Redstone Group, Supplying Corporate Needs
by Mingus Casey
Redstone Group, Supplying Corporate Needs
This isn't a perfect crime.
I guess I can tell this story because of life experience.
Everyone was talking about scams, from crashing random office parties and drinking free alcohol, stealing a little bit of money from their parents to buy lollies for their secret club, and finally, scams of the heart.
They say money is never about money and love is never about love when it is written. I don't know if that's true.
I guess crime is war and love is pain.
This is a theft and a sad love story. I don't know what colour it is, it might be a light grey, it might be dark grey. I know what colour it isn't, it isn't black or white, one and zero. I don't approve of scams of the heart, I never did. I value love so much more highly than money, but I've always been able to take money for granted.
Love, on the other hand... I would die for her love.
I'll die a free man.
Those were all small scams tho. I wanted to do a perfect crime. Not just any crime, a flawless theft with no witnesses and no motive and no detection. It's the sort of crime you would never ever hear about, because no one ever got caught.
Much later, after it all, maybe three years later, I was watching the news and a man was on tv, in police custody. It was a high profile case, over fifteen million dollars had been stolen from the Redstone Group.
I recognised him, Michael Ritchie, ex employee of Redstone Group, employed as a programmer and in accounts.
I didn't see much of the news, apparently he got greedy, and almost would have never been caught. They had recovered the majority of the money and he was trying to say it was all of it, but there was still about one point two million dollars missing. I don't think he ever said what happened to it, he claimed to say all he knew, unfortunately for Michael by that point he was a convicted fraudster in prison.
Armourguard employees and lawyers and politicians have gone rogue for less than that in this city.
I was familiar with the company, an old school friend had worked there briefly to do the auditing. I remember him from high school days, we never got along that well back then. Over time we matured, and I realised he was about more than just straight A's and money, he cared about people and that was his redemption in my eyes. He cared about money too, which was why he called me out of the blue.
The Redstone Group is one of the largest corporate lending institutes. It has hundreds of thousands of customers across multiple continents all over the world. In New Zealand alone the majority of the Top 500 rated SE40 companies hold accounts with Redstone.
My friend, Stan, was employed by a temp agency as a fully trained accountant at that point. With his previous managerial experience he was, on paper, the perfect candidate to manage the New Zealand Redstone audit.
He's smart, smarter than most, and he can spot patterns and breaks in patterns. Numbers have meaning to him, and I guess he must get a kick out of analysing them. Perhaps its the dollars and cents on the paper.
He'd spotted a trickle from the accounts, just one or two cents, charged off on top of bank fees, or out of bank interest. One or two cents doesn't sound like a lot.
I guess a good metaphor is a dripping tap, there used to be an advert with a dripping tap and they say this one dripping tap fills up a swimming pool if left dripping for this long. I can't remember the exact advert, it doesn't matter, the important thing is you get the metaphor.
Well, one or two cents isn't a lot, it doesn't mean much to you or me. But if you multiply that by several hundred thousand large accounts, it becomes a ridiculous amount of money. He was the manager of the auditors and he was the only one who had realised this error had occurred. He thought about telling it to the owner of the company, and then thought better of it. Instead he called me, early in the morning. I always kept early hours, so three am wasn't that strange a time to be called.
When he told me what he'd found, I knew what the next step was. The next step was to harvest this feed. There was a lot of money sitting there.
With hindsight, perhaps other people would have told the owner or the police.
I realised we had to find out where the employee was hiding the money.
Stan could follow the cash up to a certain point, then it went invisible. It went invisible however, in bank tallied expenses, a sub department of accounting. Generally they used programs to automatically deal with the money.
We realised, while talking the next day (we met for coffee, he takes his with two sugars and milk, I drink mine long and black), that we would need a hacker to track whatever magic was making the money flow disappear. I think I could guess at that point, a rogue employee was fiddling an expense account, perhaps the same employee who had setup the rort. Stan still had two weeks on his contract at that point.
That's when I called Joshua, he's one of my closest friends and he's dealt with Internet security and both black and white hat hacking for years. His operating system of choice is *nix, and he's a god at open source. He made the firewall I use to keep myself safe on the net, when it comes to computer security he is the most dangerous person I know.
I met him on the waterfront, this time I bought the V, he loves the stuff, drinks it like theres no tomorrow. We sat on a bench, and he tried to tell me all the reasons the scam wouldn't work. Because the accounting couldn't have been setup like that. But it was. And I knew the only man smart enough to spot that pattern and know to call me.
Because the police would spot that we'd taxed the revenue flow. But I pointed out that we already had a fall guy, the man who had setup the flow. We just had to find out who it was, who was exploiting this. Then I thought about how to get more information. Information is power.
A lot of the information is in data streams, ones and zeros aligned perfectly and made from electrons. The rest of it is in people, it always was.
It seemed to me at that point to be the perfect crime. Later I would realise that nothing was ever so simple.
Every true crime needs a few things, it needs a motive, it needs opportunity, and there's always a victim. Perfect crimes are a little harder. The perfect crime is the one that was never detected. It would be shallow to think my motive was simply money. I had money, I always had, to the point where I could take it for granted, and yet I found myself worrying about it. My goals in life are to try to find love and happiness and safety, a place to rest and recover for a little while, to find someone to have my children with, to get qualifications and an income, and to learn how to be a better person than I am.
With information, you can make better decisions. I had decided that I would form a team to steal this trickle. We wouldn't be looking at too much each, the trickle had been harvested recently. Maybe one and a half, maybe two million between us all up.
Social engineering is the one true art of hacking that any lay person can learn. The principle is that you talk to people in order to gain information from them that you can then use to your own advantage.
I can socially engineer when I have to, but it doesn't flow for me naturally. In a way I'm glad it doesn't, I've seen the corruption in some people. I'm better at introductions and knowing the right people to get the job done.
Joshua was a half decent social engineer, in his younger days me and him had gone to work related forums, Cisco forums, IBM forums (the food at the IBM forum tasted like what IBM would taste like if you ate it, bland and tasteless and full of fake nutrition). After the IBM forum I wondered if there was a cook out there who hated IBM. I remember in fight club, the line, clean food please. Well the IBM food wasn't clean, it might have been rich but it wasn't clean.
He'd already found out about a Redstone service demonstration forum happening three weeks away, and we knew we could turn up and socially engineer it.
Joshua wasn't the best tho, and to pull off this trick, we needed the best.
So I called her, and asked for coffee. First she said “Fuck you,” and hung up on me.
I wasn't sure why she said fuck you. No one ever says fuck you to me in real life, generally because I don't do anything worth saying fuck you to me about. I tend to avoid stepping on peoples toes.
It was different with us tho, we both had pride, and I'd shafted her in the settlement by pulling out a pre-nup.
She got fifty k and a kid that wasn't mine that I'd bonded with in a big way and she didn't even leave me the cat.
