Unauthorized Access Read online

  Her co-worker, on the other hand, enjoyed anonymity behind the camera. A tiny diamond stud adorned one side of Shayna’s nose. She wore small oval glasses with black frames. Behind them her eyes seemed perpetually creased from smiling, in contrast to the rest of her smooth, brown face. Her normally curly hair had been straightened, parted and combed into two black curtains that ended just above the collar of her leather jacket.

  Shayna turned off Commonwealth Avenue onto the side street where Lesley’s brownstone apartment building was located.

  “So what are you up to tonight?” Shayna said. “Another exciting evening watching Dancing with the Stars with Leo the lion?”

  “Hey, he gets lonely staying home all day.”

  “I thought cats preferred being alone.”

  “He’s only a baby,” Lesley said. “And anyway, I’m going out with Rob tonight.”

  “What do you know, an actual social life.”

  “It’s the seventh anniversary of our first date.”

  “A special occasion, no less. Are we talking presents here?”

  “Not usually,” Lesley said, “but we always go out to dinner.”

  “Seven years. Damn, girlfriend. And you two ain’t hitched yet?”

  “We weren’t together all that time. We had this big fight after our first year of college and broke up, saw other people for a while.”

  “Still, that’s a long time to be with one guy and still be living with a cat.”

  “I suppose,” Lesley said, and then she grinned. “But he’s a really good cat.”

  Shayna shook her head as she stopped the van in front of Lesley’s building. “Sometimes I worry about you, girl.”

  * * *

  Tim leaned on the buzzer to Rob’s apartment for the third time. Rob’s parking slot was empty and earlier Rob had told Tim he was taking Lesley to dinner that night. Still, Tim wanted to be triple sure Rob was out.

  When he was completely satisfied, Tim took two keys from his pocket. These had been made months before when he “borrowed” the keys from Rob’s desk at work and had copies made at a nearby lock and key shop. He used one key to enter the building and, after taking the stairs two at a time, the other opened Rob’s apartment door.

  Once inside Tim pulled on a pair of latex gloves and started toward the spare bedroom. After only a few steps he noticed something new on the end table in the living room. He walked over to it and immediately felt the tightness grow between his shoulder blades. The framed photograph had not been there the last time he visited Rob’s apartment. It showed the happy couple sitting on a truly ugly plaid sofa with Rob’s arm around Lesley, drinks in their hands and sickening grins on their faces.

  Tim filled his lungs and blew out slowly through pursed lips until no more would come, held it while the oxygen debt grew. A jagged intake of air and only the tension at the back of his skull remained.

  At least he had resisted the urge to smash the picture.

  Tim recognized the occasion in the photo. Natalie Brewer’s party the previous Friday night had been yet another opportunity for Tim to strap on his happy face, to pretend he didn’t care.

  But this was no time to brood. Tim had work to do and he wanted to be out of the apartment quickly in case Rob and Lesley returned early from their dinner date. He took one last look at the photograph. His latex-covered finger traced the outline of Lesley’s face. Slowly, a tender caress.

  She was so perfect.

  * * *

  Lesley looked in the mirror over her dresser and sighed. Her hair had stymied her for as long as she could remember. She straightened, curled, brushed, parted and tied, but the end result was always the same—a confusion of waves with a will of its own. She gave up and put down the brush. A tiny bundle of orange fur pounced on it and tried to kill it.

  “It’s already dead, Leo,” Lesley said.

  The attack on the brush ended abruptly and the kitten leapt onto the nearby bed.

  “Oh no you don’t. I don’t want to find yellow stains on the blanket when I get home.”

  Lesley deposited Leo in the tiny apartment hallway and closed the bedroom door behind her. The kitten spotted a foam ball nearby, gave it a bat and raced after it.

  A car horn sounded from outside. Lesley crossed her living room and looked out the window at the street below. Rob waved at her through the windshield of his black Nissan Pathfinder.

  “Be good while I’m gone,” she said to Leo, who paid her no attention whatsoever. He was busy trying to disembowel the foam ball. She locked the apartment door, skipped lightly down two flights of stairs and got into Rob’s car.

  Rob gave her a quick kiss and said, “You’re not going to believe what happened today.”

  She pulled on her seat belt. “From the smile on your face I’d say it was something good.”

  “I’m going to owe your uncle a big Christmas present.”

  “Why?”

  Rob looked over his shoulder and pulled away from the curb.

  “You have to promise not to tell anyone,” he said.

  “All right.”

  “Stan would kill me if he found out I told you, but you know me. I can never keep anything from you.”

  Lesley knew this was true. It was torture for him to make it to her birthday without giving her hints about whatever present he had bought.

  “First Malden is looking to acquire another bank,” Rob said, “and Stan is putting me on the team that decides if the merger makes sense.”

  Lesley’s eyebrows shot up. “You’re kidding.”

  “If I impress the executive types, that could put me on a career path to eventually become an executive myself. I mean, I like computers and everything, but writing programs won’t make me rich.”

  Lesley grinned. “Will you remember me when you’re fabulously wealthy?”

  Rob reached over and gave her hand a squeeze.

  “I’ll need someone to help me spend all that money.”

