A Calculated Risk

by Katherine Neville

  “Anything to pick up?” she asked.

  Susan collected the packets of wire transfer slips, sealed and stamped the envelopes, and brought them to the door.

  “Not many,” she apologized. “It’s hard getting folks in after Christmas.”

  “Yeah,” the messenger agreed. “We have to work, but the supervisors can’t get out of the sack.”

  She signed for the envelopes, tossed them in her basket, and pushed the cart to the elevator bays.

  In cash clearings, Johnny Hanks, the debit clerk, slashed open the envelopes containing the ten o’clock wire transfers. It took less than half an hour to post all the debits and credits on his proof-and-posting machine. He wore earphones connected to the Sony Walkman strapped at his waist, listening to Guns ’N Roses to shut out the noise of the heavy machine with its rows of stacker pockets.

  He cleared the wire transfers from the pocket and slapped on a batch-total header, winding a rubber band around the stack. Then he dropped it into a nearby pickup cart.

  Those girls up in the wire room must still be asleep, he thought to himself. They should clear more in the first batch this morning than any other day of the year—but the total batch came in under $3 million, and a lot of the transfers seemed really small.

  Shit, he thought, swaying to the rhythm of heavy metal, we have to come in at the crack of dawn and plug our ears against all this racket. While the wire operators sit at quiet keyboards, filing their nails and gossiping. It really pissed him off.

  Deep within the bowels of an unmarked building on Market Street was a bombproof, fireproof, security-sealed, four-acre vault, packed wall to wall with millions of dollars of gleaming hardware and equipment. The sign on the door read WORLDWIDE ITEM PROCESSING. It was here that all the bank’s cash clearings took place.

  At three P.M. each day, when the branches closed, this floor would leap to life. By midnight the night of December 28, it was a madhouse of activity—a wild underground sea of churning bodies and flying paper—racing against the legal deadline that declared banks must post all transactions before they could open the next day at nine A.M..

  Worldwide Item Processing never went down. No mistake, breakdown, fire, storm, or earthquake could be permitted to halt or even delay production. There were safeguards and ancillary systems and backup power supplies and—should anyone forget the well-rehearsed emergency priorities—there was a huge sign on the far wall that read THE PAPER COMES FIRST! After all—paper meant money.

  At ten minutes past midnight, a batch header came through the massive sorter/collator, followed by a debit-and-credit ticket that posted the wire transfer received that morning from National Commercial Bank in Saudi Arabia. This wire had been reviewed and approved in at least four locations throughout the bank before arriving here.

  The tickets fed into a reader and the wire information was written onto magnetic tape. When the tape was full, an operator pulled it off the drive, slapped on a sticky label, and placed it on a rack. A few minutes later, the dispatcher came along and picked it up in his cart.

  “How much longer for this run?” the dispatcher asked the operator.

  “A few more tapes. Fifteen, maybe twenty minutes,” he was told.

  The dispatcher, with his cart of wire transfer tapes, took the elevator to the next floor up, where men were stacking boxes of tapes and disks against the wall. Truckers, down by the steel doors at the far end, were checking boxes against their bills of lading, then wheeling them out, stacked four deep, on dollies, to be loaded on the truck.

  “If you guys hold on,” the dispatcher called up the ramp to them, “you can get the last of the debit/credit run before you split.”

  The truckers nodded, and went outside for a smoke while they waited.

  At one A.M., far across town, the dock clerk who’d unloaded the truck was buzzed into the Bank of the World data center. He shoved his dolly stacked with boxes up the loading ramp; a security guard checked the delivery ticket on top of the box and motioned the dock clerk to the window. The clerk unloaded the boxes and waited as the tape librarian behind the window prepared a receipt.

  “Christ,” said the librarian, “it’s about time—we been waiting hours for these.”

  He picked up a microphone, which broadcast his voice across the vast floor of the machine room inside.

  “Set up for cash clearings. Thirty-seven files—should take all night, boys!”

