Tora! Tora! As has happened in the past, they had an invitation.
They came to the underground entrance of Intercoastal Bank headquarters in San Francisco, where they were let through steel doors that could have stopped a medium tank. Why bother to attack if the enemy will open the gates? Another tragedy in a Comic Opera world.
The man who let them in wore a military style uniform and was coldly polite.
The Japanese unloaded ten large cartons. Each weighed nearly a hundred pounds. These were carefully opened by two employees while a third oversaw the operation.
As this was taking place, a second van arrived, was passed in and unloaded another ten cartons. Altogether they contained more than a ton of US currency. Most of the bills were in denominations of one hundred dollars each. The total was over ninety million dollars. The uninformed criminal often thinks robbing a bank is pretty simple: walk in, grab forty or fifty million dollars and leave. They seldom think about the problems of moving anything that weighs a ton rapidly.
As soon as all the cases were unwrapped the bank employees began the tedious process of counting the money, twice.
When they were done the third man went inside the building and sent a wire to Japan confirming the deposit, in the correct amount. Subsequently a ninety million dollar adjustment was made to the sender’s account.
By the time the employees who unloaded, unpacked and counted the currency went home it was almost five o’clock in the morning. On the surface of things it seemed an ordinary transaction. Banks, after all, are in the business of handling cash.
However, two other people were in the bank, using a computer which should only have been accessed by another person who was not there. The account, so recently flush with credit, began to show extraordinary activity via the mechanism known as the wire transfer of funds. The route these funds took was tortured to say the least.
But the first step, getting it out of Intercoastal Bank, was relatively simple. It went to a location in New York called the Clearing House Interbank System—CHIPS—in eighteen increments of five million dollars each to eighteen different overseas accounts. That these eighteen accounts were located in exotic places like the Netherlands Antilles and the Seychelle Islands meant nothing to the CHIPS system. What do computers know? Or care?
From these locations the money, still in the form of electronic wire transfers, moved to other accounts in equally protected locations and eventually were converted into certificates of deposit, which were then flown back to the States, placed in the account of a shell company via a small bank in upstate New York.
The chances of it being traced were nil, and would take the cooperation of no less than ten different countries and their investigative apparatus. None of the countries had cooperative agreements with US investigative agencies.
Add to this the fact that the FBI detests and considers itself superior to all other investigative agencies, such as the DEA, the Secret Service, the IRS, the Customs Service, and you have the clever criminal’s happiest dream.
Of the ninety million, two million went to a Bank in Belgium. This transaction wasn’t nearly as well hidden.
Chapter 3
Within the Intercoastal Bank building, the better offices were situated around the perimeter of each floor. As a dues paying subscriber to the tribal hierarchy of big business, Intercoastal Bank was a prime example of the Territorial Imperative in action.
The winners in the game of territorial acquisition had private offices with windows, and excellent views of the city, a prize worth having in San Francisco. And of these offices, the ones at the four corners of the building were even more highly prized. They were reserved for vice presidents and above. One such office on the eighteenth floor belonged to J.K.Heely, Vice President in charge of Computer Security.
Her staff didn’t call her J.K. or Heely or any other male oriented alias. She was Jean, if you knew her well enough, otherwise, Miss Heely. She did not approve of Miz and put a stop to it whenever it cropped up. She suffered neither inferiority, nor an obsessive need to draw attention to herself or her view points through the assumption of supposedly significant social nomenclature. Jean Heely was a bank vice president and a woman, and in no way unhappy about either.
Because she was single and uniquely visible, there were numerous rumors about her private life. If she had lunch with another vice president more than once in any week, it was instantly assumed that she was sleeping with that person; male or female. This, after all, was San Francisco.
Jean took little note of such rumors and lived her life as she pleased. The bank was doing well and so was she. Another rumor had it that she would be the next Executive Vice President of Computer Operations. This wild guess was correct.
She arrived at her office at seven thirty filled with energy and good cheer, and brought with her the brilliance of a perfect spring day. The sun lingered as highlights on her ash blonde hair and the breezes from the bay were caught in the folds of her stylish cotton frock.
Where other women at the bank wore severe, pin-striped suits, bras a size too small to disguise the fact that God is his perversity had given them breasts, hair so plain they could have been admitted directly into the nearest celibate religious order, Jean wore her hair long, full and curly, and dressed in a way that accentuated her abundant femininity.
She was not beautiful in the classical sense, having an over generous mouth and unstraightened teeth. But her eyes were large; light brown; bright with humor and intelligence. What she thought and felt was immediately there for all to see.
According to the scale in her bathroom, she was ten pounds over weight; the only sour note in an otherwise perfect day. She fought the good fight with catholic determination, which is to say righteous denial during the week and Lucullan excess on weekends. Three mornings a week she suffered the tortures of the damned at Gold’s Gym, and these efforts kept the goal of one hundred and fifteen pounds, like chocolate, tantalizingly out of reach.
She had turned thirty two one month earlier and was the youngest vice president of a major bank in the United States.
She smiled at her secretary, Rose McClennan, who stood and took her coat.
“Good morning, Rose. It’s a beautiful day. If I didn’t have that two o’clock with Georgesciu and Elleston, I’d take a sick day and go for a sail. How’s the baby?”
“Cheerful, full of smiles and an appetite like a stevedore. Thanks for the comp-day last week. Arthur and I haven’t been away from young George since he arrived. My mother baby sat while George and I lived shamelessly at the Mark. They were so nice; the manager said anything for Miss Heely. Whatever did you do for them?”
“Oh, I brought them Dutch Bankers, Viennese Bankers, and German Bundesbank people last year, and they’re all coming again next month. They have more money than the Japanese.”
She went into her office, looked around the room with satisfaction and tossed her briefcase on the couch. As she sat down at her desk, Rose brought a fresh pot of coffee and her mail. The day had begun exactly as it should.
There was something weird going on in the ‘wire-transfer’ department that needed investigation and she was having lunch with the General.
She was just opening her mail when what should have been a perfect day went to hell in a hurry. Rose entered without knocking. She had a look like someone had punched her hard