  “Oh, I could be good at that.”

  Rob put on his blinker to turn right as they approached Commonwealth Avenue.

  “I thought we were going to Antonio’s,” she said.

  “We are.”

  “But downtown is the other way.”

  “Patience, my dear,” he said in a mock stage voice. “All will be revealed soon.”

  Her puzzlement grew as they drove toward Newton. Eventually he turned left onto a residential street, stopped by the curb and opened his door.

  “Hop out,” he said, “I have something to show you.”

  Rob went around to her side of the car and guided her across the sidewalk to a picket fence.

  “I saw it one morning last week when Tim and I were out biking,” he said. “What do you think?”

  The white Cape Cod occupied a corner lot with a collection of nicely trimmed shrubs. A young boy and girl were playing on a swing set in the back yard.

  “What am I supposed to be looking at?” Lesley asked.

  “There are bigger ones but this one seemed perfect.”

  “You mean the house?”

  “I can’t live in an apartment forever.”

  She turned to face him. “You mean you want to—”

  Her breath caught in her throat. Rob was down on one knee and held a tiny box open in his hand. The box contained a diamond ring.

  Lesley found she could no longer breathe. Was this really happening? Right here? Right now?

  He reached out with his free hand to hold one of hers.

  “Some day I’d like to carry you over the threshold into a house like this,” he said, “but first you have to agree to marry me.”

  Lesley felt tears well up in her eyes. She had never realized before then just how long she had been dreaming of this moment. She bit her lip and stared at the ring that sat so innocently in the little box with the lid flipped up. Two smaller stones flanked a good-sized diamond in the middle of the setting.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said.

  �
�Will you marry me?”

  Lesley peered into his dark brown eyes and felt a flush of warmth flood through her. His gaze made her feel loved and safe, like there was nowhere else on Earth she would rather be than with him, now or at any other time.

  “Of course I’ll marry you,” she said.

  He rose to his feet and took the ring out of the box. Lesley’s hand trembled as he slipped it on her finger. She flung her arms around his neck, gave him a hard squeeze, then pulled back to look at the ring once more.

  “It fits perfectly,” she said.

  “I borrowed a ring from your jewelry box so the store could size it for you.”

  “Mom will freak.”

  “Probably. You want to call her tonight? Or we could drive home and show her on the weekend.”

  Lesley’s eyes were still on the ring. “I don’t know. I’d rather do it in person but I don’t think I can wait that long.” She looked up at him. “Have you told your parents?”

  “I haven’t told anybody. I was dying to tell Tim before I left work today, but I didn’t.”

  She looked back at the house.

  “Do the kids in the back yard come with the house?” she said.

  “I think we have to supply those ourselves.”

  She wiped at her cheeks and ended up with black smudges on her hand.

  “We better stop somewhere so I can fix my makeup.”

  “We can stop at my place,” Rob said, “but we should probably get going. Antonio’s has a bottle of wine chilled for us and a corner table with our name on it.”

  “I like the sound of that.”

  “It’s a nice place.”

  “No, I mean what you just said … our name.”

  The kiss was long and passionate, after which Lesley’s face wasn’t the only one with smudges.

  * * *

  Tim looked around the spare bedroom while he waited for Rob’s computer to boot up. He was searching for a suitable place to hide the sheet of paper he had brought in his knapsack.

  A sagging ski poster hung on one wall over a set of bookshelves made of one-by-eights and red bricks. Some of the textbooks on the shelves took Tim back in time. Database Design. Rob had made one mark higher in that course but ended up with an A-minus to Tim’s B-plus. It still pissed Tim off to think of it.

  The computer sat on a beat-up oak desk. Tim remembered the struggle he and Rob had squeezing the old desk out the front door of Rob’s home back in Worcester when they were both leaving for college.

  The desk was probably the best place to hide the paper. He needed somewhere Rob wouldn’t happen upon the page for a couple of days, but where a dedicated search would be sure to find it. Tim wasn’t sure if the bank’s security people would actually search Rob’s apartment. He had no idea whether they had the legal right to do so, or what sort of investigative capabilities they had. Could they check fingerprints? Would they be able to trace the electronic trails Tim was creating? He didn’t know, but he was going to make sure all the evidence pointed in the same direction.

  Tim smiled at the thought of a grim-faced crew pawing through all the desks and file cabinets of the bank’s IT staff, and of the moment when one of them would call to his supervisor, “Sir, I think you should look at this.” Tim could only guess which of his bread crumb trails would lead them to Rob, but he was certain of one thing; the bank would keep it quiet. He had seen it before when a First Malden teller named Janeen Colwell was caught helping her friends with a check kiting scheme. She had been quietly fired, with no charges laid and no police involvement. The only long-term consequence was that she would receive no reference from the bank. As Tim understood the policy, protecting the public image of the bank’s security trumped any desire for punishment.

  Tim had every confidence that policy was about to be invoked again, in a big way.

  He pulled open the top desk drawer and selected one of Rob’s pens. Laying the sheet of paper on the desk, he circled part of the text, drew a happy face next to it, then turned the paper over and doodled on the back. He put the pen away and the paper went in the bottom desk drawer, face down under a mound of junk mail and old bills.