And she still wanted to say fuck you to me.
I guess we were about even.
In a way I was glad she said fuck you, it really brought home to me her edge and aggression in a way that a simple hello would have never done. The breakup didn't go well, she'd manipulated me in the same way she'd manipulated so many others. And me, young and naive before I met her, I had no idea and fell in love at first sight, even now I'm still in love with her.
She was my first wife, smooth and charming and seductive and beautiful and brilliant at reading people and getting what she wanted. She was the best actor I have ever met. She got what she wanted from me to start with, but later on as I wised up and realised, we kinda fell apart. The worst was when I realised the daughter we'd had wasn't mine, it tore me in two literally.
She was thirteen now, and she'd gone a bit rogue after the split up. I wasn't there for her, and someone had to be, and I felt that but at the same time she wasn't mine and my ex had basically blocked her off from me. There were still bad feelings between me and my ex.
Still, I never met a better player, and a player was what I needed. We'd broken up ten years ago now and there had been a few flings in between, but nothing serious, nothing with love, and she knew I needed love to keep going, and, even worse, that I still loved her. I don't think she'll ever love me, right from the start I knew what she was and I should've stayed away.
I sent her a text, saying I had work for her, and that it would be worth her while. Then I waited half an hour and called her again, this time she was warmer, and she didn't insult me right away.
I told her we had to meet up in real life, somewhere private, somewhere safe to talk. She suggested Lambton Square Park, I knew the one.
We'd sat there before and looked at the signs and the people walking past, there were trees and a fountain and we were almost right next to the court house.
There was a Redstone sign on the side of a high-rise above us, she didn't register it, but after my conversation with Stan I couldn't miss it.
I met her there, I'd shaved beforehand and I was wearing a shirt with tie for a change. Normally I wear casual. The dreads I'd had while I was with her were long gone and I had a more conventional haircut.
She still looked great, wearing dark blue jeans and a black top that was almost skin tight, covering her arms with a dark woolen knee high trench coat around her shoulders.
She looked at me and smiled and I felt my heart pound a little faster, and I knew that for me, talking to her was dangerous, more dangerous than doing the job even.
I can write this as fiction, because it was the perfect crime. There is no evidence to prove that any of us apart from Stan ever had a connection to Redstone. And Stan may be the auditor that spots the error that solves the perfect crime.
I think he got more work there down the track, but he never called me out of the blue about Redstone Company ever again.
All we needed was more information to make a move. There was an opportunity, we just had to exploit it.
Stan had a login onto their network, he thought it would help Joshua. It didn't really make much difference really. See, Redstone are a big corporation, and their technology is cutting edge. They had invested in wireless networking their whole office and a large part of Lambton Square Park.
Joshua knew about wireless networking, he knew why he would never use it. Wireless Encryption Protocol was meant to keep hackers out, locking IP addresses to certain ones listed was meant to stop rogue computers showing up on the network, fixing Mac addresses was meant to make sure no unauthorised network adapter could get on the network.
For every door, there is a key. Josh was browsing insecure.org when I visited, getting the latest version of nmap. He'd already tried to do a port scan on their web-server from a compromised box in Eastern Europe. It's not hard to exploit unguarded hardware on the net. Especially when you have enough skill to sell your own guarding abilities.
In a way he was the ultimate cop gone rogue, never once influenced by the justice departments code of ethics and honor, simply left to his own with the Internet and a desire to hack. The initial port scan didn't show up, only that they also ran an ftp server, and an open ssh feed that he couldn't decrypt at that point.
He realised that to get inside their network he'd need a bit of hardware, business expenses and all. When he said that to me I realised that this wasn't as easy as it seems, they never ever let you simply walk in empty handed and walk out with the money. That was what we were going to do. We just needed to spend money first.
With my real-estate hookups I quickly found an apartment that was within wireless networking range of Redstone. It was two hundred and ninety a week, and we were locked into a one year contract, that was already fifteen grand.
It was under a false name, however I do like to keep even my non existent credit histories clean.
After that expense, none of the others seemed that major.
Josh needed a computer, a good one, with good wireless networking gear. I remember in the early days he'd played with coke cans as antennas, but I wanted to get him something serious, something that was worth the professional level that he would have to apply to pull off this scam.
It cost four grand all up, but it was a beautiful laptop, eight hour battery life, small and compact and portable, we could work with this on the run, with, most importantly, total Linux compatibility, and one of the best wireless network cards in the business.
I realised at that point that I'd already spent twenty grand on a gamble, but I don't gamble, that was the secret. From the way Stan talked I knew it was a sure thing, we just had to have the right pieces, my ex-wife to extract the human information, Joshua to extract the networked information, and when we had enough information we could sting the thief so badly, or, better yet, send the thief down for our crime.
That's what made it perfect. A clean getaway can be a hard thing to do.
Joshua left his gear in the apartment, set up a wireless network encryption cracker, this application, left alone, is able to break the tightest wep keys within max a few weeks. The best thing is that it's undetectable, it simply receives and processes information during the cracking stage, never transmits. He also setup an ssh link to his home via City link. Then we went out, we had more work to do.
We raided the dumpster outside Redstone that night, sorting through their trash we found a lot of paper work about accounts and transactions and customers that normally we might have tried to exploit. This time around tho, that information felt petty and small. We quickly bundled the sacks into the back of Josh's suv, and got out of there fairly rapidly.
We sat there for a while, looking through the paperwork, Josh said to me, “We're after the technical information, this time the accounts don't matter,” and I reminisced to when the accounts did matter, the early days of social engineering and free pizzas on corporate credit cards.
We'd leafed through about half the trash by then, when I came across a folder of technical data on the internal network systems. I knew we had it made right then, this was exactly what Josh would need to spoof an ip and mac address.
It was a full list of their ip tables with allowable ip ranges, combined with a relatively up to date list of the computers (and their static ip addresses) that were on the network and the computers that were undergoing repairs.
We didn't find a login, we knew we could brute force a login within half a day, max, or use Stan's. What we had now would let us pretend to be a part of their network, a stealth computer that appears to be completely clean and legit, their techs probably would not notice that. We knew we'd probably miss it, which reassured us and made me nervous about our own security. I asked Josh to double check the security of the ssh feed from the apartment, and to ensure there was no information that could lead to his real location left on the laptop.
He quickly reassured me, “It all goes through Eastern Europe before it gets anywhere near New Zealand again, multiple hacked proxies and it's heavily encrypted, we're safe,” and I felt relieved but nervous.
I knew there was a weak link.
That night I went back to my place to sleep, and sat on the net for hours, researching cyber crime and how to commit and fight it, the techniques both sides used.
I realised that the real hackers will always find a way to create an edge, the defense has evolved in response to the attack, the offense always has the edge.
