MONEY TREE (10 page)

‘And to be clear
, Oscar – all we’re looking for is some evidence of the dirty tricks. Some emails or the like. You won’t go into the customer files or the bank’s accounting systems.’

‘Cross my heart. Besides, I’m sure your
office systems are completely separate from your operational.’

‘Completely.’

‘There you go. I’m good. But I’m not that good.’

Her face sho
wed her relief.

‘
And, Erin dear, if we find anything interesting, what will you do with it?’

‘
Leverage? Let’s see what we come up with.’

‘I like the ‘we’ my dear.
I’ll need your help.’

Erin
teetered on the brink.

‘I thought you’d kind of do it from here. . .’

‘Oh, we’ll collect here. This will be our repository. But we need a teensy bit of inside help to get us going.’

‘This isn’t going to
land me in jail, Oscar?’

‘You won’t feel a thing. No trace. No evidence. And in return. . .’

‘What
do you charge?’

‘Oh you silly thing! I don’t do this sort of stuff for
money. This is fun! I don’t need any more money. All I want is a promise.’

‘What sort of
promise?’

‘That you’ll do me a favour some day. I may never ask. But if I do, whatever it is, you’ll do it. Is that fair?’

She laughed. ‘That’s too open-ended. I mean you could ask for something completely outrageous or illegal or impossible. Like Rumpelstiltskin.’

Oscar was amused. ‘I’m glad you like
fairy
stories. Don’t worry your pretty little head. You’re not my type dear. And the favour won’t be so awful, I assure you. Ask Ted. Do we have a deal?’

Erin
was beginning to feel she was striking too many deals lately, all of them taking her further into the quicksand of deviousness and deceit.

‘It’s a deal. Now what?’

Oscar glanced at the Dali clock oozing down the wall. ‘We’re between lunch and supper. Let’s do high tea. I’m sure Albert can conjure some salmon and cucumber sandwiches. And you can tell me all you know about your head office systems.’

I
t wasn’t unusual for Erin Wishart to be working Saturday mornings. It happened most weekends. The doorman at the side doors of Global American saluted her and wished her a good day. Using her pass card, she made her way up in the lifts to the executive floor on level 48 of GA Tower. She wandered round the corridors checking she had the place to herself. All the executive offices, like hers, were locked. 

She swiped her pass, typed in the code
and stepped inside her office. As usual, her heart lifted and she was drawn to the window. Straight ahead, she had a clear line of sight to
Liberty
far off in the bay. The day was fine, with a heat haze already building up. The New Jersey shoreline was blurred and out of focus, as though a muslin curtain had been dragged across it. Inevitably, her gaze was drawn to the right. She wished she’d taken more notice all those years ago; she could never quite locate the exact spot where the Twin Towers had dominated the skyline. Another regret. Now the Freedom Tower cut the air and glistened provocatively; try it again if you think you’re hard enough.

She turned away and walked round, touching things, a
nd realised she might be saying goodbye. Was this how it began? The slide? She sat down at her white ash desk and wished her dad had been able to see this. Would he have been impressed or censorious? It depressed her that she didn’t know the answer, not for sure. But she had a sneaking feeling that some of his drunken sermonising had stuck after all. Or why else was she doing this? 

She touched the edge of her desk and her computer screen slid up into view. A panel opened and her keyboard lifted up. The screen swirled and settled.

‘Password please.’

The voice was female and friendly.
Sexy even. Why did Scarlet Johansson need the money? Erin typed in
lochlomond
with zeroes for the Os. The picture cleared and brought up her preferred icons and layout. Erin fumbled in her purse and pulled out a memory stick. She put it on the desk, played with it for a bit, then got up and paced back and forth. Why was she really doing all this? Was it really worth the risk?

Oscar had explained that the first task his software performed was to create a
safe area, shielded from all firewalls and bug detection code, for his code to operate in. It would be like an invisible cloak thrown over a corner of her drive, or like the camouflage on a stealth bomber. She perfectly understood the approach. But her computer science degree had taught her scepticism. What if the whole bloody system crashed and they traced it to her? What if it triggered a complete shut down and she got locked in until the cops led her off in cuffs?

