Nele Neuhaus - Swimming with Sharks

“Yes, hello?” Alex heard a sleepy voice. She felt her heart start pounding, and she hesitated.

“Hello? Who is this?”

“Nick, it’s me. Alex,” she said. “I’m sorry if I woke you up.”

“Alex!” Nick sounded wide awake at once. “Don’t worry about it! How are you?”

“Good, thank you. Did Justin give you the e-mails?”

“Yes, he did.”

Nick told her about his meeting with Engels and Jenkins and that all of the men who were questioned about the corruption allegations had confessed to their crimes.

“The murder charges against you have been dropped unofficially,” he said, “and things are moving. The US Attorney’s Office is working at full speed.”

“That’s a start.”

“Tate Jenkins urgently asks you to come back to New York. The FBI will protect you.”

“That’s hardly reassuring,” countered Alex. “Just think about David Zuckerman.”

She lay on the bed and stared at her hotel room ceiling. How would it feel to be frightened and in hiding for an entire lifetime? The thought of a life on the run sobered her. This wasn’t an exhilarating game or an exciting movie with a happy ending—her situation was deadly serious. Her euphoria suddenly vanished, and the champagne tasted flat.

“Justin Savier is very worried about you,” Nick said, although he really wanted to tell her that he was the one most worried.

“Tell him that I’m doing well,” Alex replied. “Did Mark Ashton or Oliver Skerritt get in touch with you or Justin?”

“No,” Nick replied, “unfortunately not.”

Alex felt a chill. Mark and Oliver were probably in serious trouble, while she was safe in Switzerland sipping champagne. And although the idea to go into hiding somewhere and never return to New York was appealing, she also knew that she couldn’t turn her back on her friends.

“Alex,” Nick said emphatically, “you’re in great danger. Vitali will try everything to get a hold of you.”

“Are you worried about me?”

“Yes, I am,” Nick replied in a hoarse voice. “Very worried. The fact that you’ve stolen money from Vitali will make him furious. I know what he’s capable of, and I don’t want to see anything happen to you.”

These words affected Alex. She felt that they came from the heart. The mayor of New York, this powerful man, was worried about her! And rightfully so.

“I didn’t steal the money,” she said. “I’ll give it back to him if he leaves me alone. I don’t want to be on the run for the rest of my life. But he can’t forgive me for leaving him and…”

“And what?”

“…and coming to you, of all people.”

There was complete silence again for a moment. His voice felt so close, it was as if he were standing right next to her, without the entire Atlantic Ocean between them.

“You’ve saved my life once,” Nick said softly. “At a time when I was struggling, you bolstered my spirit and helped me move on with my life. I’ll never forget that. Whenever you need help, you can count on me.”

Suddenly, she felt a lump in her throat and tears pushed into her eyes. “I…I’ve got to go now. I’ll get in touch with you again, okay?”

Henry Monaghan was furious that Alex Sontheim had escaped. What’s worse, someone had hacked into LMI’s central computer without his noticing. It undermined his authority as the head of security, and it was his own fault. Of course, no one would ever tell him that to his face. He desperately needed to recover his tarnished self-confidence.

He sat with Phil Fox—his closest staff member—in the basement security control center of the LMI Building trying to figure out who had snooped around in their corporate network. Without a doubt this someone was clever, because nothing had been destroyed. They were dealing with a professional who was already familiar with the system, and that significantly limited the circle of potential suspects. The windowless room, filled with state-of-the-art security technology, was cloudy with Monaghan’s incessant cigar smoke. There were fifteen cigar stubs in the ashtray already when he lit himself another one.

“And?” Fox asked after Monaghan hung up the phone.

He had called the company that had installed the system five years ago, but no one was familiar with the software.

“They think that only someone who programmed the system could hack into it. He said that software manufacturers leave a back door open so that they can enter the system unnoticed at any time.”

“Sure,” Fox said, nodding, “I know that. Where should we start searching?”

“Which operating system are we using?”

“BankManager 5.3 by IBM.”

“Great,” Monaghan said with a frown, chewing on his cigar pensively, “IBM’s a pretty big organization.”

“It is,” replied Fox, “but there couldn’t be too many people who worked on BM 5.3. There are just a handful of programmers at that level.”

Monaghan looked at the IT specialist and then picked up the telephone. After four phone calls, he was speaking with the head of software development at IBM. Monaghan quickly described his problem. However, he carefully kept the reason for his call to himself.

“BankManager 5.3 was developed in-house,” IBM’s head of technology explained, “but the security testing of the program was performed by external specialists.”

“And which specialists did the testing?”

“Usually a team from MIT. However, that was six years ago. It’s likely none of the same people still work there.”

“Right, this seems pretty hopeless to me,” Monaghan replied.

“Massachusetts Institute of Technology,” he said to Fox in a sinister tone. “I bet the little asshole we’re looking for is there somewhere. I’m flying to Boston tomorrow. I’ll find out who’s behind this.”

The young man responsible for Levy & Villiers’s computer system turned to Vincent Levy and Lance Godfrey, director of the branch in Georgetown on Grand Cayman.

“I’m sorry, I can’t access those files at the moment.”

“What do you mean?” Levy asked indignantly. He hadn’t slept well for a number of nights. During the day he was forced to deal with the SEC and the police. In the evenings, his wife was giving him hell. She found it intolerable that LMI had become the subject of negative headlines, and this made his life even more difficult. Levy couldn’t bear her whiny reproaches anymore. To make things worse, he had to fly to the Caymans to have all documents relating to the secret accounts deleted—as if he didn’t already have enough work on his plate.

“Something’s not right here,” the young man said. “It refuses access to certain files and tells me that a fatal exception error occurred. I’ll risk crashing the entire system if I try to fix this.”

He pressed a few buttons, moved the mouse back and forth, and then pointed to the screen with a distressed expression.

“Look, sir. I can open and print these files without a problem, but whenever I try to delete them it says this every time:

“Invalid operation. The file is being closed. ”

The way this man talked about the computer as if it were a human being made Levy nervous. He was also annoyed about how relaxed Godfrey seemed.

“I don’t understand your agitation, Vince,” he said, casually crossing his feet on the desk’s glass tabletop. “There’s no trace leading here. The data is as secure as Fort Knox.”

Levy didn’t respond. He thought it was best to keep Godfrey in the dark. With his athletic, six-foot-four frame, deep tan, and light-colored suit, this man looked more like a nightclub owner than the director of a prestigious private bank. And Levy didn’t appreciate it. Godfrey was clearly a capable man, but a little more professionalism seemed appropriate for a man in his position. But this wasn’t the right time to voice his disapproval.