The white moon bore down like a spotlight in the sky, peering steadily between passing black clouds. The bank towered dark against the sky. The streets were nearly vacant, but each car that did drive by seemed somehow intent on the Lexus. Kent imagined that it was because the car's tailpipe was dragging with Mr. Brinkley hiding like a lead weight back there. Or maybe he'd left a finger poking out of the trunk. He took a deep breath to calm himself. No, the tailpipe wasn't dragging or even sagging. And the finger-in-the-trunk thing was ridiculous. The lid would not have closed with anything so thick as a finger sticking out. Hair perhaps? Kent glanced in the side mirrors but saw no hair flapping in the wind.
“Get a grip, man!” he growled. “You're acting stupid!”
Kent drove three blocks past the bank before turning onto a side street to circle around. The objections were screaming now. Taking the truckâthat had been nothing. Stealing the bodyâchild's play. This, now
this
was where it all hit the fan. Only a complete imbecile would actually attempt this. Or someone who had nothing to live for anyway. Because attempting this might very well end in death.
You know that, Kent, don't you? You might die tonight. Like Spencer
.
His palms were slippery on the leather steering wheel, and he wondered if forensics could pick that up. He would have to wipe the sweat off the seat as well. He didn't want some ambitious rookie investigator concluding he'd arrived in a state of distress, leaking buckets of sweat all over the seats. Then again, he had lost his wife and child; he had reason to be distressed.
Kent approached the bank from the rear and rolled into his parking spot at the back corner by the alley.
Okay, boy. Just chill. We're just going to walk in there and take a quick look. You come here all the time at night. Nothing unusual yet. You haven't done anything wrong yet. Not much anyway.
Kent took a deep breath, stepped from the car, briefcase in hand, and walked for the back entrance. His hand shook badly inserting the key. What if they had changed the lock? But they hadn't. It swung open easily to the sound of a quiet chirping. The alarm.
He stepped in and punched in the deactivation code. Now the alarm company knew that Kent Anthony had entered the building through the rear door at 10:05 P.M. Sunday night. No problemâthat was part of this little charade. The rear offices were not monitored by video equipment like the rest of the bank; he was a free bird back here.
Kent walked through dark halls, stepping quickly by the light of glowing exit signs. He found his office exactly as he had left it, untouched and silent except for the
whir
of his computer. The exotic fish swam lazily; red power lights winked in the darkness; his high-back leather chair sat like a black shadow before the monitors. Kent's hands trembled at his sides.
Kent flipped the light on and squinted at the brightness. He set his briefcase on the desk and cracked his knuckles absently. By his estimation, he would need five hours in the building to pull this off. The first four hours would be relatively simple. Just walk into the advanced processing system using ROOSTER, execute the little BANDIT program he'd been fine-tuning for the last three weeks, and walk away. But it was the walking away part that had his bones vibrating.
Kent made one last pass through the halls, satisfying himself as to their vacancy. And then it was suddenly now-or-never time, and he walked briskly back toward his office, knowing it had to be now.
It's okay, boy. You haven't done nothin' yet. Not yet.
He withdrew a disk from his briefcase, inserted it into the floppy drive, took one last long pull of air, and began punching at the keyboard. Menus sprang to life and then disappeared, one after the other, a slide show of reds and blues and yellows. He located ROOSTER and executed it without pausing. Then he was into AFPS, through ROOSTER's hidden link, like a ghost able to do anything at will without the mortals knowing.
He'd already determined his will. His will was to confiscate twenty million dollars. And stealing twenty million dollars all came down to a few keystrokes now.
He stared at the familiar screen of programming code for a long minute, his quivering fingertips brushing lightly on the keys, his heart pounding in his ears.
It's okay, boy. You haven't done . . .
Yeah, well, I'm about to.
He entered the command line: RUN a:\BANDIT.
Then do it. Just do it.
He swallowed and depressed the ENTER key. The floppy drive engaged, the hard drive spun up, the screen went blank for a few seconds, and Kent held his breath.