There are new exploits generated daily, their effects can vary from sending down an entire network of computers, through to disabling one single router for a brief period of time, right up to breaking into a system, gaining root access and Josh knew them all.
Right before I fell asleep, I knew the technical aspects of breaking into their system would work out. I had the best. Now I had to talk to Stan again, find out the human information we needed, I wasn't quite sure on that but I knew it would be necessary.
Back at Lambton Square Park, I skipped a bit. I do that with time sometimes when I have to explain things piece by piece. See at the moment, I'm putting the pieces together.
This is the introduction.
Back at Lambton Square Park, I met Julia. She was still a smoker, I'd given up shortly after we broke up. She was sitting on the park bench, and offered me one. I reluctantly said no. Then she got up and said, “Still drink the same coffee?”
I nodded and she moved towards a coffee kiosk, ordering two take away coffees. I didn't hear what she ordered precisely, but she came back with two coffees and offered me one. I accepted, and we sat and started to talk.
She asked me what the job was, and I said social engineering. She said “What?” followed by a brief sharp look at me, and I said “Manipulating people,” in one short breath.
She looked at me again and her eyes showed a tiny bit of hurt and I felt guilty. I thought she might be about to go on the offense at me. We were upfront with each other back then, more or less.
Instead she asked why, why do you want me for this job.
I said because I want the best, I always did, and you are the best at reading men and getting what you want.
She looked at me and said “Is that how you feel about our relationship?”
I realised she might well walk away and I didn't want that. It hurt me inside as well, the problem was I never totally got over how I felt about her. I had to change the subject, our past was dangerous territory emotionally.
“Let's talk about work,” moved out of my mouth before I felt it was there and she looked at me with a little more understanding than before, but I wondered if she misunderstood at the same time.
Maybe that misunderstanding was the only reason she took the job.
She asked me the specifics and I told her, that we had spotted a revenue leak, and only one person, the employee who had created and was exploiting it knew how to get it. We didn't really need the exact information as it turned out, but we did need information from him and about him.
I told her the plan was to seduce him, to get the information we needed out of him. The thought never occurred to me that the employee might be gay or female, but fortunately we lucked out like that.
I told her we would know the identity of the employee once Josh had fully exploited their systems and analysed the information, within a few weeks we would know. I also told her what the pay off could potentially be, and she nodded slightly and looked at me with a bit more wonder, I guess she was wondering why I would get her in on an opportunity like this.
I was probably wrong about that.
I sipped the coffee and looked at the fountain and then looked at her and asked her if she was interested in the work. She nodded slowly.
Then she got up and looked at me and said “I'm not what you think I am,” and moved away.
Suddenly I felt empty and cold, and I almost called her back. But what could I have said, and she was going to do the job. Later I realised Julia had her own motives for nodding, but I don't know if she had those motives when she nodded.
I went home and felt terrible about the idea of her with some corrupt corporate asshole, and at the same time I would be the one that'd push her towards him. I'd have to tell her not to sleep with him, but then she might ask me why not., or if I thought she was going to just for money, it would be awkward.
I guess I never thought about the irony of her with some corrupt thieving asshole.
I guess the real reason was because I wanted to be the only guy who slept with her even then, ten years after we'd broken up. Still, she'd agreed to do the job, and we were going to have a friendly work relationship, and that was all I wanted at that moment from her.
Josh called me a week later, and said “I've got the wep key, and a valid mac address and ip from the paperwork we raided.”
I grinned and said lets meet up for some butter chicken. Josh knew how I felt about butter chicken, and I think he shared some of the love.
We went to Citystop, interestingly Citystop does the best butter chicken in Wellington, far cheaper than anywhere else, the only disadvantage is that its microwaved, but the price to quality ratio is unbeatable, there is a place on Willis St that charges an extra five dollars and serves smaller worse portions. They do include naan bread however.
He bought the drinks, and I bought the butter chicken, and we walked down a thin alley towards the waterfront.
The waterfront is a beautiful part of Wellington to walk through, especially at night. That was one thing me and Josh had in common, we both lived at night, he would stay up for hours implementing the latest *nix installs or coding and designing websites, but when he got really serious he would sit there for days tightening his own security, making it unbreakable, or, and he didn't talk much about this, attempting to get into other peoples systems. Security compromising was what I had hired him for, and I appreciated his desire for discretion.
I had never thought about it before, but Nyx, the goddess of night, daughter of chaos, perhaps the name *nix meant something to someone once upon a time.
He talked to me about this of course, said he was inside the Windows web server through a Microsoft IIS exploit, and he was inside their virtual network masquerading as a machine that was being returned to the manufacturer for servicing at that point. The fact they were returning the hardware to the manufacturer said to me their techs can't be that great, and I felt lucky. Personally I would have diagnosed the part or software that had failed and replaced that, potentially at manufacturers expense, but not every tech is as good as me.
Turned out they were outsourcing all the work, we had no risk from a nosy technician, when the technicians are in New Delhi, India doing phone support, they just cannot keep as good an eye on the network as someone who works on the premises.
It's an example of how outsourcing and expense cutting leads to errors in other areas.
He figured he had three to four days to get me the information I needed, and find another machine to stealth. The next step for him was to isolate the accounting subnetwork, and then the bank tallied expenses, and then extract those records. I don't know exactly how he did it, we talked trade, but I never asked the exact specifics, I figured it was safer for me not to know and I felt his agreement in what he didn't say. Once I had that information he could back off for a bit, or keep stealthing, his choice.
So far I had kept each person involved in the job separate, and I thought it wise to continue that. After it, if it went perfectly, maybe we could meet up for drinks.
Two days later Josh handed me the entire records of bank tallied expenses, and the logins and user names of all users who had edited those records. Fortunately his company had maintained and installed similar security setups to what Redstone used so he found it quite easily to override and break into the main security logs and erase his presence. He had simply brute forced the admin account, which they had stupidly left on the default password.
He couldn't believe his luck, it's the sort of thing that people only do in the real world.
With the login and user name list of all edits, and the expenses records, I paid Stan a visit.
Stan lived in an apartment on Taranaki Street, just off Wellington central. He was a wealthy accountant by this point, but he had always been single that I knew of.
He said “You've gotten me what I needed, leave me alone with this for a few days and I'll tell you who the thief is, and how their doing it.”
I knew it was working then, it was working flawlessly like a swiss watch where all the pieces come together. Real life never works this well, not for me, not this far in anyways. This is why it really was the perfect crime. When it does work well, too well, I sometimes start to mistrust.
Stan called me a day and a half later, he sounded manic like he hadn't slept, and he said we need to meet asap. He called me at about ten in the morning, a time when I am often asleep. I think I muttered briefly to him and hung up the phone.
I lay there for a bit and fell asleep, I started to have dreams, of the water and falling in and looking around and realising I was only human like everyone else.
