Jason this morning because I didn’t know what the hell you were up to, and of course he didn’t know either. He’s supposed to contact you. He thinks he can get the money in time, and get you past the U.S. government restrictions. But you can’t wait. You’ve got to get out of there now!

  “I don’t understand.” Elizabeth felt the chill hit her spine again.

  “These people are powerful and ruthless, Elizabeth. They can have you arrested for breaking into their system. You’ve stumbled into the middle of a snake pit, so get out of there! Right now! Call me from an airplane headed back to the States. I know I’ll feel better when you’re airborne!”

  He said goodbye and they disconnected. The phone had been back on the cradle less than thirty seconds when it rang again. She picked it up, fully expecting to hear Creighton’s voice once more. Instead, a high-pitched computer tone warbled in her ear, probing for a silicon-based mate to warble back.

  She hung up, slightly annoyed, and dismissed it as a wrong number.

  But the phone rang again within thirty seconds. Once more the computer tone warbled in her ear—triggering a chilling recognition: the ITB computer had found her room number and was trying to reestablish the link!

  Elizabeth dropped the receiver back on the cradle and backed away, as if it had suddenly become a poisonous snake.

  It rang again and she jumped, her heart racing. She then let it ring continuously as she turned to the closet and began flinging her things into a bag.

  Wait! Leave something in the closet and on the bed, she cautioned herself. Don’t let them think you’re checking out!