The Y2 Kaper

The Y2 Kaper

  By Jim CaJacob

  Copyright © 2006 Jim CaJacob

  Cover design by Emily Aslin

  *****

  For Slim and Rita, always there

  Chapter 1

  Josh was nervous, but he didn't think it showed. He sat in a Formica booth in a LaGuardia coffee shop by the gate, trying to touch as little as possible. The coffee, if you could call it coffee, was lukewarm when he bought it.

  It was so typical of Anderson to arrange a meeting in a public place and not give a clue how to recognize the person he was meeting. Josh watched the airport crowds bolus by. He wondered why "how was your flight?" was the only thing thousands of people could think of to say to each other in an airport.

  "Is anybody sitting here?” Josh looked up. A bland looking man in a suit was holding a briefcase, a plastic bag from the airport bookstore, and a tray with a bagel and a cup of coffee. He didn't have an accent.

  "Yes. I mean no. It's OK. Please sit down." Maybe it did show. The man sat, unwrapped the cellophane from his bagel, separated the two halves, methodically spread it with cream cheese, which he squeezed out of the little pouch, and took a bite. Josh looked into his coffee. Next time he'd buy a magazine.

  "Flying out today?" the man asked.

  "Yes. I mean no, I just flew in,” Josh answered. "From BWI. How about you?”

  "Omaha. I'm just here for one night, then I fly back tomorrow. I like to wait a few minutes for the baggage claim crowd to thin out a little.”

  Josh nodded while wondering what kind of loser checks bags. The man munched earnestly.

  "Well, it's about that time. You have a good day now." Josh wondered what the small talk threshold must be in Omaha. He hoped he'd never find out first hand. The man dabbed his mouth with a paper napkin, stood up, brushed some crumbs off his brown suit, and left.

  Josh decided to wait three minutes. He brought the paper coffee cup to his lips and pretended to sip. He couldn't bring himself to actually put any in his mouth. He looked at his watch, picked up his carry-on suitcase, his briefcase, and the plastic bag from the Omaha airport bookstore that the man had left on the floor. Josh stood up and left. It never occurred to him to bus the table.

  He walked out and got in the taxi line. There were fewer line jumpers than usual, and the crack crew of trained professional trunk slammers was on the ball. In a couple of minutes, Josh was in the cab. The driver looked at Josh in the mirror with eyebrows raised.

  "56th and Lex. Take the Triboro,” Josh said. The cab lurched into the flow of traffic, eliciting only two honks. On the cab radio the dispatcher was jabbering in some tongue, apparently employing circular breathing. "What language is that?" Josh asked.

  "Punjabi, sir."

  The cab made good time. Josh involuntarily jammed on the phantom back seat brake pedal only twice. Traffic in the city was heavy but moving. He got out before his corner. As usual, he rounded the fare up to the next five dollar multiple. He figured the drivers' karma evened out, one guy's lucky day was another guy's screwing, and it was easier for Josh to figure.

  Hippolito, the one who tried to look surly, was the doorman on duty. Nice name, Josh thought. Hippolito said "Hello Mr. Calder" and held the door open. Josh made a point of being patient. He emptied his mailbox, and got on the elevator with one of the interchangeable little old ladies with tiny, nervous dogs. Josh wondered who would intentionally breed an animal to look like that. The elevator had that indelible New York slow cooked cabbage smell.

  Josh got off on 15 – they still build brand new buildings without a 13th floor! - went to his door, unlocked the three locks, and went in. He sat his suitcase and briefcase by the door, walked over to the small table by the window, sat down, and dumped out the contents of the bookstore bag. He pulled the shrink-wrap off the hardback novel with his fingers. Inside the cover the pages had been hollowed out. There were four shrink-wrapped packs of hundred-dollar bills, each about a half inch thick. Josh did the math in his head for the thousandth time.

  Chapter 2

  Just before dawn, standing outside in the light rain, Wilton Chen reminded himself that he could quit smoking whenever he wanted to. He was in the Tavron Industries headquarters courtyard, with one foot on the bench of one of the uninviting concrete picnic tables.

  Wilton had not been back to his hotel for thirty-one hours. The fresh air felt good. This part of a project was always like this. Wilton and his team had five days to complete the assessment. That gave Wilton about two and a half days to dig through the data.

  Wilton thought of himself as a data detective. On each project he would quickly get his hands on whatever data was available, in whatever format, and try to make sense of it. The in-house people always spent a while trying to be helpful, which was more of a waste of time than anything, but he tried to be polite. He mainly needed a place to work and a connection to the network. He always tried to remember to get password security, although, to be honest, he didn’t really need it.

  Wilton carried a “lunch pail” computer to each job – bigger than a laptop but still portable. It was a portable version of a high-end UNIX workstation. On it was Wilton’s toolkit of programs he used to look at data.

  Wilton took the security card out of his shirt pocket and went back inside. The building had sensors that turned lights on and off as people entered and left rooms, which was kind of spooky at this hour. He heard a vacuum somewhere.

  In the small conference room where he had been set up there was a stack of four pizza boxes and eleven empty two liter Diet Coke bottles. Wilton could remember when he had had his first slice of pizza in Berkeley in his freshman year. The only pizza places in Taiwan growing up were amid the rows of GI bars his mother made sure he avoided. Wilton made up for lost time, and figured that by now his aggregate lifetime consumption was average for a 25-year-old American. He sat back down and stared at the screen.

  Before his last smoke, Wilton had kicked off a data-mining program. This tool looked for unusual patterns in data. For example, if 2% of a company’s customers were in Iowa and 3% of the complaints came from there, the data mining tool would flag that occurrence. It was then up to a human to figure out if something was going on or if the pattern was a coincidence. Like most double-E types, Wilton didn’t believe in coincidences.

  When he worked, Wilton usually talked to himself (in English, not in Chinese), or whistled disco songs from the seventies. This was one big reason why his team liked to get him a room to work in by himself. Now Wilton said, “What do you know? Somebody forgot to take out the cat.” He typed for a few seconds, poked the RETURN key with his index finger, and sat back in his chair with his chin in his hand, staring at the screen. He was whistling YMCA, one of his standbys.

  “Well, well, well. Congratulations. You’ve got the best kind of business. People send you checks and you don’t have to do any work.”

  It was 3:47 AM. The meeting was at 11. Wilton figured he had to leave no later than six to get back to the hotel, shower, and brief the team at the breakfast meeting.

  - - -

  Val walked into the hotel lobby, patting down his cowlick. He took it as a sign of maturity that he was now allowing himself 45 minutes from wake-up call to breakfast, instead of 30. He looked over the fern planters into the breakfast area, and saw Wilton and Jenny Lu. Wilton had that look that he always got.

  “Hi guys. Wilton, how do you feel?” Val asked.

  “Wilton’s fine,” Jenny answered. For some reason it never bothered Wilton when Jenny answered for him.

  The waitress recommended the $11.50 breakfast buffet four times before agreeing to accept an order for something she would have to carry to the table. Val
thought of breakfast as an exercise in empty calories. Whatever the diet gurus said, it seemed like he was hungrier by noon when he did eat breakfast.

  “I’m guessing you have something to show me?" Val said.

  “Wilton has found some anomalies that could be significant,” Jenny said. “We should corroborate further, but we’re confident that we’re on the right track.” Jenny had been raised in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Val thought of her accent as faintly Chinese-American and faintly Okie. She denied she had any accent at all.

  “Should I even ask how we found this?" Val said.

  “Val, we’ve been through this,” Jenny said. “They gave us the go-ahead to dig. If we try to explain how we found this out they’ll just get more paranoid.”

  “I know. Just be glad Wilton’s on our side, right?” Val said.

  Jenny ignored the question. “It appears our problem begins with the in-house staff,” she said.

  “How so?" Val said.

  This time Wilton answered. “One of the techies, or I should say at least one, has been dipping his pen to write checks with company ink.” Jenny rolled her eyes semi-audibly.

  “Surely you’re not suggesting that Tavron is not always applying generally accepted accounting principles?” Val said.

  Again Jenny ignored him. She had learned to tolerate, if not exactly appreciate, Val’s repertoire of snide clichés. “The good news is we’ve found the leak. The bad news is it’s going to be hard to catch them. Half the programmers at Tavron drive Beemers already. California!”

  “I have to pick up Leavitt at the airport,” Val said. Max Leavitt was the senior partner from Marx, Barnes & Adams, the big accounting company. Val's team usually worked as sub-contractors for MB&A.

  They were specialists in what Max called data digging. When it came to changing the hearts and minds of business people, there was no substitute for numbers. Val had established a reputation for being able to get at the heart of a business problem through analysis.

  He had worked as a sub for Max several times. This was the first time when Max suspected out-and-out fraud. He depended on Val and his team to be fast, accurate and discreet.

  “We’re on at eleven. It’s eight-forty now. We have a presentation to make, and handouts to print. Let’s go upstairs and get started. Wilton, did you get any sleep?” Val said.

  “Wilton’s fine,” Jenny replied.

  - - -

  The meeting went pretty well until they got to the part about the embezzling.

  “You’re suggesting that some hacker was able to jimmy our programs to authorize checks to vendors that don’t exist?” The question came from Brady, the CEO.

  “Actually, it’s not even that sophisticated,” Val answered. Val and his team had been working at Tavron Industries for about two weeks. “Anyone with the right security access can manipulate the information directly in the Purchasing system database. Our culprit simply entered the bogus invoice, then removed it after the check was cut. Nobody was the wiser. You’d be surprised how common this kind of thing is. A programmer at one of our clients, a long-distance company, added himself to the tax table and collected a tiny amount of tax on thirteen years of calls. He was still working there when we caught him!”

  “What’s the damage?” asked Wilson, the auditor from corporate.

  “We think between six and seven hundred thousand dollars so far this year.” Jenny answered. “Harder to tell about previous years without digging into the archived files.”

  Smart embezzlers limited their greed to numbers that were just smaller than the company’s definition of rounding error. Tavron had sales of about 2.5 billion per year. Six hundred thousand was about three-hundredths of a percent -- way into the rounding error.

  Val never got used to how naïve top management was about technology. Guys who would lose an eye for a share point meekly accept whatever gobbledygook the computer gurus feed them.

  “With all due respect, I think your analysis is overly simplistic,” said Bannion, the IT guy. “We have rigorously implemented the full AS/400 security model.”

  “Security is only as good as the people who implement it,” Val said. “This was an inside job. Whoever made these changes had the security access they needed. Like most corporate finance programs, this one had no protection against this kind of data manipulation. All the double entry accounting functionality was in the application layer, not in the database. This couldn’t have happened when the accountants had green eye shades and when the boss signed every check personally.”

  “By our count there are thirty-three people in IT with the necessary access,” Jenny said. “I’m sure our culprit knows we’re poking around and won’t do this again.”

  “Do we know where the money went?" Brady asked.

  “Yes, to a company called Carson Contracting in Omaha,” Jenny answered. Tavron had just finished building a large distribution center across the river in Iowa. The construction budget was over twenty-five million, spread over dozens of contractors, all of which were unfamiliar to the people in Accounts Payable.

  “I have a feeling nobody at Carson Contracting would pick up the telephone if we were to give them a ring,” Wilson said.

  “I’m afraid not,” Val said. “Your checks have been cashed. Carson Contracting has driven its last imaginary nail.”

  Max had said little during the meeting. After it broke up he asked Val if they could ride together to the airport.

  Chapter 3

  The building was a dingy yellow brick 30s era WPA job. The fourth floor was overcrowded with cubes and had bad fluorescent lighting. Josh wondered if the medicinal green paint had been developed in a secret World War II lab.