An hour later the phone rang again and this time I answered it. I had a pen and paper next to where I slept so I was ready to jot down information. He said to me I know who it is now, with the login information as well, and I said yeah? He still sounded manic, and I wrote down the name he gave me, Michael Ritchie.
Getting personal records off their systems was easy for Josh, I really had picked the right people.
He'd worked there for about fifteen years all up in various departments, starting out as basic office admin, and moving his way around. At some point he'd studied programming, and had been offered a stint as programmer approximately five years ago.
The project he was on was, interestingly, the accounts payable financial software, Redstone had hoped to automate a large amount of the work, and they had quite possibly saved millions in terms of wages and employee expenses.
A year later he was transferred to simply admining the accounts payable software, and I think perhaps the manager didn't trust him any more after that point, and he was buffed down to simple quality control over bank tallied expenses, a sub department of accounting..
With his personnel file in hand, I called Julia and asked to meet her for another coffee, this time at the Lido, next to the central library and just down the road from the central police station. A lot f traffic drives past it, but it's still a nice place to meet.
She said “I can't do tomorrow, I've got something on, but I can do thirty minutes at seven thirty. That was forty minutes away so I started moving. I tended to walk around Wellington, most of us did, we all lived so centrally.
It took me three or four minutes to get my shoes on and find my wallet and organise the files into a dossier for her, and then I was moving out the door and down the hill.
When I arrived, three or four minutes early, she was already sitting there. She offered me another cigarette and this time I took it, I was feeling good from the pieces coming together, and it felt good to be with her again after so long.
She asked me what was up, and I explained to her about the dossier and the man inside it, and the Redstone forum in two weeks time.
Then she asked me, “Well what do you want me to do with him,” and I quickly muttered don't sleep with him, just get the information we need to do this.
She smiled ever so slightly to herself, it would have been imperceptible had I not known her for so long. I think she knew the power she had the potential to hold over m, but at that point I was the one in power.
Information is power, and I had just handed her enough information to find her target. Now I had to put into words exactly what information I needed to extract. I had also done a google search on Michael Ritchie, found a copy of his cv, and, ironically a less detailed version of the same personnel page that was sitting in Julia's dossier.
She asked me if I really thought she was the best, without specifying quite what for, and I nodded and felt slightly sick.
I asked her if she felt like getting a little bit of food with me and she smiled and said “I only had half an hour,” and got up.
This time she didn't say goodbye quite so... smoothly but not... so somethingy, it was a bit warmer and I realised I was in danger of having my heart stolen.
I walked off alone and felt empty again, and got a kebab from a takeaway place on Cuba on my way home.
I thought about the risk of sexual tension between me and Julia making the job fail. It wouldn't break the job, it might break my heart. Problem is, I don't like having my heart broken for any amount of money. I started to have misgivings about it all.
There was so much work to do and I realised I was almost overloaded, in between researching the job, putting the pieces together, and socialising, I realised I was starting to neglect other areas of my life. Still, one thing at a time I guess.
I had to eat, so I figured I would go out and get some take out food. For a while I quite enjoyed satay food, there's a place that serves the best satay in Wellington on Left bank just off Cuba mall, their rhoti chanai is especially good, and their other meals are well above par. I have to recommend eating it takeout, as it is quite a messy meal, but it tastes great. Also, the vegetarian has more substance to it.
After ordering I waited on my usual spot, on concrete steps just down from a set of stairs to apartments. For some reason every time I've ever sat there I've seen a cute girl who will smile at me. I tend to smile back and wait for my order, one day if it feels right I might try for some conversation.
Then I get up and move off through the rear towards home.
After eating, I went home and thought about fate. My ex-wife was interested in witch-craft, as was my first lover, Hecate was the goddess of the underworld and the crossroads and she was once truly beautiful but now she is a little aged, some call her a crone and lover of the god of shadows.
I remembered I had to call someone. I also had overdue library books, I had found every piece of information about Redstone, including, interestingly, that several major arms firms based in the European Union held stock in Redstone. Approximately four years ago its stock value had shot up, potentially caused by heavy investment.
My neck was still stiff from the weekend as the Redstone forum rolled around, on Tuesday.
Michael Ritchie was thirty five, a longterm disgruntled employee of Redstone, he had worked there since he was twenty, he was a Caucasian male of average height and above average build, I guess theres no polite way to say someone is large. He was large physically, and, I imagined, large in his human appetites. I hoped he had sexual appetites as well as his obvious greed for financial gains.
In the id photo attached to his personnel file he had blonde hair and a mustache.
Who we were targeting looked a lot like a real version of the comic book store guy from the Simpson's who had gone completely rogue.
I wondered if he would have a similar personality, and hoped not. I didn't want Julia to go through too much stress over this, and I was hoping he was an easy mark.
He'd worked all over the show, starting as office admin, promoted to a different department, and at some point he had studied Computer science briefly at Massey university.
About five years before the job he had become programmer, a relatively professional position, and had implemented the new accounts payable software, along with customisations to better suit Redstone Group's unique business environment. Or that was how he'd sold what he was doing. The truth would read a little like it involving those customisations better suiting his unique lifestyle. Which seemed to entail extravagant amounts of money, but we didn't know what he was doing with that money.
Josh said it was probably gambling, and I think he may have been right. I know IT staff like to get into amphetamines at times, but he didn't appear to have that problem judging from his build.
Fortunately I had always avoided that kind of problem, but I was vulnerable in other ways, I was lonely most nights and at times I cried myself to sleep, even then.
That was my Achilles heel, love is the biggest lever in my oh so human and frail mind.
I realised, I wasn't stealing over a million, I was rather trying to make contact with my ex on whatever terms would be stable between us.
I was dumb like that, and I knew she was gonna play me, I should have seen it from a mile away and I did, but even with the playing there was love mixed with it, love that I had once believed was real, before reality got smashed apart by the reappearance of her childs father.
That fucked me over emotionally in a big way.
And now here I was, asking for it again. I didn't realise that the game would work out differently this time. Not happily, just differently I guess. At least this time it was mine, that was some bitter sweet consolation. Course by then I was burnt too bad for it to ever work with her for much longer than the duration of the job, I think we both felt the same way.
It was Monday and I had to call her, make sure she was sweet as for the Redstone forum tomorrow. Julia picked up the phone on the third ring, and said heya. I said heya back and we organised another meeting. All Julia had to do was find out the last key, where he had squirreled the money in the accounting system. After that, with information from Stan passed on by me, Joshua could safely withdraw and transfer the money.
Internet money laundering would normally be hard. This time we would simply use the trail Michael Ritchie had setup, up to a certain point. Then we would make it invisible. The easiest way to get something is to simply walk in and take it.
She would have to bug his home computer with a keyboard logger and a Trojan and that was it. Neither me nor Joshua nor Stan could simply walk into his apartment, but perhaps Julia could. It would all depend on how the forum went.
