The seventh commandment

Chapter 20

Dora awoke the next morning convinced that her brainstorm of the previous night had been exactly that: a storm of the brain. Now, in the sunny calm of a new day, it seemed highly unlikely that the peculiarity she had spotted in the computer printout had any significance whatsoever. There were a dozen innocent explanations for it. It was a minor curiosity. It would lead her nowhere.

But still, she reflected glumly, it was all she had, and it deserved, at least, a couple of phone calls. So she dialed Arthur Rushkin. He wasn't in his office yet, and Dora continued calling at fifteen-minute intervals until, at about 10:30, she was put through to him.

"Did you find anything?" he asked eagerly.

"Not really," she said, wondering if dissembling was part of her job or part of her nature. "I just have a technical question, and I was hoping you'd be willing to give me the name of that computer expert you consulted."

"I don't see why not," Rushkin said slowly. "His name is Sregor Pinchik, and he's in the Manhattan directory. He has his own business: computer consultant for banks, brokerages, credit card companies, and corporations."

"Sounds like just the man I need."

"There are two things you should know about him," the attorney went on. "One, he charges a hundred dollars an hour. And two, he's an ex-felon."

"Oh-oh," Dora said. "For what?"

"Computer fraud," Rushkin said, laughing. "But since he's been out, he's discovered there's more money to be made by telling clients how to avoid getting taken by computer sharpies like him. Shall I give Pinchik a call and tell him he'll be hearing from you? That way you won't have to go through the identification rigmarole."

"It would be a big help. Thank you, Mr. Rushkin."

Then she phoned Mike Trevalyan in Hartford.

"Are you on to anything?" he asked.

"Not really," Dora said again, "but something came up that needs a little digging. Mike, remember when you were telling me about Starrett Fine Jewelry? You said that about a year ago Clayton Starrett fired most of his branch managers and put in new people. And about the same time he started trading in gold bullion."

"So?"

"Starrett has fifteen branches in addition to their flagship store in New York. What I need to know is this: Which of the branch stores got new managers a year ago."

"I'm not sure I can get that," Trevalyan said, "but if it's important, I'll try."

"It's important," Dora assured him. "How come I always end up doing your job for you?" "Not all of it. The other thing I wanted to tell you is that I'm going to hire a computer consultant."

"What the hell for?"

"Because I need him," she said patiently. "Technical questions that only an expert can answer."

"How much does he charge?"

"A hundred dollars an hour."

"What!" Trevalyan bellowed. "Are you crazy? A hundred an hour? That means the Company will be paying twenty-five bucks every time this guy takes a crap!"

"Mike," Dora said, sighing, "must you be so vulgar and disgusting? Look, if you needed brain surgery-which sometimes I think you do-would you shop around for the cheapest surgeon you could find? You have to pay for expertise; you know that."

"Are you sure this guy's an expert?"

"The best in the business," she said, not mentioning that he had done time for computer fraud.

"Well… all right," Trevalyan said grudgingly. "But try to use him only for an hour."

"I'll try," she promised, keeping her fingers carefully crossed.

Her third call of the morning was to Gregor Pinchik, whose address in the directory was on West 23rd Street.

Dora gave her name and asked if Mr. Arthur Rushkin had informed Pinchik that she'd be phoning.

"Yeah, he called," the computer consultant acknowledged in a gravelly voice. "He tell you what my fees are?"

"A hundred an hour?"

"That's right. And believe me, lady, I'm worth it. What's this about?"

"I'd rather not talk about it on the phone. Could we meet somewhere?"

"Why not. How's about you coming down here to my loft."

"Sure," Dora said, "I could do that. What time?"

"Noon. How does that sound?"

"I'll be there," she said.

"It's just west of Ninth Avenue. Don't let the building scare you. It's being demolished, and right now I'm the only tenant left. But the intercom still works. You ring from downstairs-three short rings and one long one-and I'll buzz you in. Okay?"

"Okay," Dora said. "I'm on my way."

The decrepit building on West 23rd Street had scaffolding in place, and workmen were prying at crumbling ornamental stonework and brick facing, allowing the debris to tumble down within plywood walls protecting the sidewalk.

Dora nervously ducked into the littered vestibule and pressed the only button in sight: three shorts and a long. The electric lock buzzed; she pushed her way in and cautiously climbed five flights of rickety wood stairs, thinking that at a hundred dollars an hour Gregor Pinchik could afford a business address more impressive than this.

The man who greeted her at the door of the top-floor loft was short, blocky, with a head of Einstein hair and a full Smith Brothers beard, hopelessly snarled. But the eyes were alive, the smile bright.

"Nice place, huh?" he said grinning. "I'm moving to SoHo next week, as soon as they bring in power cables for my hardware. Watch where you step and what you touch; everything is muck and mire."

