Thomas Perry - Vanishing Act

"Why did yours miss out?"

"I was handling a lot of single-client personal accounts. I would enter what I was doing and pass the disk on to the woman who oversaw the mainframe, and she would feed it to the machine for the company records. She kept the disk for backup and I got a new one." He looked tired now, his brow wrinkling a little as he remembered. "So I took a chance. I spent the first two days of the quarantine printing out everything in my files. Every word came out. For the next day or two I looked it over for signs of the virus."

"What did you find?"

"A lot of transactions I didn’t know about."

"Stealing?"

"Yes. There was a pattern. There were lots of accounts where somebody had money in a portfolio— retirement funds, mostly. There would be dividends that were supposed to go for reinvestment, but instead they went to money-market accounts inside the portfolio. Then there would be a withdrawal from that account marked as an internal transfer to another account. The problem was, that one wasn’t part of the portfolio. It didn’t belong to the customer. I checked the number and it wasn’t even an account that was under the company’s control."

"It doesn’t sound complicated enough to be the perfect crime."

"It wasn’t. But the customer wouldn’t notice right away. His balance wouldn’t go down, it just wouldn’t go up as much as it was supposed to. If he saw a report of the transfers, he would see that dividends received were being moved from one of his own accounts to his holding account and then to another account. He would assume that was his, too. Finally, I called the money-market fund’s customer service number to get the name of the owner."

"Wait. They’ll tell you that over the phone?"

"I was just trying to find out if it was legitimate. If it was one of our accounts, they’d tell me what I wanted to know. If they wouldn’t, I’d know it was trouble. I said, ’I’m John Felker, from Smithson-Brownlow. Can you fax me a copy of the last statement for account number 12345678?’ "

"And they did it?"

"Yes. Only not for the reason I thought. They did it because it was mine. There was almost half a million dollars in the account."

"It was in your name?"

"Yeah. At first I was furious. It took me maybe an hour to get scared."

"What did you have to be afraid of?"

"I started thinking. The computer virus had nothing to do with the company. It’s a random act, like a drunk throwing a beer bottle into a crowd at a ball game. This was different. Somebody who had studied the operation—my part of it, specifically—had gone through and carefully moved things around. Whoever did it had access, knew the names of clients, that kind of thing. They were doing it to me."

"Did you go to your boss?"

"I was going to, but you have to imagine what the atmosphere was around there. They were losing money, probably clients. We were all suspects for bringing the virus in, so they were looking at us like the enemy anyway."

"So what? They already knew about the virus. This might have been part of it—some angry ex-employee or something."

"Right. But what if I had been stealing money? All of a sudden the virus hits and everybody in the firm starts scrutinizing all of the old records. All I could do was go to the boss and tell him the transfers on the computer were part of the joke. Only they weren’t in the computer, like the virus. The money had really been moved and deposited in my name. I decided that before I brought this up, I had better keep looking until I found out enough to prove I wasn’t a thief."

"Why would anybody do this, anyway? If they put it in your name, it wasn’t for the money."

"That was what my boss would have said. Then it occurred to me that the half million could have been only part of it, or it could have all been done to set me up."

"Did it occur to you to transfer it all back where it belonged?"

"I told you what I found. I can’t tell what I didn’t find. For one thing, I didn’t find anything like a half million in transfers. They could have been from accounts I never saw, didn’t know about. And if these people could put money in, maybe they could get it out, too. There could be another half million already gone."

"You were an ex-cop. Why didn’t you go to the police?"

"Believe me, I thought about it. But being an ex-cop made me more worried. I thought about what had happened in cases like this when I was a cop. You get a guy—a banker or accountant or lawyer—we got lots of lawyers. Some company blows the whistle. There’s an account in his name with half a million in it. What does the D.A. do? He puts him in custody, quick. The judge doesn’t grant bail, because if he’s got one account with that much in it, he might have five more, and finding them takes months. He’s a sure thing for jumping bail. While I was sitting in jail, anything could be happening with those records, and none of it was going to help me."

"So what did you do?"

"Here’s where Harry comes in. After all this time he called me."

"Where?"

"I don’t know where he was. I was at home."

"What did he say?"

"Two things. One was to stay out of jail. He had heard that some guys had been shopping a contract on me inside the prison system."

"Shopping?"

"Yeah. It was open. Anybody who got me was going to collect."

"Is that normal?"

"It hardly ever happens. It’s too risky. There are so many people who would hear about it who need something to tell the police more than they need money."

"How did Harry hear about it?"

"He wouldn’t say. Not in prison, and not in St. Louis. He was calling long-distance from a pay phone, and he kept pumping money into it and I kept hearing cars go by."

"What did you do?"

"I thought it through eighty different ways. No matter what I did, I couldn’t imagine a way things could work out that didn’t include my spending a lot of time in a prison waiting for an investigation. Harry said the contract was for a hundred thousand. That meant somebody must have stolen a lot. He might have taken ten million, left a half million lying around to get me arrested, and gotten me killed before my trial."

"Would that put an end to it?"

"Sure. He keeps the nine million or so, and everybody figures I took anything that’s missing in the whole company."

"So it was somebody in the company."

"It might have been, even somebody in one of the other branches, but I couldn’t be sure. It might have been somebody I arrested when I was a cop. For a long time now, they’ve been giving inmates computer lessons as part of the job-training program. It beats lathes and drill presses for getting a job afterward, and they can’t use them to make a knife. You can learn a lot about computers in a five-to-ten sentence. Or it could be something bigger. If you can steal money by phone, then anybody anywhere could be doing it, and I just happened to be the victim."

"What did you do?"

"Any way you looked at it, the minute the computer man got the company’s machines up and running and they took a close look at what was in there, I was going to jail. Within two or three days after that I would have to sleep, and then I would be dead."

She looked at him closely. "You stole it, didn’t you?"

"What else could I do?" he asked. "I was an honest man. I didn’t have the kind of money it takes to go on the run."

She seemed to be staring through his eyes into the back of his head. "Did it occur to you that this might have been what they wanted you to do?"

"Of course it did," he said. "If they were capable of thinking up the rest of it, they could think of that, too. But if I did nothing, each day the prisons were going to graduate maybe a hundred guys whose only offer of employment on the outside was killing me. If I brought it to the police, I was going inside, where the rest of them were. Even if I didn’t, the company was going to find the pattern soon, just as I had."