Both fit easily on the portable memory drive I would hand to Julia later on on Monday. I had always been good to my geek friends, and at times they rewarded me. The Trojan and key logger were programmed by a friend who had edged towards the dark side of coding, and both were completely undetectable by all commercial anti virus software, and tiny. Even Josh would have trouble spotting these, but it was still possible, netstat -a would show a list of all sessions made to or from his computer, so we had customised the software to again transmit via Eastern European ip addresses, encrypted, before it bounced back to Josh. We couldn't hide it from netstat -a, but neither would show up at any other point, not when the user presses control-alt-delete, not when the user types in msconfig or services.msc, maybe when a very smart user manually checks every single automated start up, even then it was unlikely.
It didn't seem like that hard a task all up, but we couldn't exactly break into his home, that would be home invasion and potentially assault, and we were clean white collar criminals who wouldn't physically or emotionally hurt anyone who didn't have it coming to them.
So all Julia would have to do would be to briefly plug in a usb key, and press enter a few times.
I figured I should take along a portable computer to our next meeting for her to experiment with.
Our next meeting went a bit better than the last. She'd understood from the way I had talked in the earlier meetings that this would definitely be worth her while, but she was starting to wonder why I didn't just hire an actress for ten or twenty thousand. It was because I always wanted the best, regardless of the price I would have to pay, both financially and emotionally, and besides, only the best could make this job work. Also, I knew she would never talk, never break, none of us would, ever, apart from me now. She saw that I was totally focused on the job at hand, and I think maybe she also saw in my eyes how beautiful and smart and cunning I believed she was.
I don't know what she saw in my eyes but I think she liked it. My heart fluttered a bit more as she sat slightly closer to me than before. I realised that when she said yes to the job, she was really saying yes to a lot more, and when I was asking her if she wanted to do the job, I was asking far more than I knew.
I thought to myself maybe she's trying to do a job on me, but then I just relaxed. I asked her if she wanted to go out drinking and dancing with me after she'd met with him and she coyly nodded. Maybe she felt she owed me something, but the job hadn't paid out yet, so it would have been wrong for me to do that then. That came later on.
I showed her the laptop, booted it up, and showed her exactly how to use the usb key to upload the virus's onto his or any computer. She got what she had to do, play interested enough in him that he would want to meet with her and take her back to his apartment (we knew so much about him by then, where he lived, his favorite foods, and it did turn out his biggest weakness was a girl like Julia), where she just had to use the computer for a few moments privately to check her messages.
I told her to call me asap if anything went wrong, and that I would be waiting with Josh in his suv about a block away.
It looks so easy when its on ink and paper, but in real life sometimes the simplest things get complicated.
She told me afterwards that she thought he was kinda cute, and grinned ever so slightly at my instant slight scowl. Then she looked at me and said “Well, you could have had me...” and it was true.
I could have had her, but she'd lied to me for a long time and I still wondered what she was keeping back from me. We had trust issues in some regards, but when it came to crime we knew we could trust each other like only lovers can.
Suddenly I wanted her, realised I was sitting next to one of the best things I'd ever let slip away from me, and realised if I wanted it I would have to initiate it. Now wasn't the time tho, now was for focusing on the job at hand.
Suddenly all of our differences seemed to stop existing and I looked at her in a new light. We'd met in Aro St park, just around the corner from the old soccer field that was really a concrete basketball court. We sat there under the trees at a park bench, and it smelt of recently mown grass and a vague hint of perfume, hers. It was getting towards dusk, and there was a strange golden yellow glow to the area, the sort of day that only happens once or twice a year, and that you have to be moving and living to experience.
I felt myself, felt my insecurities and flaws and stopped seeing the mind that had put this together, instead just feeling frail and human and wondering what she had ever seen in me. I knew I had to snap out of this if I wanted her to like me at all, I had to be the smooth calculating leader who makes all the pieces tick like clock work. That gets to be hard when your own head starts ticking in strange ways and your hormones are telling you this girl is too beautiful and suddenly you get clumsy and do stupid things.
It wasn't just her physical beauty that I was attracted to, more so than anything else I felt she was a kindred spirit, another player in this incredible game, and she was my equal. It felt good to know there was at least one other master thief out there and that I had made love to her once upon a time. Maybe we would again, it was nice.
The last time, there'd been a double rainbow in the sky, and I knew, knew for certain that something or someone was watching over me.
It was Tuesday now, the day of the Redstone forum. Josh and I had decided to attend, after all, I wanted to make sure Julia was ok, and it was free food. Well it wasn't really about the food, after the IBM forum me and Josh no longer cared about the food one bit, we were more interested in getting the feel of Redstone before we did the last few steps.
Me and Josh and Julia were going to meet up and go for a drive and a talk in Josh's suv after the forum was over.
Michael Ritchie was there, managing the demonstration of a new ip phone system that was basically ripping off Microsoft net meeting to a whole new level. And it didn't even include video support.
He looked more or less how I expected him to look, like a real life version of the comic book store guy from the Simpson's, but with a dark evil edge to his eyes.
I watched from the buffet table as Julia walked in in full on corporate gear, a black skirt, dark grey top, and the same knee high trench coat. Somehow she fit the bill perfectly and I knew no heterosexual male would be able to resist her, myself included. Still, that was what I had wanted.
I looked over at Josh and I felt him look at me and wonder how I had ever let Julia go, but he didn't know the back story like I did, he didn't know how much it had hurt me to realise she was using me.
Redstone believed they were doing well at that point, their share price was high and they were planning to expand from solely investment banking to other areas of the e-commerce industry. Well that was what the forum was about, and companies that aren't doing well don't have free champagne at their forums.
I think I was on my third glass when I saw her put her arm on his and I suddenly felt sick. I realised right then that I was madly in love with her, and that I didn't want her to do anything at all with him, I wanted her all to myself and I didn't want to share her with anyone ever.
I glanced at Josh again and winced and he looked back at me with slight confusion, after all, wasn't this the plan?
I knew he wouldn't understand.
Julia looked at me for a second and saw my eyes were wincing, then she did a smooth hand motion that seemed to suggest lets go outside for a bit. Michael Ritchie never registered it, he was too busy stupidly staring down her cleavage. That was what made me believe without a doubt that this man was worth screwing over.
I saw Julia slip outside without a sideways glance at anyone and I saw Michael look slightly dejected and continue to demonstrate the ip phones to other customers.
I said to Josh “Wait for me,” and walked outside.
She was smoking another ciggie, I'd tried to give up but what with the champagne and the need to connect in some way I found myself accepting the cigarette she offered towards me. It was another rainy day and she looked at me and said “You're still in love with me aren't you,” and I couldn't think of a good reply.
I just looked at the ground for five seconds and felt my tear ducts go to the edge. Then I looked at her and said “Yeah, yeah I always was, I only clicked when I saw Michael's arm on you.” She kinda looked confused and said she thought that that was what I had wanted.
And it was, but really I had just wanted a little bit more time with her.
I tried to say that but it came out awkward and fumbly, all of a sudden I'd lost the smoothness and control that I had had over every other part of the job.
I don't know why but she hugged me right then, and I felt my head spinning with the champagne and the head rush from the ciggie, I didn't smoke often at that point. Well I didn't smoke at all, apart from when she was around.
I wanted to kiss her and I moved my head towards her, she knew me right then and laughed, a satisfied and happy laugh. She knew I was trying to deny everything I had felt for her for so long, and now that she was here, in front of me... She knew I wanted her, and I felt my loins stir, but she deftly moved her head away and said “Listen hon, I'm working at the moment, maybe later,” then smiled and moved back inside without looking back.
I sat outside in the rain for a bit, by that time I was crying for all the times I'd had my heart broken and all the hearts that I had broken. Fortunately the rain covered my face and washed away the tears as they happened.
I moved back inside, through the RFID security systems and the bar code scanners and security staff, and found Josh. Josh could tell from my face that something was wrong, and I knew my worry was contagious. I felt like a total asshole for pushing someone that I loved into a greedy corporate asshole like that, and I felt guilty, and I thought to myself whatever price she charges I will pay willingly so long as I get a fair deal and maybe if she feels like it we could hold each other one more time and I could try to apologise to her. I didn't realise it at the time, maybe I wasn't played, it was more my own hormones than any other factor, the only problem was she knew how to exploit them, that was why I'd hired her and I could feel the burn begin.
I looked around the room and I saw Julia in another part of the gallery, browsing and conversing with strangers. I knew that was a part of her game plan, it had to look natural and feel real when she came back to Mr. Michael Ritchie, and if she targeted him too obviously he might smell a rat. This way, he might actually believe it was his charm and charisma that would give him a chance at going to bed with her.
I then watched her walk up to him, smoothly and elegantly, with none of the awkwardness and confusion that I had felt with her just a few minutes before. She really could do a better job than me, and I really did need someone like her for this step of the job.
I decided to have another glass of champagne, and Josh looked at me with a little bit of warning in his eyes, but I figured what could it hurt.
It looked so unbelievably real, it looked like she was into him in a big way, everything he said was making her smile and laugh and he was laughing too, and there was slight body contact. I thought to myself that that mofo had better not touch her or hurt her or else it might give me a motive to become a violent criminal.
Then I thought to myself that that wouldn't happen, besides Julia had the air of someone who was protected from high on up, the whole you fuck with me and I'll get someone to break your knee caps vibe. I just didn't click that I was that protection and that she could feel that off me.
I mean of course I would keep her safe, with four glasses of champagne and a heart longing for comfort, I don't know how any man could not.
I would ask her to meet him totally sober, and to have a small relay to push if anything went really wrong so that me and Josh could get her out safely and get him into hospital safely. I could see the setup had gone well anyways, she had his number, and I'm sure a date was one phone call away at that point.
That was when me and Josh left, waiting a block away in his black suv. I thought about getting some wheels, but I figured I didn't need them, this was Wellington and I could walk everywhere I needed to be. At the same time, Josh's wheels suited him quite well.
I thought about a new Mercedes, jet black with tinted windows and chrome mags, and realised that that would be such a waste of the money we were about to make.
I thought about Julia and I wondered what she'd do with her share of the job. I figured Stan would invest his share, Josh I didn't know about, maybe slowly filter it through his company, and me I was still thinking.
After sitting in the suv for half an hour listening to the Rock (I never liked it, I always preferred radioactive 89 fm, but Josh was a big fan) I saw Julia in the rear view mirror walking towards us. Josh popped open the central locking and she got into the suv with a slightly smug grin on her face. I couldn't help but notice that her lipstick was ever so slightly smeared, probably just from the edges of a wine glass or from wiping her mouth with a napkin. I really hoped so. I think she recognised that I noticed and again was glad that I winced. I don't think I'll ever understand her, but I do love her, that I was sure of at that moment.
Julia said lets move, and Josh started driving. I looked back at Julia and she smiled at me and said she got the date, at his apartment, and it was all sweet.
Everything was still ticking like clockwork, I guess the crime was blessed or cursed in some way that I still don't understand. Maybe it was Michael Ritchie's karma for us to come along at that point.
I reached back and took her hand and squeezed it briefly and said great job so far. I looked over at Josh again and knew I owed everyone in the car and Stan a big favor for this one if it didn't work out. Even if it did work out, I still owed them all a job, but I don't think they knew that then. Well me and Josh were even regardless, we'd sorted that out years ago.
I think maybe Julia felt like she owed me something, I asked her if she wanted to out for some friendly drinks sometime and she said yeah, ok. Then she said I'm seeing Michael on Thursday, how about Friday or Saturday?
I said Saturday and smiled back at her. She looked at me again and her eyes were open and I saw some of the same love and compassion that had made me fall for her, tho it had been worn down by years of callous cruelty and pain. I couldn't help but think of what my own eyes might look like and realised they were probably not much different by now.
We dropped her off at her place, and Josh drove me home.
That night I slipped towards sleep and dreamt of the colour beige and thought about making love to Julia.
We had all the pieces in place, the only things left to do were to hack his personal computer and find out how he was concealing and removing the money from Redstone's accounts, and then, to create a virtual accounts page accessible from his computer and updated in real time as he accessed Redstone's accounts and his own, indistinguishable from the real thing.
With the Trojan, we could route all of his traffic through a third party proxy server, and redirect him to the faked Redstone account pages, and the faked Internet banking pages. This way when he types in his login and attempt to commit fraud,he will be committing fraud against a setup that Josh is monitoring very closely and can change in real time.
With what Michael does, the transactions he makes on the virtual machine that Josh has hidden between Michael and the real Internet, he will give us the information required to be able to make the hidden withdrawal and potentially hide the money.
It's basically a spin off of the old trick, the one where the robbers change the tapes on the security cameras so it looks like nothing happened. All Josh had to do was make a fake website that seemed completely real.
The next day when I woke up I realised that my attraction to and jealousy of Julia could put the job at risk. I really didn't want her going around to that fat fucks house. I realised my personality was being warped, when I had started this, I didn't realise what I was doing, now that I got to here I was starting to get worried and I thought to myself maybe I should have just asked Julia for a coffee.
Then I thought about the misunderstanding, and figured this was as good as it gets for someone like me.
The one consolation was that if I was feeling like this, maybe Michael's head was spinning worse.
There wasn't much left to the mission, just Julia's date with Michael, and a bit more hacking and time. Maybe one or two more nights of work, if that.
Julia's date with Michael was suddenly tonight and I wanted to see her before she saw him.