He led her into one enormous room, jammed with sealed wooden crates and cardboard cartons. His desk was a card table, the phone covered with a plastic cozy. He used his pocket handkerchief to wipe clean a steel folding chair so Dora could sit down. She rummaged through her shoulder bag, found a business card, handed it over.

Pinchik inspected it and laughed. "I know the Company," he said. "Their computer system has more holes than a cribbage board. I got into it once-just for the fun of it, you understand-and looked around, but there was nothing interesting. Tell your boss his computer security is a joke."

"I'll tell him," Dora said. "You're a hacker?"

"I'm a superhacker," he said. "I protect my clients against electronic snoops like me. Which means I have to stay one step ahead of the Nosy Parkers, and it ain't easy. By the way, your first hour of consultation started when you rang the doorbell."

Dora nodded. "Mr. Rushkin tells me you reviewed the computer printout from Starrett Jewelry and found nothing wrong."

Pinchik made a dismissive gesture. "That wasn't real computer stuff," he said. "It was just data processing. You could have done the same thing with an adding machine or pocket calculator, if you wanted to spend the time."

"But it was accurate?" she persisted.

"Accurate?" Pinchik said, and coughed a laugh. "As accurate as what was put into it. You know the expression GIGO? It means Garbage In, Garbage Out. If you feed a computer false data, what you get out is false data. A lot of people find it hard to realize that a computer has no conscience. It doesn't know right or wrong, good or evil. You program it to give you the best way to blow up the world, and it'll chug along for a few seconds and tell you; it doesn't care. Did Rushkin say I've done time?"

She nodded.

"Let me tell you how that happened," he said, "if you don't mind wasting part of your hundred-dollar hour."

"I don't mind," Dora said.

"I've got an eighth-grade education," Pinchik said, "but I'm a computer whiz. Most hackers have the passion. With me, it's an obsession. I was a salesman in a computer store on West Forty-sixth Street. I could buy new equipment at an employee's discount, and I was living up here paying bupkes for rent. I worked eight hours a day at the store and spent eight hours hacking. I mean I was writing programs and corresponding electronically with people all over the world as nutty as I was. I can't begin to tell you the systems I got into: government, universities, research labs, military, banks-the whole schmear.

"Now you gotta know I'm a divorced man. My wife claimed she was a computer widow, and she was right. She's living in Hawaii now, and I understand she's bedding some young stud who wears earrings, beats a drum, and roasts pigs for tourists. But that's her problem. Mine was that I had to send her an alimony check every month. Getting bored?"

"No, no," Dora said, thinking of Detective John Wenden and his alimony problems. "It's interesting."

"Well, those monthly alimony checks were killing me," Pinchik went on. "I could have afforded them if it hadn't been for my obsession; all my loose bucks were going for new hardware, modems, programs, and so forth. So one night I'm up here noodling around, and I break into the computer system of an upstate New York bank. Just for the fun of it, you understand."

"How did you get in?" Dora asked curiously.

Pinchik gave her his bright smile. "If you want to know the truth, lady, most bankers are morons. This was the case of a brand-new integrated computer system installed in an old bank that had more than twenty local branches. There were seven top bank executives who were given private access code words to the entire system. All right, you have seven guys who can tap into the system and move it any way they want anytime they want. Now you guess what passwords those seven guys selected."

"Days of the week?" Dora suggested.

"Try again."

"The Seven Deadly Sins?"

"Try again."

Dora thought a moment. "The Seven Dwarfs?" she said. "From 'Snow White'?"

"Now you've got it," Pinchik said approvingly. "They thought they were being so cute. It's easy for hackers to break into so-called secure systems. It took me about ten minutes to get into this bank's records, using the password 'Dopey.' I was just looking around, reading all their confidential stuff, and I got this absolutely brilliant idea."

"And that's what put you in jail," Dora said.

"Yeah, lady," the expert said ruefully, "but it wasn't the idea; that was a winner. I just screwed it up, that's all. Here's how it worked… The bank I invaded, like most banks everywhere, carried a lot of what they call dormant accounts. These are old savings and checking accounts that haven't had any action-deposits or withdrawals-for years and years. Maybe the depositor forgot he had money in that bank. Maybe he died and his heirs didn't know he had the account. Maybe he's in jail and doesn't want to touch it until he gets out. Maybe he's hiding the money from his wife or girlfriend. Or maybe he stole the money and parked it in a bank until the statute of limitations runs out. For whatever reason, these are inactive accounts that keep getting bigger and bigger as the interest piles up."

"But don't the banks have to advertise the accounts?"

