The Zero Hour

“What the hell else do you want?” Sarah finally burst out. “You want a ticking bomb? You want the whole building brought down? You want a signed statement from the terrorists notarized by a notary public-‘Oh, and make sure that little seal-punch thing hasn’t expired’?”

Rosabeth Chapman shouted back: “You want to send a bomb squad around to search our headquarters and all the branches, is that it? You want to announce publicly that someday soon, we don’t know when, Manhattan Bank is going to be struck by a terrorist? Do you have any idea what that will do to the bank’s business?”

“All right,” Sarah said. “Let’s agree on this much. You’ll send plainclothes teams around to inspect for bombs on a regular basis. The public won’t have a clue. You beef up your security here and at all branches. Make sure Elkind’s personal security is doubled or tripled. And for Christ’s sake, change the bank’s access codes immediately. Will you at least do that much?”

Rosabeth Chapman glowered. After a long pause, she said primly, “Yes. That much we can do.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

Ken Alton emptied his Diet Pepsi and slammed it down on his desk with a hollow aluminum thock. “Hot damn,” he said. “So Elkind talked. Let’s hear it for compromising situations.”

“Let’s not dwell on that,” Sarah said queasily, pulling up a chair next to his desk. She looked around at the wall of blue computer screens and keyboards and CPUs and cables that surrounded him. “I’d rather not think about it. He says the disk had an entire year’s worth of computer passwords on it, a different one for each day. He said someone who had access to it could conceivably steal billions of dollars from the bank. This sound right to you?”

“Shit, yeah.”

“How?”

Ken sighed the sigh of the expert who dreads the ordeal of having to explain in layman’s language. “All right. Cash-good old-fashioned cash, the stuff we use to buy a cup of coffee or tip the waiter, that funny paper-that’s disappearing, okay? Fast becoming history. Today, five out of every six dollars in the economy isn’t cash but-vapor. Streams of zeroes and ones zipping around through cyberspace. A trillion dollars a day now ricochet around the world by computer. A trillion-can you get your mind around that?”

Sarah shook her head slowly, lost in thought.

“I mean, okay, you can argue that cash is an abstract concept, right? It’s just a colored piece of paper printed up in some government printing press somewhere. Checks, too-what are they but fancy IOU notes? Okay, but the really big sums of money-the really cosmically huge amounts-they always move by computer. In the old days, when a bank wanted to send a million bucks, they sent a messenger out with a piece of paper, a cashier’s check. Now it’s almost always done by wire transfer-electronic funds transfer, to use the proper name. Man, I remember when the Bank of New York had some sort of software glitch, back in ’85, and the Federal Reserve had to lend them twenty-three billion dollars overnight to bail them out.”

“But what about theft?”

“Right, I was getting to that. This whole system makes it so goddam easy. Only shmucks go into banks with guns and ski masks on and try to steal the, what, maybe ten thousand bucks the average bank has on hand. That’s pathetic. In 1988, some people in Chicago almost got away with stealing seventy million dollars from a bank, using electronic funds transfer.”

“But they didn’t get away with it.”

“Yeah, but they were morons. Thing is, you rarely hear about the successful heists, because the banks don’t want people to know how vulnerable they are. But around 1982 or 1983, this guy went into a bank in the U.S., I forget where, and did a little ‘social engineering’-”

“Meaning?”

“Oh, that’s computer hacker talk for using people to help you pull off some computer caper. The guy pretended to be from the Federal Reserve Bank doing something security-related, and he managed to transfer ten point two million dollars to an account in Switzerland, where he converted it to diamonds-and got away with it.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yeah. And then there was this case in 1989, when a con man from Malaysia co-opted two employees of the Swiss Bank Corporation in Zurich in a huge scam, where they wired twenty million dollars to the New York branch of an Australian bank. The order was forged, but no one knew that. So the twenty million was zapped over to Australia, where it was drawn down quickly to a bunch of different accounts, and it just disappeared into the ether, leaving no trace. By the time Swiss Bank Corporation discovered what had happened, the money was pretty much all gone.”

“So if someone had the computer passwords-?”

“Are you kidding, Sarah? Christ, someone clever could steal all of a bank’s money, make it go belly up inside of a day. I think I should take a look at the Manhattan Bank’s computers, don’t you?”

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO