Avenger

The judge glanced at the ADA, who shrugged, meaning no objection.

"A week from today," said the judge.

"I'd like to ask for bail," said Dexter.

"Opposed, Your Honour," said the ADA.

"I'm setting the bail at the sum named in the charge, ten thousand dollars," said Judge Hasselblad.

It was out of the question, and they all knew it. Washington Lee did not have ten dollars, and no bail bondsman was likely to give him the time of day. It was back to a cell. As they left the court Dexter asked the ADA for a favour.

"Be a sport, keep him in the Tombs, not the Island."

"Not a problem. Try and grab some sleep, huh?"

There are two short-spell remand prisons used by the Manhattan court system. The Tombs may sound like something underground, but it is in fact a highrise remand centre right next to the court buildings and far more convenient for defence lawyers visiting their clients than Rikers Island, way up the East River. Despite the ADA 's advice for a bit of sleep, the file probably precluded that. If he was to confer with Washington Lee the next morning, he had some reading to do.

To the trained eye the wad of papers told the story of the detection and arrest of Washington Lee. The fraud had been detected internally and traced to Lee. The bank's head of security, one Dan Mitkowski, was a former detective with the NYPD, and he had prevailed on some of his former colleagues to go over to Brooklyn and arrest Washington Lee.

He had first been brought to, and lodged in, a precinct house in midtown. When a sufficient number of miscreants were gracing the cells of the precinct house, they were brought down to the Criminal Courts Building and relodged there on the timeless and unvarying diet of baloney and cheese sandwiches.

Then the wheels had ground their remorseless course. The rap sheet showed a short litany of minor street crime: hubcaps, vending machines, shoplifting. With that formality complete, Washington Lee was ready for arraignment. That was when Judge Hasselblad demanded that the youth be represented.

On the face of it, this was a youth born to nothing and with nothing, who would graduate from truancy to pilfering and thence a life of crime and frequent periods as a guest of the citizens of New York State somewhere "up the river." So how on earth had he sweet-talked the East River Savings Bank, which did not even have a branch in Bedford-Stuyvesant, out of ten thousand dollars? No answer. Not in the file. Just a barebones charge, and an angry and vengeful Manhattan-based bank. Grand larceny in the third degree. Seven years' hard time.

Dexter grabbed three hours' sleep, saw Amanda Jane off to school, kissed Angela goodbye, and came back to Centre Street. It was in an interview room in the Tombs that he was able to drag his story out of the Black kid.

At school he excelled at nothing. His grades were a disaster. The future offered nothing but the road to dereliction, crime, and jail. And then one of the schoolteachers, maybe smarter than the others or just kinder, had allowed the graceless boy access to his HewlettPackard computer. (Here Dexter was reading between the lines of the halting narrative.)

It was like offering a young Yehudi Menuhin a chance to hold a violin. He stared at the keys, he stared at the screen, and he began to make music. The teacher, clearly a computer buff when personal machines were the exception rather than the norm, was intrigued. That was five years earlier.

Washington Lee began to study. He also began to save. When he opened and gutted vending machines, he did not smoke the proceeds or drink them or shoot them into his arm or wear them as clothes. He saved them until he could buy a cheap computer in a bankruptcy sale.

"So how did you swindle the East River Savings Bank?"

"I broke into their mainframe," said the kid.

For a moment Cal Dexter thought a jimmy might have been involved, so he asked his client to explain. For the first time the boy became animated. He was talking about the only thing he knew.

"Man, have you any idea how weak some of the defensive systems created to protect databases really are?"

Dexter conceded it was not a query that had ever detained him. Like most nonexperts, he knew that computer-system designers created "firewalls" to prevent unauthorised access to hypersensitive databases. How they did it, let alone how to outwit them, had never occurred to him. He teased the story out of Washington Lee.

The East River Savings Bank had stored every detail of every account holder in a huge database. As clients' financial situations are regarded by most clients as very private, access to those details involved bank officers punching in an elaborate system of coded signals. Unless these were absolutely correct, the computer screen would simply flash the message "Access Denied." A third erroneous attempt to break in would start alarm signals, which would flash at the head office.

Washington Lee had broken the codes without triggering the alarms, to the point where the main computer buried below the bank's headquarters in Manhattan would obey his instructions. In short, he had performed coitus noninterruptus on a very expensive piece of technology.

His instructions were simple. He ordered the computer to identify every savings and deposit account held by clients of the bank and the monthly interest paid into those accounts. Then he ordered it to deduct twenty-five cents from each interest payment and transfer it into his own account.

As he did not have one, he opened one at the local Chase Manhattan. Had he known enough to transfer the money to the Bahamas, he would probably have gotten away with it.

It is quite a calculation to ascertain interest due on one's deposit account because it will depend on the ambient interest rate over the earning period, and that will fluctuate; and to get it to the nearest twenty-five cents takes time. Most people do not have that time. They trust the bank to do the math and get it right.

Not Mr. Tolstoy. He may have been eighty, but his mind was still sharp as a pin. His problem was boredom, whiling away his hours in his tiny apartment on West 108th Street. Having spent his life as an actuary for a major insurance company, he was convinced that even nickels and dimes count, if multiplied enough times. He spent his time trying to catch the bank in error. One day, he did.

He became convinced his interest due for the month of April was twenty-five cents short. He checked the figures for March. Same thing. He went back two more months. Then he complained.

The local manager would have given him the missing dollar, but rules are rules. He filed the complaint. Head office thought it was a single glitch on a single account but ran random checks on half a dozen other accounts. Same thing. Then the tech staff were called in.

They established that the master computer had done this to every checking account in the bank and had been doing so for twenty months. They asked it why.

"Because you told me to," said the computer.

"No, we didn't," said the techies.

"Well, someone did," said the computer.

That was when they called in Dan Mitkowski. It did not take very long. The transfers of all these quarters were to an account at the Chase Manhattan over in Brooklyn. Client's name: Washington Lee.

"Tell me, how much did all this net you?" asked Dexter.

"Just shy of a million dollars."

The lawyer bit the end off his pencil. No wonder the charge was so vague. "In excess of ten thousand dollars" indeed. The very size of the theft gave him an idea.

Mr. Lou Ackerman enjoyed his breakfast. For him it was the best meal of the day-never hurried like lunch, never overrich like banquet di