Deal Gone Bad - A Thriller (Frank Morrison Thriller Series Book 1) (13 page)

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.

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.

Morrison kept shaking his
head.

If First Collins Bank’s
accounts, the day two target, ended up being tapped anyway, that meant somebody
did get that information after all.

How the hell did this
happen?
he
thought.
And who did it?

Morrison had no clue as to
how that could have happened. It just blew his mind. Right then, he didn’t have
enough information to make any form of educated guess. But as for who had done
it, the list of suspects was rather short.

Apart from him, there had
been four other partners in that deal: Mike, Tommy, Harris and Cowgirl.

Morrison ran them one by
one through his mind. Mike was the one who had forced him to investigate the
failed deal in the first place. Mike had even judged the matter urgent enough
to have two thugs pick him up at gunpoint straight out of prison, at the bus
stop. This would’ve been an unbelievably foolish move by Mike if he’d had
anything to do with the First Collins withdrawals. Like calling the cops to
report himself. You could call Mike a lot of names, but foolish wasn’t one of
them. So it couldn’t be him. By extension, it couldn’t be Tommy either because
he had sided with Mike. If Tommy had had anything to do with First Collins, he
certainly would’ve vetoed Mike’s audit plans. Those two were in regular contact.
Morrison had to assume they were on the same page.

So if it couldn’t be Mike
or Tommy, then that only left Harris and Cowgirl.

Morrison shook his head in
disbelief.

Harris. He had seemed really
happy to see him, genuinely pleased to have a meal and talk shop with him. Of
course, the trucking entrepreneur’s reassurances that he was scaling down his
criminal activities hadn’t impressed him much. After all, Morrison had just
stumbled upon Harris’s basic ATM-skimming deal. And that’s precisely what rattled
Morrison’s cage: Harris’s ATM attack the previous night was so raw and basic.
So unsophisticated. The complete opposite of the First Collins Bank deal. Three
years before, if Harris had managed to pick up where Morrison had left off on
the First Collins deal and grab the two million dollars—out of thin air as far
as he was concerned because he had no idea how anyone was able to pull that off—then
why would he resort to such lowly tactics now? For such a small payoff? It just
didn’t make any sense. But that didn’t exclude him either. People did all sorts
of things for all sorts of reasons.

As for Cowgirl, well, he
didn’t know what to make of her. She had told him she had just enjoyed three
carefree years outside of the business. At the moment, he had believed her. She
had appeared so relaxed. They had spent a couple of hours in bed together. Making
love. Shooting the shit. If she had indeed robbed him blind three years ago, he
couldn’t believe she’d be able to act so innocently.

But three years without
any form of substantial revenue was a long time, especially when you had stables
and a few horses. Those beasts required constant care. House visits by the veterinarian,
wages for the hired hands. The bills piled up quickly. Not even to mention the
rest of her expenses. Earlier, they had each driven from Flanagan’s Bar to
Cowgirl’s place in their own rides: Mike’s Navigator for him and a recent
Mercedes E350 for her. Morrison wasn’t in on her personal finances, but if she
was the one who had pocketed the First Collins Bank millions, then that could
explain her insouciance.

The shrill wail of an
engine being worked really hard interrupted Morrison’s train of thought. It
came from behind in a high-pitched fury. He wanted to crane his neck toward his
door’s side-view mirror to see what it was about, but he didn’t even have the
time to do it. A motorcycle caught up to him and passed in a flash. At a
hundred and twenty miles an hour—at least. A lean, mean, fast-racing machine. Silver
and red. The bike had passed by so fast that even though he knew a thing or two
about them, Morrison couldn’t identify the brand let alone the model. A sudden
jerk of the SUV immediately followed, but Morrison didn’t know if the
motorcycle’s draft was responsible for this or if his vehicle’s movement was down
to another sudden burst of wind.

He shook his head. Crazy
biker. Another young punk with too much testosterone. They were everywhere, especially
during springtime. After a long winter, they got out in droves and used the
roads as a racing track. The newspapers were full of their crashes.

Morrison was about to return
to his musings when a flurry of blue and red lights appeared in his peripheral
vision. He gave a nod to his door’s side-view mirror. The motorcycle was not
alone. A sheriff’s department patrol car was chasing it at full speed,
increasingly filling his mirror. It was going fast but it lacked the zip of the
nimble motorcycle. As it bore down on him, the patrol car switched on its siren.
They were traveling on the two-lane country road south of Acton. Apart from them
and the increasingly small red light of the motorcycle in front, he could see
no other car. Still, Morrison pulled over to the shoulder to give way to the
pursuer.

He gave a nod to the car
as it passed. The sheriff’s deputy was hard at work behind the wheel, all
concentration and intense focus. Morrison didn’t know him. He had never seen
him before. But his fight already seemed lost. The motorcycle was way ahead, a
small red dot now barely visible in the distance. And Morrison suspected it
still had some speed in reserve.