She sat down, took a huge breath and
slid the stick into the USB slot.

‘Please wait.’ An icon appeared on the screen showing speed of loading.

‘Software accepted and loaded. Activate?’

She swallowed.
‘Activate.’

A trumpet
volley blared. She jumped and jabbed the sound key to lower the volume. When her heart slowed down she smiled. It was the William Tell overture. The screen cleared and a figure galloped towards her on a huge white horse. They crashed to a halt in a swirl of dust and the camera zoomed in on the head sporting a white cowboy hat and a black mask.

‘Tonto! My trusty friend! You summoned me?
’

The voice was high-pitched and camp.
Oscar’s. A grin spread across Erin’s face. It would turn into hysteria if she didn’t control it. Her dad would have loved this. He’d made her sit through some early Lone Ranger reruns. She knew the response.

‘Yes, Kemosabe.’

She knew the software was doing a voice recognition check based on the words she’d recorded at Oscar’s.

‘Tonto, have you scouted ahead?’

‘Yes, Kemosabe. The way is clear.’

‘Mount up Tonto. It’s time to ride! Hi-Yo Silver. Away!
’

The face moved
away and became a full shot of the rider dressed in white and wearing an old-style six-gun on his hip. He caught up the reins of the majestic white horse and made it rear on its hind legs. He waved his hat in the air and the horse landed and galloped off into the distance to the strains of the overture.

Erin
sat back and waited. Her stomach was playing up again. The ache and the rumblings were sawing for attention. She’d forgotten her pills, so she took some water from her fridge and sat sipping it and gazing sightlessly out of her window. A few minutes later her screen flickered and she turned in time to see the horseman galloping up in his dust cloud. He leapt down and strode towards her. Oscar’s masked face filled the screen.

‘Mission accomplished, Tonto. But I’m out of silver bullets.’ He brandished a six gun. ‘The place was full of bushwhackers and bandits.
Tell Sheriff Oscar that he won’t have any more trouble round these parts.’

‘I will, Kemosabe.’

‘Time we were out of here, Tonto. Let’s ride!’

This time the screen dissolved without a
nyone riding into the sunset. Erin removed the memory stick and closed down her computer. She took a last lingering look around her office, locked it and left the building.

She hoped to G
od, Oscar Feldstein was as good as Ted thought he was. And that Oscar was as disinterested in money as he said he was. If neither was true, alarm bells were already going off, telling the world – including Warwick Stanstead – that Erin Wishart, Senior Vice President, Asia Pacific region, had just sabotaged the entire head office computer network.

Or wo
rse. She knew the admin systems were physically separate from the operational and in theory the layers of firewalls protecting customer accounts, treasury systems, the dealing rooms and the bank accounting systems were impenetrable. But if Oscar Feldstein was really at the top of his game, she might just have handed a hacker the keys to riches beyond avarice.

T
ed Saddler was clamped in his seat on a 747 coming in to land at Kolkata airport. He was dehydrated from the in-flight bar. His head hurt and his body was imploding. As the big jet bounced down the runway and jammed on the air brakes, death seemed a good option. It made Ted doubly determined that this would be the fastest report in journalistic history. In and out before his lungs had fully emptied of fresh Manhattan air. That was the plan.

He picked up his old Samsonite and wandered out of
Kolkata’s international airport terminal to be slammed by heat and light. The gleaming new concourse was littered with people sitting or lying in sprawled groups. He stood, surrounded by bodies; Wyatt Earp after the OK Corral. Only the flies were stirring. Like a plague ward. He was spotted. Some figures jumped up and made towards him with intent.

He fought his way through the ambush to the first taxi. He stared at it. It was an evolutionary branch-line of the motor car. A black bodied, canary-topped relic of the British Raj. The Brits also left the gift of irony; the cabs were called Ambassadors. He was certain that it would have all the mechanical artistry of a broken pen-knife.