A string of numbers popped up, center screen, and began spinning by like a gas pump meter gone berserk. The search was on. Kent leaned back and folded his hands, his eyes lost to the blur of numbers.
The program's execution was simple, really. It would systematically scan the massive electronic web of banking and identify accounts in which charges had been levied for interbank ATM use. Example: Sally, a Norwest bank customer, uses her cash card at a Wells Fargo cash machine and is charged $1.20 for the use of Wells Fargo's ATM. The fee is automatically taken from her account. Sally gets her statement, sees the charge, and adds it to the line that reads “Service Charges” on her reconciliation form. Case closed. Does Sally question the charge? Not unless Sally is a kook. BANDIT would search for one hundred million such transactions, add twenty cents to the fee charged by the host bank, and then neatly skim that twenty cents off for deposit into a labyrinth of accounts Kent had already established. In Sally's case, neither Norwest nor Wells Fargo would be short in their own reconciliation. They would receive and be charged precisely what they expected: $1.20. It would be Sally who was out twenty cents, because her statement would show a service charge not of $1.20 but of $1.40. The additional twenty cents she paid would be unwittingly donated to Kent's accounts while the balance of $1.20 happily made its way to Wells Fargo. No one would be the wiser.
But say Sally
is
a kook. Say she calls the bank and reports the mistake: a $1.40 charge instead of the customary $1.20 rate advertised in the bank's brochures. The bank runs a query. BANDIT immediately identifies the query, dispatches a gunman to Sally's house, and puts a slug in her head.
Kent blinked. The numbers on the screen continued to spin in a blur.
Okay, not quite. BANDIT would just return Sally her precious hard-earned twenty cents. But it was here, in the method Kent had devised to return Sally her money, that his real brilliance shone. You see, BANDIT would not just return the money lackadaisically and apologize for the blunder. Too many blunders would raise brows, and Kent wanted to keep those eyebrows down. Instead, BANDIT acted like a self-erasing virus, one that detected the query into Sally's account, and did its dirty deed of returning the twenty cents immediately, before the query returned the details of Sally's account to the operator's screen. By the time the banker had Sally's latest bank statement on the screen, it would show that the customary bank charges of $1.20 had been levied. The computer would then spit out a comment about an internal self-correcting error, and that would be that. In reality, there would undoubtedly be some deeper probes, but they would find nothing. The transactions would be executed through the back door and their trails neatly erased, thanks to AFPS. Of course, the safeguard was AFPS itselfâthose who entered AFPS normally left their prints at every keystroke.
Normally. But not with ROOSTER.
Either way, it really did not matter. The last hour of this operation would neutralize everything. Meanwhile, he had a body rotting in his trunk. Kent let the computer spin while he chewed his fingernails and paced the carpet. He might have shed a full gallon of sweat in those first three hours, he did not knowâhe hadn't brought a milk jug along to catch it all. But it did a fine job of soaking his shirt clean through.
It took three hours and forty-three minutes for the program to find its intended victims. The clock on Kent's office wall read 1:48 when the program finally asked him if he wished to get it onâtransfer this insanely huge amount of money into his accounts and enter a life on the run from the long arms of the United States justice system. Well, not in so many words. There was actually only one word on the screen: TRANSFER? Y/N. But he knew what the program was really asking by that simple word, because he had written that word.
His hand hovered over the Y that would actually alter the accounts and transfer the money into his ownâa process he'd calculated to take roughly thirty minutes. He pressed it, conscious of the small click in the key. The words vanished to black, replaced by a single word blinking on and off: PROCESSING.
Kent backed from the desk and let the computer do its deed.
Yes indeed, BANDIT, rob them blind.
His heart beat at twice its customary pace, refusing to calm. And he still had that clammy body to deal with.
Kent crept out to the Lexus, glancing around nervously for the slightest sign of an intruder. Which struck him as ironic because
he
was the intruder here. He popped the trunk and quickly peeled the plastic away from Mr. Brinkley's body. He had to be quick now. It wouldn't do to have a passerby seeing him hauling a flopping body from the trunk. Backing the car into the alley would have been easier, but it also would have left tire tracks that didn't belong. One of those Stupid Street moves.