  A moan went up across the floor of the machine room, and a few seconds later the librarian’s phone buzzed at the window—just as he’d finished writing up the receipt and handed it to the dock clerk. It was Martinelli—the graveyard-shift supervisor.

  “Tell that asshole from the dock to try to impress upon his drivers they should not pause for coffee when they’ve got twelve hours of stuff in their truck and we’ve got six hours to run it in.”

  The phone crashed down in the librarian’s ear, and he smiled wryly at the dock clerk. “I guess you heard that as well as I did,” he told him. Then he put the boxes on the flat cart and wheeled them into the center.

  TUESDAY, DECEMBER 29

  At nine A.M., a blond, shaggy-haired young programmer sat before a terminal at the data center. The floor was nearly deserted, and the few people arriving and removing their coats seemed not to notice him as he powered up and logged on to the machine.

  He pulled a crumpled list from his pocket, and checking the numbers, he keyed into the private customer accounts file and reviewed a few account balances. The first was a new account opened under the name of Frederick Fillmore, which displayed an eight-hundred-dollar opening balance.

  Tavish smiled, and reviewed a number of other accounts in quick succession. The thousands of accounts he’d sliced wire transfers into, using the “salami technique,” should add up—for today at least—to over a million dollars.

  It was the morning of December 30 when Said al-Arabi unlocked his telex room at National Commercial Bank in Saudi Arabia. He logged on to the terminal to see whether anything had come in during the night.

  There was a message sitting out there, so he pulled it off on the printer and read it:

  From: Bank of the World, San Francisco, California, USA

  To: Wire Room, Nat’l Commercial Bank, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

  Message: Ref: Your wire to transfer USD dated 12-25-XX. No deposit was made. Stop. Wire was scrambled in transmission. Stop. Please retransmit. Stop. Repeat. No deposit was made. Stop. Could not read wire. Stop. Please retransmit.

  End.

  Said al-Arabi sighed.

  The problem was that the bloody phone lines in Saudi were totally worthless. Half the time, the desert lines were buried in sandstorms. How did they expect the bank to do business all over the world, when they used bloody camel drivers to repair the equipment?

  He went over to the file, unlocked the drawer, and pulled out the transfer he’d done to Bank of the World—a full four days ago now. Then he remembered that the American banks had likely been closed for the Christian holidays. He’d just have to retransmit the thing, and hope there would be no penalties for being late with the mortgage payment.

  He sat down again to send the wire. It was unlikely the money would be posted for another forty-eight hours now, he thought. At nine in the morning, Saudi time, it was seven P.M. yesterday—in San Francisco. The Bank of the World had already been closed four hours.

  THE AUCTION

  Gold is a wonderful thing! Whoever possesses it is master of everything he desires. With gold one can even get souls into heaven.

  —Christopher Columbus

  When I came into the office on Monday morning, Pearl was sitting on my desk with her legs crossed, looking out at the dazzling turquoise bay, the slim, silvery bridge sliding off into the distance.

  “Well, well, well,” she said slyly as I dropped my things and went around the desk to go though the mail. “Ten-thirty’s a bit tardy even for you, isn’t it? You were not at home this weekend—I called.”
/>   “Isn’t that dress a bit low cut—‘even for you’?” I asked. “Or are you trying a new approach to career advancement?”

  “If anyone’s broken new trails this weekend, it seems to be you.” She laughed. “Romance improves the complexion, sweetheart, and you look as though you’ve just had the seven-day makeover at La Costa!”

  “I find this conversation totally inappropriate to the setting in which we find ourselves,” I told her as I slashed open an envelope.

  “I’ll bet. What setting was more appropriate? Satin sheets? Body oils? Hot tubs?”

  “I spent the weekend deep in meditation,” I assured her.

  “Of course he is totally gorgeous,” Pearl ran on. “And here I was, giving you advice about how to while away your hours in New York! But Tavish tells me you did make a trip to the data center the other night when you left us. Those programs were up and running just fine this morning. I suppose you were just too preoccupied to phone and let us know.”