  “You people will work here, at least for the time being,” Simmons said. Albert Simmons wore a short sleeve white shirt, double knit slacks, and what Josh would bet was a clip-on tie.

  Simmons, in his mid-40s, was the programming supervisor. That would make him a GS-not high enough, Josh thought.

  “Miss Anderson says you people are familiar with CICS (he pronounced it "kicks"), PL1, et cetera?" Simmons said.

  “Yes, sir. We don’t foresee any problems” Josh answered. He and Scott Crane stood in Simmons’ cubicle.

  “Good. As we told Miss Anderson, BLS is a little late getting on the Y2K bandwagon. Your job is to help us get ‘compliant’, whatever that means exactly.”

  The Bureau of Labor Statistics was the part of the Department of Commerce responsible for accumulating and publishing a large volume of statistics about the American economy each month.

  “We have between three and four thousand processes, no one is exactly sure, written in COBOL, PL1, Fortran, ADA, and God knows what else,” Simmons said. “So I would say we need a medium-sized miracle just to have somebody look at each program once.”

  “Will someone brief us on change control procedures, version control, and so on?" Josh asked.

  “Yes, however our large change management staff is at a luncheon at the moment,” Simmons said dryly. “Mr. Calder, have you worked on federal jobs before?”

  “Not really,” Josh said.

  “I thought so,” Simmons said. “Let me educate you. We are standing in a deep gully at the bottom of a very large hill, made up of budget cuts, changing priorities, and technical fads. We are neck deep in the middle of a pile of thirty-eight years worth of shit that have rolled down that hill into our little gully. The Secretary saw Social Security’s “Y2K OK!” briefing and has suddenly taken a keen interest. That’s how the money to hire you guys got shaken loose. No, Mr. Calder, no one will be briefing you. I expect you to conduct yourselves professionally,” Simmons said.

  “Here’s how we’re going to keep track,” Simmons said. “First your team is going to do an inventory of the programs, by language, including lines of code. Then we’re going to create a wall chart which shows the total lines of code divided into the lines of code that have been check
ed for Y2K.”

  “How do we check?" Scott asked.

  “I thought you were the geniuses. You realize that your firm bills me more per day for each of you than I get paid, gross, in a week?" Simmons said.

  This was a familiar complaint. The consultants remained silent.

  “Here’s our ‘methodology’,” proud of himself for using the buzzword. “You’re going to open the program. You’re going to look at it, line by line. You’re going to fix any problems you note. You’re going to enter your modifications in a logbook, which Mrs. Salazar over there will type into her word processor. You are expected to test your code.”

  “Each week we will update our wall chart, like a thermometer for a United Way drive, so my boss can have a warm and fuzzy feeling when he glances at it on his way to another important conference. Then, when the day of reckoning arrives, after you hotshots are long gone, we will wait to see which programs break and fix them, just like we do today. Any questions?”

  “I have one,” Josh said. “How close is the nearest latté bar?”

  Simmons stared at him for a second; pretty sure the little punk was making fun of him. He shook his head, slammed his notebook shut, and walked out. Over his shoulder he said, “Just ask Mrs. Salazar for whatever you need.”

  Chapter 4

  “You are not going to believe this.” Scott was excited. Scott was often excited.

  “Let me guess. You have a date for this weekend,” Josh said.

  “Funny.” Scott’s social life, or lack thereof, was a source of constant amusement to Josh. He soldiered on. “No, I was speaking about something I discovered here in my professional capacity.”

  “What’s up?" Josh said.

  “You've heard of the Consumer Price Index, right? Do you know how it’s calculated?" Scott said.

  “Some kind of market basket in Peoria or something, right?"

  “That’s right. They have these expert shoppers that go forth and pillage the Kmarts and Targets of America, buying Kool-Aid, Windex, and Regular Unleaded. You can actually look up the list of stuff they buy on the net,” Scott said. “But there’s more. You know how they always say ‘seasonally adjusted’? You know what that means?”