The cadaver stared up at the moon with its wide, gray eyes, and Kent shuddered. He reached in, swallowing hard, wrapped both arms around the cold torso, and yanked. The body came out like a bloated sack of grain, and Kent staggered under its weight. The head bounced off the rear bumper and came within an inch of leaving a slab of skin on the asphalt, which would have been a problem.
Move it, man! Move it!
Kent hoisted the body and flipped it into the crooks of his arms as he turned. The trunk would have to remain open for the moment. He staggered down the alley, wheezing like ancient bellows now, fighting to keep the contents of his stomach where they belonged. If he'd eaten more over the last day, it might have come up then while he staggered down the alley, eyes half closed to avoid seeing what lay across his arms. Mr. Brinkley bounced naked and gray. Butt up.
The cadaver nearly fell from his grasp once, but he recovered with a lifted knee. He lost his firm grip on the body, however, and had to run the last few yards before the fish slipped all the way out of his arms.
The rear door proved another challenge altogether. Kent stood there, bent over, straining against the dead weight, knowing that if this thing fell it would leave evidence. Dead body evidence.
Problem was, his hands were trembling in their task of keeping Mr. Brinkley from landing on his toes, and the door was closed. He would have to get the body onto his shoulderâfree up a hand.
“Oh, man!” He was whispering audibly now. “Oh man, oh man!” The words echoed ghostly down the alley.
It took him three panicked attempts to heave the naked body up by his head, and by the time he finally managed to snake a shoulder under it, his breathing was chasing those words. The body's flesh felt soft on his shoulder, and visions of that hole in the cadaver's gut filled his mind. But Mr. Brinkley's spare tire was sucking up to his right ear, and the realization put him into gear.
Kent opened the door and staggered through, fighting chills of horror. The thought that he'd have to wipe that door handle managed to plant itself firmly in his mind. He had dead flesh on his hands.
He ran for his office with the body bouncing on his shoulder. Groans accompanied each breath now, but then who was listening?
He heaved the body from its precarious perch the second he lurched through his office door. It fell to the gray carpet with a sickening dead-body thump. Kent winced and pushed the door shut. His face still twisted with disgust, he paced back and forth in front of the body, trying to gather himself.
To his right, the computer screen still winked through its dirty deed.
PROCESSING, PROCESSING, PROCESSING . . .
He needed fresh air. Kent ran from the bank and walked back to the car, thankful for the cool air against his drenched shirt.
He removed a green-and-red cardboard box, which had only two weeks earlier held twelve bottles of tequila, from his rear seat and carefully cleaned out the trunk. Satisfied that the Lexus carried no physical evidence of the body, he stuffed the plastic into the box and walked to a tangle of pipes and knobs poking from the concrete halfway down the alley. The smallest of these controlled the bank's sprinkler system. He twisted a valve and shut it down.
From the tequila box Kent removed a pair of running shoes and replaced his own loafers with them. A few stomps down the alley insured they would leave a print. Evidence. He wiped the rear door handle carefully and reentered the bank.
The body lay face up, naked and pasty when he stepped into his office. He shivered. The computer screen still flashed its word: PROCESSING, PROCESSING . . .
Kent stripped off his clothes, until he stood naked except the running shoes. He started to dress Mr. Brinkley but quickly decided that he could not tolerate being naked in the same room with a naked dead man. Granted, he would put up with whatever it took to do this deed, but bending naked over a dead naked body was not in the plan. He would dress first. He snatched a pair of loose jeans and a white T-shirt from the green-and-red box and pulled them on. Then he turned back to the body.
Dressing a dead body proved to be a task best done with a vengeanceâanything less had him cursing. The body's stiffness helped, but the dead weight did not. He forced his white boxers over Mr. Brinkley's midsection first, holding his breath for most of the operation. Relieved, he struggled with the slacks, rolling the body around, and tugging as best he could. He had the shirt nearly over the cadaver's chest when a blip sounded at the computer.