  “Would you like to hear what I really did this weekend?” I asked, going over to shut the door. “You ought to—since the news may affect your entire career.”

  “What career?” Pearl said bitterly. “After your little tête-à-tête with Karp last week, my career has descended into the twilight of the toilet. My darling boss seems to think it’s all wrapped up—that you’ll find me another job on an instant’s notice, and I’ll waltz away from the bank without a blink.”

  “It is, I have, and you will,” I told her, taking a seat across from where she perched on my desk. “It’s no joke, Pearl. Besides, we’re all leaving the bank sooner or later. It’s simply a question of when.”

  “Right. ‘Is there life beyond banking?’ and all that,” she said. “But I’m not quite ready to break camp yet. What are you—my career counselor or something?”

  “I made a deal this weekend—with Tor, as a matter of fact. It turns out his side of the wager is a bit more complex than I thought.”

  “I’ll bet,” said Pearl, smiling slyly.

  “To make it short and sweet,” I cut in, “he has the perfect job for you: something that calls for someone with just your skills.”

  “I’ll show him my skills if he shows me his,” she said with a grin. When she saw I wasn’t biting, she added, “Just what skills did you have in mind?”

  “Two things. The first is foreign exchange. You know as much about that, I believe, as anyone in the business.”

  “And the second?” asked Pearl.

  “Spending money,” I told her.

  It was strange. I’d known Tor for twelve years—known him as well as anyone could know a man like that. But after one weekend together, I realized I didn’t really know him at all.

  Like me, he kept a part of himself secret—contained—veiled from the curiosity of others, just like that womblike office of his so many years ago. What was he hiding? His passion, he’d called it. But I knew by that, that he didn’t mean simply making love.

  Something had changed—not only between us, but within us—in the three days Tor and I spent on that island. It felt as if we’d been whirled together in a cyclotron, rearranging our molecules, so we each contained a share of each other’s being. You didn’t have to get to know someone when you’d already become part of them. But there was this unbearable craving for the other half. Wasn’t that how Plato had defined love? The longing of the soul for its missing part, which it had lost somewhere in the primordial mists of time.

  This feeling made it pretty tough to get back to work.

  I was gazing out at the bay, trying to sort through these strange emotions, when Peter-Paul Karp came strolling into my office.

  “Banks—you’re staring through the window! Has something happened to you?” he said in surprise.

  “Not to me. But something has happened,” I told him, pulling myself together and rearranging the things on my desk. All I needed was to have my mind get mushier than Karp’s.

  “You know that problem of yours we discussed the other day?” I asked. “I think I’ve got the solution.”

  “Not really!” he said, pulling up a chair.

  “I’ve recommended Pearl for the Forex seminar—the Foreign Exchange Traders’ Consortium,” I told him. “It’s held every spring—it goes on for three months. You’d have to give her a leave of absence to attend it, and pay her way.”

  “A leave of absence,” he said. “That means the bank would have to give her a job when she returns—but not necessarily in my department, right?”

  “Right. The symposium begins next Sunday in New York.” I pushed the papers across the desk for him to sign.

  “Banks, I’ll get this paperwork going at once,” he said, scribbling his name across the approval forms. “And my warmest thanks. I think Willingly’s completely wrong in everything he’s said about you.”

  Though I longed to learn exactly what that might be, I bit my tongue. I had more important fish to fry—and Karp was hardly the last one in the pond.

  “I may have another surprise for you,” I told him, “if you can keep it to yourself. I’m nearly through with my project. I could transfer Tavish back to you in a few weeks.” A little more soap, and he’d land right in the tub.

  “But this is more than I’d hoped for.…” Karp began.

  “I owe you,” I assured him. “After all, you gave me that inside information. And with Kiwi trying to steal Tavish from both of us—”

  “What are you talking about?” said Karp, his face darkening.