He squeezed into the back seat, his knees pushing into the driver’s back. Then they were off into lunatic traffic. It took so long to work up speed through the clunking gears that the driver was loath to lose it. So he tackled roundabouts left elbow on the horn, right arm out the window – holding the roof on maybe – with a fine disregard for the grandma on her bike, and the family of 7 piled on the two-seater trike.

The roads were a bedlam of bicycles, scooters, stumbling rickshaws, gas-spewing three-wheelers with 5-up plus the driver, dented trucks and black and yellow taxis like his. Everybody hell bent on keeping the middle of the road. He guessed it was their Mogul blood. They wouldn’t retreat or take avoidance action unless and until mayhem was imminent. Roundabouts were the only medium for converting certain death at a crossroads into an even chance.

They passed miles of corrugated-iron shacks where the sidewalk should have been. Each was a good bit smaller than Stan Coleman’s office and without the amenities. People’s lives were on show like a thousand TV sets jammed side by side, all showing personal disasters. Closer to the city, old colonial buildings mouldered in the heat and sagged into the street. They’d given up the fight long ago when the Brits left. Maybe it was to teach the West a lesson about trying to change things; trying to implement Anglo-Saxon discipline in equatorial torpor.

Ted
felt overwhelmed with the sheer foreignness of it all. He wanted to turn the taxi round and get the next flight home. Then, soaring out of the gloom, was a white castle. His castle apparently. The Oberoi Grand. They pulled into the sanctuary of the white courtyard. He trundled his sweat-encased body into an oasis of greenery and wood panelling away from the eyes of the poor and thirsty. Ted checked in, shivering in the air-conditioning, and when he got to his room, tried to dispel his anxiety with two stiff Jack Daniels – ice-free for fear of bugs.

Ted
sat on his bed and fought the urge to phone Mary. He’d always phoned her first thing on arrival if he was travelling on business round the States. He’d never worked out whether it was to share the moment or to provide a comfort blanket. Her brisk voice would chop the distance and make him brave. Now, though the need was stronger, he had to face his middle-aged fears alone. He’d get even less sympathy from the hardnosed Miss Erin Wishart.

He had the afternoon off to recover from the flight. So he showered, raided the mini-bar again, lay on his bed, switched on CNN and fell deeply asleep. He woke much later, feeling worse than before, stunned and disoriented. It was dark outside. To prove something to himself he showered, put on clean shirt and pants and stepped out into the fetid night. In seconds the clammy air plastered his clothes to his body. Within ten yards, the lights went out. His safe white towers were blotted out as he stepped through this looking glass into the underworld.

An urchin tagged him and softly jabbered at his big white bulk. Maybe he was importuning. Maybe he was cursing him gently for having so much. Ted shook him off with difficulty. The boy was tough and well filled out. His conscience let him off the hook for this one. He passed a slim woman in an electric blue sari rooting in a heap of garbage by the roadside. She was intent on her plunder, driven by a need stretching back to a family somewhere.

He stepped over sleeping figures, their arms twisted for a pillow, dirty cloths round their thin hips. Their skins glistened as if they’d been dipped in oil. Other figures moved in the shadows, creeping to their beds or to assignations beyond his imagination. He tried not to see people, or watch them or catch their eyes just in case. But there was no smell of danger among all the other stinks of urine and stale food. You
wouldn’t feel so relaxed on Brooklyn’s meaner streets.

Then he saw her.
Framed in an open ground-floor window. On a pile of mats surrounded by tumbling boxes whose guts spilled into the street. A man by her side. Father? Pimp? Please, not that. She was ram-rod straight, in a red sari, poised like a princess with calm sovereignty over her midden. He looked at her once and shied away and then again. Into her eyes. Large and dark in a face of perfect symmetry. She was all of 12, with a life that should have been special going forward. But how could it. How could it?