He peered behind him.
Nobody else was coming, so he brought the Navigator back to the center of his
lane and settled on a nice even cruise.

Soon, the patrol car
itself disappeared down a long bend to the right. Morrison was now all alone on
the road.

He stretched and yawned in
his seat. He cupped his right hand over his forehead to massage his temples.
Where was he? Ah yes, the money from First Collins and his dear partners. Who
the hell had put their filthy hands on it? That was the question. The two-million-dollar
question—or more. Because there were other questions to ask. Three more, in
fact. One for each of the three remaining banks. Yeah, those were big questions.
And he hoped that Johnson and his sidekick would soon provide answers for them.

After the long bend, he got
to a straight flat section of the road. Out in the distance, he could see two
sets of blue and red police lights. Two patrol cars, blinking but otherwise immobile.

He squinted.
Oh, shit.
He
knew right there that something terribly wrong had just happened.

As he got closer, he saw that
the cars were at a right angle to one another. The one perpendicular to the
road was missing its left front beam light. Only the right one was piercing the
night. As for the other patrol car, it was immobilized in the middle of the
right lane but at a respectable distance from its sister car. Maybe two cars’
length.

As he drew closer yet to
the scene, he understood why.

It looked like an airplane
crash.

Debris was strewn all over
the place. Upon impact with the patrol car, the motorcycle had disintegrated into
a myriad of small pieces.

The sheriff’s deputy who
had passed him minutes before stood on the pavement. He made big signs to tell
him to slow down and skirt the wreckage on the left.

Morrison complied. While
he did so, he craned his neck to take in the scene, just like every other
rubbernecker in the world.

Silver and red fragments covered
a radius of about fifteen feet in front of the car. None bigger than a pack of
cigarettes. Morrison suspected there was more behind. A whole lot more. The patrol
car itself had sustained a lot of damage. Its left front wheel had caved in
under the force of the collision. The surrounding body panel and the hood had
been ripped as if they were just giant pieces of aluminium foil. From the general
shape of things, Morrison could tell that the motorcycle had veered slightly to
the right before the impact. The rider must have flown far into the ditch,
probably all the way to the stands of maple that began fifty feet away from the
road.

Instant death, certainly. A
massive crash. Like he had rarely seen. If ever.

Inside the patrol car, the
shock must have been horrific. A motorcycle was not heavy. But the force of any
impact was proportional to the square of its speed. When it had zoomed by, that
bike had been north of one hundred twenty miles an hour. No wonder the driver
appeared so stunned.

She was still behind the
wheel. Conscious but in a semicomatose-looking way. She stared at empty space
in front of her.

The last times Morrison
had seen her, she had been the polar opposite.

The previous day in
person. Then earlier that day on the TV. She had been brash, animated and
confident.

But even in her
shell-shocked state, her features remained intact. And easily recognizable.

Those of Acton County Sheriff
Claire Sanford.

*

Being head of IT security
at Candela Bank was a big job. One of the top two or three in the whole
organization. It meant that you worked long, stressful hours at the office. And
that when you finally went home, you were never totally free. It was a 24/7 assignment,
much like that of a priest or a family doctor in a small rural community. Your
mobile phone could always ring. Important emails could always head your way.
And you were expected to deal with them. 24/7. Throughout the whole year. Never
a break in sight. Even during your vacations, you still had that virtual umbilical
cord linking you to the office.

Now, the job paid well. Enough
to pay for a nice house in a quiet leafy suburb, fitted with all the trimmings.
But the head of IT security at Candela Bank never dared to compute all his working
hours. He suspected that if he did, the hourly rate wouldn’t be so impressive. But
still, it was a choice he made and he rather liked the job anyway.

As he did most Friday
nights, he was binging on a couple of movies in a row in his basement home
movie theater. When his mobile buzzed at close to midnight, he wasn’t surprised
one bit, just slightly annoyed that he would have to pause the movie.

The man grabbed his phone
and looked at it. It was an email. An automated heads-up from Candela’s defense
system telling him that somebody had just made queries on some accounts. He
scrolled down the message. His eyes widened.

Those accounts.

The four hundred ones that
had been hit three years before in a sophisticated ATM-skimming operation.

The man stared at the
message. That was a surprise. A real surprise. Ever since the hit, nothing further
had happened concerning these accounts. Nobody had ever even looked at them
again. Because if they had, he would’ve known. He would’ve received a similar
email to the one he was now staring at.

Shit.
The man reflected on this
for a while.

Then he immediately
forwarded the email with instructions to his employees on duty, asking them to
investigate the matter further, to try to establish the possible provenance of
these queries. Always a difficult endeavor. Skilled hackers knew how to cover
their tracks. But you never knew. It could be the work of a less careful or
skilled operative.