Of course, it was far from a sure thing that to own up to his regular liaisons with Valerie would destroy his marriage and family. Marriages and families sometimes had unexpected artesian sources of resiliency. But his career as America’s most powerful banker, or even second- or third-most-powerful banker, would assuredly be ruined.
She went on, “Valerie Santoro was hired to steal a CD-ROM from your briefcase-”
“Nothing was stolen from my briefcase!”
“No. She ‘borrowed’ it for a while, then returned it to the front desk at the Four Seasons.”
He stared at Sarah again, and this time she was sure she could see the blood drain from his face. “What are you-”
“A CD-ROM. Did you ‘misplace’ it while you were at the hotel?”
“Oh, Jesus God. Oh, Jesus God.” Elkind’s face seemed to cave in.
“What happened to it?”
“The disk-I thought it fell out of my suitcase. I mean, it was meaningless to anyone else-no one would know what was on it. Then when it turned up, I knew it had just fallen out somewhere. The front desk said it had been found in a trash container-”
“What was on it?”
“Every year we get one of those CD-ROMs that’s got an entire year’s worth of authentication codes on it, a different computer ‘key’ for each day. They’re used to send money around the world by computer, encoded digitally. That’s why I was in Boston, for one of those bank security meetings. Once a year the heads of the bank, or their designated proxies, meet and exchange computer keys.”
“Someone who had that cryptographic key-”
“-could get into our computers and falsify transactions and steal billions of dollars. Can’t even think about it.”
“But if the bank is suddenly missing an enormous sum of money, wouldn’t the Federal Reserve just bail you out?”
“Christ, no. All these banking reforms. The Fed talks about ‘moral hazard’-that we’re not strict enough with depositors. The truth is, only eight percent of Manhattan Bank’s assets are secure-in government bonds, triple-A-rated securities-basically liquid.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning it would only take a loss of about a hundred million dollars to make us insolvent. Now, will you just tell me what you want me to do, please?”
“I want to see your director of security,” Sarah said. “Right now.”
The Manhattan Bank’s director of security was a formidable, very tall woman in her late forties named Rosabeth Chapman. She was ex-Bureau, which gave Sarah the notion that they’d have common ground on which to schmooze.
Rosabeth Chapman, however, was not a schmoozer. She had the charm of a meter maid. She had a firm, intimidating way of speaking, a perfect pale-blond bouffant hairdo, precise pink lipstick. She spoke in a contralto, and her three male associates listened in respectful silence. Warren Elkind seemed to have a fondness for dominant women.
“You’re asking us to activate a crisis-management approach. You want us to come up with a ‘game plan,’ as you call it. Yet you have absolutely no evidence of an impending attack on Manhattan Bank, whether the headquarters building or any of our branches.”
“That’s not quite accurate,” Sarah said. “We have an intercepted telephone conversation-”
“Which is meaningless. It’s talk; it’s a hollow threat.”
“Threats are more than we usually get in this business-” Sarah began.
“Are you aware how many threats are made against this bank?”
“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.”