About then I realised I needed some wheels, I was sick of walking everywhere and the idea of a jet black Mercedes with tinted windows and chrome was somehow very cool to me at that point. I decided I would get new wheels sometime quite soon. It was 8:16am in the morning and I had spent another night going over every inch of the plan, trying to spot every flaw. The only weak point I kept coming back to was my own feelings for Julia.
I knew her so well, and yet just a little while before my rational mind had been warning me off, telling me she was trouble, and I knew rationally she was, I guess when I really think about it I might not have ever fallen for her if she wasn't, the problem was my heart was saying hey go for it, you need love and warmth and happiness.
I met with Julia alone in Central Park, a few blocks away from Michael Ritchie's apartment in Torrens Terrace, top of Cuba. The apartments feel manufactured and grey, they have no real character, and they feel bland. Where I live has character and personality and warmth and that is something.
Central Park can be nice, she was meeting him at eight pm, and it was seven forty two now. Josh would arrive shortly and park in the Torrens Tce car park at a little after eight.
The Torrens Tce apartments are build around a large car park, the place doesn't have a great deal of personality as far as locations go, but I guess its nice enough.
I wouldn't generally live in a location like that. I really do like having a little bit of outside, enough room for a few trees and somewhere nice to sit privately outside, just somewhere with a little bit of nature and character is what I prefer.
We didn't have long to talk but I figured why not bug the room as well. I couldn't help but think perhaps this was excessive, but at the same time, Information is power. I thought it might be excessive, and if Julia said that it was, then ok, because she was in charge of her section of the plan.
Unexpectedly, when I suggested it to her, both as a means of keeping her safe while she was in there and to gain further information (we didn't gain much from the bug) – Josh and I could listen to the live feed and if necessary we could remove her from danger – unexpectedly, she agreed completely.
I hoped that all she would have to do was briefly show interest in seeing his hardware and what he created with it, and then after a bit he would get up and walk away long enough for Julia to plug in the thumb drive and run the program.
It would also be good if she could acquire a cheque from his book, but I would leave that to her.
I asked Julia if she thought she would be in any danger at all, and said to her that she didn't have to do it and she looked at me and an understanding passed through her eyes to mine. She agreed that if it got interrupted we would rush the place.
Then she smiled a little sadly and said “Don't worry about a thing hon,” glancing off.
I registered that each person in this job had complete free will to execute their section as they chose fit, however at the same time each person looked to me for the final go ahead and confirmation of what they did.
All of a sudden it was five to eight and she said she'd better start moving. I felt strangely apprehensive and walked with her for a little bit before she walked into the Torrens Terrace apartments and I waited for Josh to show. By that time I'd hooked up the listening device, it looked like I was wearing an ipod, I was even using ipod headphones for the hell of it.
I waited outside Hells Pizza for Josh to arrive, he arrived about seven minutes late. The whole time I had a live audio feed running into my ears, it sounded mostly of scrunching and moving, and then I started to hear murmurs and talk.
I heard her knock on the door, and greet him. She was flirting with him, asking about his work and he was probably smiling and leering at her body and getting a little bit of a rush from it all, that thought made me feel somehow annoyed at Michael.
Josh drove up through the light drizzle and pulled up outside Hells Pizza, and I jumped into his suv and plugged in the standard three point five millimeter jack from the tape car kit and started listening to it through his car stereo.
Unfortunately the mic, due to its low size, wasn't incredibly high quality and the sound got a bit garbled on the way over. We could hear talk and movement and scrunching, but we couldn't hear exactly what was going on.
I think I might've heard the standard Windows startup sound and then a little bit of laughing and continued work.
I heard the word wine, and Julia's voice say red, and some other stuff I didn't catch.
Then I heard him say I'll just go to the toilet and freshen up, and about twenty seconds later, some very brief typing.
Then just more murmuring and movement and a bit of paper rustling for a tiny bit and then I heard a glass break and I realised her white dress quite probably had a large red wine stain on it from him jostling her accidentally. It's funny what a smart woman can do.
Now he would feel guilty about the dry cleaning bill and offer to pay it. Most girls would say no, but Julia would say ok, write me out an unmarked cheque, you can trust me, it'll just be for the dry cleaning bill.
Just more quiet noises and suddenly running water and then she was jumping into the suv and Josh was driving.
I asked her how it went and she smirked and said it went perfectly. Both me and Josh grinned, me directly at her, Josh kept his eyes on the road.
She had successfully bugged his computer, and it would already be sending information to Josh's setup.
She really smiled at that point and said “Guess what I found in his bathroom?” and I was like what?
Then she pulled out a small film cannister filled with white powder and we realised we'd just scored some free cocaine off Michael Ritchie, as well as bugging him and trojaning his computer and stealing off him.
Josh said hmmmm I wonder if that's what he was spending his cash on.
Julia giggled and said he had a shit load of office supplies from work lying around his place, like whole boxes of Redstone pens and stuff. She'd asked him for one and he'd given her one. Even if he noticed the coke was missing, it wasn't like he could go to the police about it.
We realised the job was almost over, Josh had to do a little bit more hacking and Stan had to give him advice, I knew all I would have to do was let them talk to each other and organise it and within a week it would all be over.
I asked Julia if she wanted to hang out for a bit and she said yeah ok, I asked Josh and I saw him wince slightly at the idea of doing coke and he decided to pass. I got him to drop us off at my place, just an average sized cottage with a nice outside area.
I gave Josh Stan's number at that point, and told him to call him and organise the rest of the job with him based on what we'd already talked about. I knew at that point that they were safe to leave in charge of this area, in fact if I was involved it might make it more dangerous, the less I know the better.
By now it must have been nine or tennish at night, and me and Julia were quite elated, she was happy that she'd done her part of the job perfectly and I was happy that everything was going so well and she was here and soon we would all be rich so long as we didn't do anything too stupid.
I grabbed her hand briefly and squeezed it as we walked up to my place, and she squeezed back and looked at me warmly with just the tiniest hint of be careful your gonna get burnt little boy. I prolly didn't see that then.
Still, everything was more or less perfect at that point, I knew I had a bottle of fine wine in the cupboard, we had cocaine, I had a tiny bit of weed, and I knew we would have fun with Michael's cocaine.
We went to the lounge, the heater was on and the curtains were a little open, just enough to see the really beautiful view, even at night time. I got up and offered her a glass of wine which she graciously accepted, and poured myself a vodka and lime.
We sat down again on the couch with the coffee table in front of us with some really nice music playing, just ambient style stuff, with lyrics that'll make you think a little bit but it won't break the stream of reality that flows.
If music had a colour and a shape I guess what we were listening to would be the shape of the sea far far out and calm and safe.
She looked at me and laughed and said “Feel like doing some of Michael's coke?” and I looked back and grinned and nodded.