  “Good heavens—I was sure you knew,” I told him. “Kiwi took Tavish to lunch last week—and said he’d be coming to work for him, not for you.”

  Karp had turned a lovely shade of red.

  “So Willingly’s trying to play both ends against the center,” he hissed. “I really can’t thank you enough for sharing this with me.”

  He was halfway to the door when I added, “You can’t say I didn’t warn you about Kiwi, Peter-Paul. But I do suggest that you let everyone think this assignment for Pearl was your idea. We wouldn’t want it said that we were plotting behind anyone’s back—even if that’s what was done to us.”

  “She’ll be gone by the end of this week,” he assured me, at the door.

  I could see from his stormy expression that the seed of doubt I’d planted would not take much water to flourish into a healthy mistrust of everyone around him—most especially Kiwi. But of course, that suited me just fine.

  I was singing the Valkyries’ battle cry as I went down to the garage that night, where Pearl was to meet me.

  “What the hell does ‘ho-yo-to-ho’ mean?” she asked as she got in the car. “Sounds like some kind of voodoo chant.”

  “A mantra for good luck on your trip,” I told her. “I made a deal with your boss, Karp, this afternoon.”

  “More the fool you,” she said as she got into my car. “That creep’s so two-faced, he could pass for Siamese twins. I should have guessed that something was up—he’s been grinning at me all day. I’d like to wipe that leer off his face with a Brillo pad. Just what kind of deal did you cut?”

  “Financing,” I told her as I pulled up the ramp. “He’s going to foot the bill for your new job. But I think he’ll be surprised to learn that someone else has a tongue as forked as his.”

  “You lied to him?”

  “I’m afraid so. I gave him some authorization forms for the Foreign Exchange Traders’ Consortium. He was so excited to unload you for the next three months, he’d have signed anything. He has just approved spending the bank’s money to send some cocaine dealers on a boondoggle to Hong Kong—at least, that’s what the paperwork says. I thought there should be something interesting in his file—in case he keeps leaning on me as he has been.”

  Pearl put her hand to her mouth and laughed as I came over the rise on California Street and headed for Russian Hill.

  “So if you’re not sending me off to Forex for three months—what are we discussing tonight at dinner?” she as
ked.

  “I wanted to tell you what your new job’s really about,” I said, smiling privately at what Tor and I had worked out. “I think you’re going to like this—staying with some friends of mine in a Park Avenue penthouse.”

  “Gray flannel types—or are you upgrading after all these years?”

  “European nobility—of the slightly French variety. You can speak your native tongue to your heart’s content while you’re learning all about the family business.”

  “Which is?”

  “I understand they attend a lot of auctions,” I told her.

  SUNDAY, JANUARY 10

  At one in the afternoon, a large black limousine pulled out of the underground garage of an apartment house on upper Park Avenue.

  In the backseat were two women, so overdressed and bejeweled they might have been pricey courtesans. They were headed toward the Westerby-Lawne auction galleries on Madison Avenue.

  “So tell me about your daughter, Georgian,” Pearl asked Lelia. “Where is she now?”

  “Ah, Zhorzhione, she is in France. We are making the plans to go to Greece for the printemps—what you call the springtime.”

  “You know, you may speak with me in French if it’s easier for you,” said Pearl.

  “Non, I feel myself more comfortable in the anglais now,” said Leila. “It is the best tongue I am speaking—I am what you say extremely fluid in English.”

  “I see,” said Pearl, who was having trouble making sense of Lelia in any language. “And what’s she doing in France, other than making your travel arrangements?”

  “She visits the banques: the Banque Agricole, the Banque Nationale de Paris, Crédit Lyonnais … she makes the little investments, you see, to prepare for our trip abroad. Tout droit!” Leila tapped on the driver’s shoulder. “Just ahead—it is just over there.”

  “Are we there already? I’m so excited about this,” said Pearl.

  “Moi aussi. It is very long since I am going to the auction galeries.”