"Sure they do, after a period of years. Then some of the depositors come forward. In most states, if the money isn't claimed after a period of X years, it goes into the state's general funds. So I saw all these dormant accounts on the records of that bank I invaded in upstate New York, and I thought 'Why not?' So every month I'd have Dopey transfer my alimony payment electronically to my ex-wife's account in a Hilo bank, making withdrawals from a large dormant account. The depositor didn't scream; no one knew where the hell he was. Maybe he was dead. And my ex didn't object; all she saw were those monthly payments coming in. The bank's books showed legitimate withdrawals with no evidence that they were being made by Dopey, who was me."

"You were right," Dora said, "it's a brilliant idea. What went wrong?"

"I did," Pinchik said. "Every month I would get into the computer as Dopey and instruct the New York bank to transfer the alimony payment electronically to the Hawaiian bank. What I should have done was feed instructions into the New York bank's computer telling it to make those payments automatically every month. It would have been an easy job, but I had other things on my mind and never got around to it. So one month I forgot to tell the New York bank to transfer the alimony money."

"Oh-oh," Dora said.

"Yeah, oh-oh," Pinchik said disgustedly. "It was my own stupid fault. My ex-wife didn't see her payment show up on her statement that month and asked her Hilo bank to check up on it. They contacted the New York bank and asked where the alimony money was. New York said, 'What alimony money?' Naturally my ex gave them my name-she wasn't ratting on me; she really thought it was my dough she was getting-and the New York bank discovered I didn't have an account there. One thing led to another, and I ended up behind bars. But it was a sweet deal while it lasted."

"You don't seem bitter about it."

The superhacker shrugged. "Don't do the crime if you can't do the time."

"Is there a lot of computer crime going on?"

Pinchik rolled his eyes. "More than you and everyone else realizes. Want a rough estimate? I'd guess a minimum of two or three billion dollars a year is being siphoned off by computer thievery, fraud, and swindles. And most of it you never hear about."

"Why not?"

"Because the victims-mostly banks-are too embarrassed by their idiotic carelessness to make public their losses. In most cases, even when the crook is caught, they refuse to prosecute; they don't want the publicity. They let their insurance companies cover the shortfall."

"Thanks a lot," Dora said. "That makes me feel great. Tell me something else: Is there a national list somewhere of all the computer thieves and swindlers who have been caught, even if they've never been prosecuted?"

"No, lady, I don't know of any data base that lists only computer felons. But I imagine the FBI's computerized files are programmed so they could spit out a list like that."

Dora shook her head. "The people I'm interested in aren't in the FBI files."

"Ah-ha," Pinchik said, trying to comb his tangled beard with his fingers, "now we get down to the nitty-gritty. You got people you suspect of being computer crooks?"

"It's a possibility. The NYPD has done a trace on them, and they have no priors. The Company's data base of insurance swindlers also shows nothing. I thought maybe, with your contacts, you could do a search and see if these people have ever been involved in computer hanky-panky."

"Sure, I could do that," the expert said, and then gestured around the littered loft. "But you caught me at a bad time. All that stuff in crates and boxes is my hardware, disks, files, and programs, packed up and ready to go. It'll be at least a week, maybe two, before I'm really back in business."

"I can wait," Dora said.

"Good. Meanwhile, if you give me names and descriptions, I can get started calling hackers I know on the phone. When I'm set up and functioning in my new place in SoHo, I'll be able to make it a more thorough worldwide search. How does that sound?"

"Sounds fine," Dora said. "Please keep a very accurate record of the time you spend on it and your expenses. I've got a tightwad boss."

"I meet them all the time," Pinchik said. "Now let me turn on my handy-dandy tape recorder, and you dictate everything you know about these people. Be as detailed as you can, lady; don't leave anything out."

So Dora spoke into his notebook-sized tape recorder, stating and spelling the names of Turner and Helene Pierce, mentioning their roots in Kansas City, MO, describing their physical appearance, and what little she knew of their ages, habits, Turner's occupation as computer consultant, their style of living, their accents, their connection with Starrett Fine Jewelry, their home addresses and phone numbers.

"And that's all I have," she finished.

"Enough to get me started," Gregor Pinchik said, switching off the recorder. "The names mean nothing to me, but maybe one of my contacts will make them."

"I'm staying at the Hotel Bedlington on Madison Avenue," Dora said. "Can you give me weekly reports?"

"Nope," Pinchik said. "A waste of time. If I come up with something, I'll let you know immediately. But there's no point in sending you a weekly report of failure."

"How long do you think the search will take, Mr. Pinchik?"

He considered a moment. "Give me three weeks to a month," he said. "If I haven't nailed them by then, they're clean-guaranteed. Trust me."

"I do," Dora said, rising. "Send your bills to me at the Bedlington-all right?"

"Oh sure," he said. "Those you'll get weekly. Depend on it. Nice meeting you, lady."