  By this time the computer was ready. Tim produced a memory stick, which contained a program he had created to send emails to selected people at First Malden. The first batch of emails would go out right away, after which Tim’s program would wait until two p.m. Eastern Time the following afternoon and then send a second series of messages. The emails could not travel directly from Rob’s home computer to their final destinations, though. That was too obvious. Tim had to insert a couple of levels of misdirection to make the scenario realistic.

  He was still amazed at how easy it had been to gain access to the computer accounts he needed. The scripts he had downloaded from the hacker web site had been easy to use. It had taken him less than half an hour to gather IDs and passwords for dozens of computer accounts across the country. Today he needed only two.

  The first account was at the University of Kentucky. A few taps on the keyboard and the program containing his email message flew off down the telephone line to land in Lexington. It felt strange to type with the latex gloves on.

  From the Kentucky account, Tim signed on to a UCLA computer and the program made another hop through cyberspace. He issued a few commands to create a new email id, then started his program running. In a second-floor lab on the west coast campus, the wait for tomorrow began.

  Tim sat back and swiveled his head to release the tension in his neck. It seemed unreal that his plan was finally underway. He reached for the mouse to begin shutting down the computer, but then froze when he heard voices in the hallway outside Rob’s apartment. Adrenaline coursed through his body when he recognized Rob’s voice. What happened to dinner?

  Tim didn’t have time to go through the normal steps to shut down the machine. He pushed the power button and held it until the computer shut off, did the same for the monitor, then looked around frantically for a place to hide.

  There was only one option. He grabbed his knapsack, ducked into the spare bedroom’s closet, wedged himself in one corner behind some clothes and pulled the folding door shut.

  Tim’s mind raced. Any hopes of ending up with Lesley would fly out the window if he were discovered. He had no reasonable explanation for being in Rob’s apartment, especially if they found him hiding in a closet. And Rob would know just where to point the finger when the excitement started at the bank. Tim heard a door open and Lesley said, “I won’t be long.”

  Tim slouched further back into the closet. All he could think to do if they found him was run out the door and keep on going.

  * * *

  Rob rose from the couch when Lesley finally emerged from the bathroom.

  “At last,” he said. “I thought you were going to spend the night in there.”

  “How do I look?” she said.

  “Perfect, as usual.”

  “Flattery will get you everywhere.”

  Rob slipped his arms around her waist.

  “That’s what I’m counting on,” he said, and kissed her.

  She pulled back. “We better get going before I have to fix my face for a third time.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t go anywhere.”

  He snuggled in closer and went for her neck.

  She pushed him away, more firmly this time.

  “No way,” she said. “You promised me a corner table at Antonio’s and I’m holding you to it. Besides, I have to show this diamond ring to somebody tonight, even if it’s only a stranger at a restaurant.”

  Rob let go with an exaggerated sigh. “Okay.”

  “But if we have enough of that wine, you never know what might happen afterward.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  That’s when Rob’s cell phone rang.

  * * *

  Tim slumped in the darkness of the closet. His jaw worked in agitation and his breaths came in tiny gasps. He held his mouth open, doing his best to keep his b
reathing quiet. Being forced to sit and listen while they flirted was almost more than he could bear. And she mentioned a diamond ring! Tim shut his eyes and willed Rob and Lesley to leave so this would be over.

  * * *

  “Oh, man, I can’t,” Rob said into the phone. “I’m totally busy tonight.”

  He paused, and then said, “But I’m already doing something important. Can’t you find someone else?” His face became grim while he listened for a moment. Finally he sighed and said, “All right, I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  Rob ended the call.

  “I’m not going to like it, am I?” Lesley said.

  “That was John Kelleher. I have to go in to work right away.”

  Lesley groaned. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “There’s some sort of emergency. He wouldn’t tell me what it is.”

  “And no one else can handle it?”

  “He gave me the choice of coming in tonight or finding another job tomorrow.”

  Lesley’s lower lip pushed out in a mock pout. “What a shame. I had such plans for you tonight.”

  “Maybe the problem won’t take long to fix.”

  “You should be so lucky.”

  “Come on, let’s go,” Rob said.

  Tim heard the door open and close, and then their footsteps receded in the hallway. Silence engulfed the apartment. The door to the spare bedroom closet remained closed for a long, long time.

  CHAPTER THREE

  EACH OF THE fourteen branches of the First Malden Bank contained a state-of-the-art, fireproof, walk-in vault with an impressively thick door. Customers visiting any branch could see the vault behind the counter and might reasonably assume the bank’s money was held within.

  It was not.

  The vaults certainly held their share of valuables, including modest amounts of cash to support day-to-day operations. The vast bulk of First Malden’s monetary holdings, however, resided in a box on the fifth floor of the bank’s headquarters.

  The box in question emitted a distinct hum twenty-four hours a day, ran the Unix operating system and was arguably the most important of the several computers in the bank’s data processing center. Bank staff referred to this computer as the account server. Its primary function was to run the Account Management System, or AMS for short. This system kept track of all monetary accounts and the many thousands of deposits, withdrawals, transfers and other account transactions that took place each day.