Dave Zeltserman - Outsourced

“Never mind, you’re in too big a hurry. What do you have that’s so important for me to look at?”

“Can we go to the back room?” Joel lowered his voice to a whisper. “I’d like a little privacy.”

The old man eyed his nephew suspiciously. “Did you do something to get yourself in trouble?” he asked.

“No, of course not,” Joel muttered, indignant, his voice still barely above a whisper. “I’d just like a little privacy, that’s all, I don’t need everyone in this store gawking at what I want to show you.”

There were only half a dozen other people in the store, none of them paying Joel or his uncle any attention. The old man shrugged and led Joel to the back of the store and into a small room that was only slightly bigger than a closet.

“So what do you have?” his uncle asked, now showing a little curiosity.

Joel took a silk pouch from his pocket and emptied a diamond into his hand. His uncle took the diamond from him, studied it and then looked back at his nephew.

“What are you doing with an uncut diamond?” he asked.

“Let’s just say I found it.”

“Tell me the truth. Did you steal this?”

Joel made a face. “Of course not,” he said. “Come on, Uncle Hymie, just tell me what it’s worth, okay?”

The old man stuck a magnifying glass in his eye and studied the diamond. “This is very good quality.” He popped the glass out of his eye and held the diamond in his open palm. “Two and one quarter carats.” He gave his nephew a long, careful look. “Retail, this would go for twenty-two thousand, wholesale, fourteen thousand. If you were someone off the street, I could probably get you nine for it. You, if I forgo my commission, twelve. Do you want to sell?”

Joel rubbed a hand along his jaw as he did the math in his head and realized that he had over a million dollars in diamonds. “Not right now,” he said. “Maybe in a little while. What if I’m able to get my hands on more diamonds like this?”

“How many more?”

“Fifty, a hundred, I don’t know yet. How many would you be able to buy?”

“Joel, what did you do?”

“Nothing. This is all above board. So tell me, Uncle Hymie, how many diamonds like these would you be able to take off my hands?”

“Everything is so above board that you had to show me this diamond in private, eh?” The old man sighed heavily. “But, I guess if not me, you’ll get yourself in trouble with someone else.”

“Look, Uncle Hymie, I’m not in the mood for a lecture. How many diamonds like these can you buy?”

“Gott im Himmel,” the old man muttered to himself, then to Joel as he smiled wistfully, “Uncut, this quality, as many as you have.”

When Dan was brought into Craig Brown’s office, the bank manager introduced him to Alex Resnick, telling him that Resnick was a Lynn police detective investigating the bank robbery. Dan shook hands with the man and sat down.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Brown was saying, “but the detective is also trying to find out why our security system didn’t work. You won’t mind answering a few of his questions?”

“Of course not,” Dan said. As he smiled at Brown, he thought, You sneaky underhanded little prick, trying to waylay me like this. Goddamn sneaky underhanded bastard.

“Any idea what happened?” Resnick asked.

“Off the top of my head, maybe a couple of ideas.” Dan then turned to Brown. “Have you tested the system since the robbery?”

“Of course. We tested each alarm button. They all worked.”

“How about the system status?”

“What does that tell you?” Resnick asked.

Dan gave the detective a thin smile. “How long the system has been up and running. If the system was turned off before the robbery, we’ll be able to tell that.”

Brown made a show of looking through a stack of papers. “I don’t think I’ve gotten around to checking that yet,” he said.

“We’re wasting our time until we do,” Dan said, trying to keep his tone pleasant, all the while his mind spinning while he tried to figure out how he was going to handle this. He had known he was going to have to talk to the cops at some point, but he hadn’t expected it this quickly.

That little prick, he thought as he followed Brown out of the office. Goddamn underhanded little prick!

For a moment Dan daydreamed that he had pistol-whipped the bank manager when he’d had the opportunity. It had taken quite a bit of self-control on his part to only shove Brown the other day. He didn’t like the man – and this was even before Brown made the decision to farm out the software to India – and he resented the condescending comments Brown made to him afterwards.

“You don’t need this type of work,” Brown had told him. “After all, haven’t you made millions already in high tech? From what I’ve read, anyone who’s any good has.”

And…

“I don’t understand why you would want this – isn’t this only menial work? Anyway, I can’t justify paying you fifty dollars an hour when I can hire four Indian programmers for the same price.”

There were other jabs, many others. All made with a smug little smile.

When they got to the security system, Dan moved Brown aside so he could type in a command at the system’s console. He showed Resnick the response which indicated that the system had been up and running continuously for over thirty-four days.

“Too bad,” Dan told the detective. “This would have made things easy if someone had simply turned the system off before the robbery.”

“Could someone have hacked into it?” Resnick asked.

“Not if the system was built the way I designed it.”

“It was built exactly to your design,” Brown interjected, his tone defensive.

“If that’s true, then the system will only allow outgoing calls. No one can connect into it.”

“I’m not sure I understood something you said. What do you mean if the system was built the way you designed it?” Resnick asked.

“I had nothing to do with the implementation, only the design.” Dan grimaced as he straightened up. “I’m getting too old to crouch like this,” he said. “My knees can’t take it. What do you say we head back to Craig’s office?”

Resnick was frowning. “Anything you can tell by looking at it?”

“No. If it wasn’t turned off, then there are only two possibilities I can think of. Number one, no one pushed the alarm buttons during the robbery-”

“That’s ridiculous,” Brown interrupted. He was trying to appear indignant, but his act fell flat. He knew the FBI agent had suspected that and the accusation weighed heavily on him. As hard as he tried, he couldn’t muster up any genuine indignation.

“Well then, the only other explanation I can think of is that a backdoor was put into the software.”

“What do you mean by a backdoor?” Resnick asked.

“One or more of the programmers built in a way to make the system fail-”

“That’s preposterous!”

Dan turned to Brown, his affable grin hardening. “No, it isn’t. What’s preposterous is you having some firm halfway around the world building critical security software for you because they’re the cheapest ones you could find.”

“There was nothing wrong with what we did,” Brown insisted. He cleared his throat. “Would you be able to examine the software and figure out why it failed?”

“Sure, I could do that. Two hundred dollars an hour, one hundred and sixty hours guaranteed. Paid in advance.”

Brown’s head jerked as if he’d been sucker punched. “That’s r-ridiculous,” he sputtered. “We only paid you fifty dollars an hour to design the system!”

“If you don’t like my price I’m sure you could always offer it to the lowest bidder. Maybe that same firm in India who you had build the code. I’m sure for two hundred dollars an hour, they’d be able to get twenty people.”