This was the sort of thing that I loved Julia for, that we could steal off a bad man and enjoy what he'd earnt while laughing behind his back. Never occurred to me that Julia might do that to me.
We drew up some lines on an old portrait that had been in my family for years, and I rolled up a twenty to snort with.
She offered me it first, and I asked her how was she sure it was coke? She said well it made my lip numb.... And that was good enough for me.
I offered her the twenty and she nodded slightly, bent down her head and drew in a line. She always always always looked elegant, it was surreal, even then she looked elegant and stately, snorting stolen coke in my lounge.
I saw her wince slightly as the chemical hit the back of her nose, if it doesn't burn you it can't be that good, and good coke burns like fire in your nostril passages, making you wince and your eyes tear up ever so slightly. When it's just fake drugs, that's about all you experience, a little bit of pain, but with this we both knew it'd only be so long before we were both floating away on a coke high.
She winced and I saw her eyes were watering a tiny bit as she offered me the bill and she giggled ever so slightly, I wondered if it was the drug kicking in. I looked over at her and she looked happyish and I guess that made it ok for me right then.
I bent forward and snorted, felt the particles flow up my nose and start to burn like acid or pepper or something, I hadn't ever done enough coke to recognise the taste, but I've known people who reckon that amphetamines taste like mars bars. Personally I reckon the taste is like a bitter horrible yucky drug, I think people learn as they get addicted and it tastes better to them. Or maybe it really does taste like mars bars to some people, subjective perception is an incredible thing.
I shivered slightly and looked over at Julia and the coke was starting to hit my head and she looked adorable and beautiful and I couldn't believe what I had let go away from me and it would all be worth it if she would just show me a little bit of affection and care and love.
I tried to lean in to kiss her and I almost did when she looked at me and said “What are you doing?”
I suddenly felt a little embarrassed and quite awkward, but fortunately the alcohol and the cocaine was diminishing that feeling. I looked at her and decided to be totally upfront with her. I told her she was so beautiful and perfect and that I had wanted her to be mine and no one elses from the first day I met her, and I still wanted her more than anything. I think the drugs definitely affected my judgment at that point. It was the truth tho.
She looked at me and I realised she was high too, there was no longer any pain in my nose and I was just in a dreamy floaty state and suddenly the music sounded too good and I found myself moving ever so slightly.
She moved her head closer to mine and put her hand on mine, I loved that feeling of physical contact with another human being and I think she knew it had been a while since I had been with someone who had loved me.
I picked up her hand and kissed it and she giggled and snuggled her body into my side. That felt good, real nice.
Then she said something like I'm right here you know....
And I knew... I knew she wouldn't be here in a few hours, I knew our lives would go on different paths from here on in, she would take the money and run.
I felt my loins stir and I tried to kiss her again, this time she leant her head in towards me and returned the kiss.
We'd done this before while we were together, we smooched for a little bit more on the couch and then moved to the bedroom.
The next day, when I woke up, she was gone and a few days later I received a letter with her post office box details for the deposit. I realised I wouldn't see her again for a while. I think I knew right then that she wasn't going to meet me on Saturday like we'd planned, or any time soon for anything apart from work.
I had foolishly let myself fall for her, and now I had to deal with the loneliness and pain that would come after she'd left.
The coke withdrawal sucked a bit too, it probably didn't help my emotional state at that point.
I tried to call her a few months later on and she told me she was with her long term partner and they were having great sex and he'd gotten her pregnant and she was going to invest the money in a saving scheme of Stan's as a fund for her child.
That made me feel blue and I wished it was me with her.
We hadn't quite finished but I'd already started to spend the money in my head. That could wait, there was still a lot to be done.
I thought very briefly about bailing on Josh and Stan and Julia and taking the first flight overseas, but I figured that would be a little nasty, kinda like not sharing one single lolly with anyone else. Well I guess it wouldn't be nasty, but considering the lollies were stolen.
I'd like to sit on a beach somewhere in South East Asia relaxing in the sun all day long.
I liked Julia's attitude to lollies, I guess that was why I liked her. She would be ok with stealing the lollies and keeping them to herself. I liked to steal the lollies, but I liked to share them, I understood tho that selfishness can be a survival attribute in surprising ways.
I liked to share them with people like her too, I love people that can appreciate good candy.
It wasn't in my nature, it was enough that we were stealing lollies off someone who stole more lollies, we could share them amongst ourselves.
Josh and Stan met up later on and organised the last pieces of the scam together.
It went flawlessly, Michael had no idea his computer was bugged, and with access to the Redstone web server, Josh had no problems emulating their site and we watched exactly what Michael did with the money.
The only thing that was different was that it gave an error message on his transaction, which we then executed very rapidly.
Stan used his capabilities to effectively launder the money we had stolen and a little while later he presented me with an account in a false name with just over one point two million dollars sitting in it.
Michael got caught when Josh removed the virtual web server from the system, there was no way Michael could explain his withdrawal of that much money from a corporate account off as an accident, especially when they looked closely and recognised that he'd been stealing off them for a few years.
Between each of us, after expenses, it worked out to be about three hundred thousand each.
We filled in the cheque to withdraw the money with a stolen Redstone pen (the one Michael had given Julia), and we withdrew it from his cheque account which was where the money had been put by Michael.
It worked perfectly.
We literally called the bank and they sent us one point two million dollars.
There has to be a way to clean that money. We needed clean, untraceable cash and we needed a trail that wouldn't lead to us. All transactions occurring on American soil that are over $10,000 in worth are legally required to be reported to the government. I don't know if New Zealand has a similar law, but I assume we do.
The cheque rort. This is the last piece of the puzzle, and the hardest. No one ever lets you walk into a bank and walk out with a million in cash that isn't yours.
It's not meant to be possible.
Anything within the laws of physics is possible. Physically it's quite easy to move an object from one location to another. Of course with banks, there is security, there are internal audit checks.
Of course, no one would ever think of stopping you from walking out of a bank with a million in cash that is yours. Long, long before, I had set up a fake identity. He had died in a car crash and was approximately my age.
For a long time I just rented videos and library books in his name, later I tried to open a bank account. I didn't think it would work, but it did, fortunately. I had his birth certificate and a letter from the library and a letter from the video store and that was enough identification.
I remember when I first opened an email account in the dead mans name, I had told Josh, and he'd sent me an email spoofed from god@gmail.com saying I was going straight to hell.
It had freaked me out and I tried to reply saying I'm sorry... I didn't mean to... but by then it was already done and the reply bounced back, no one had registered god@gmail.com. I deleted the account the same day, but I always kept the obituary records, they did prove useful later on in life. Then Josh told me he sent it and I felt ok.
The bank never complained, the account was never overdrawn and there was no reason to look too closely at it.
Stan had directed Josh to transfer the funds to that account.
From that account, all I had to do was call the bank and say if you could create four packages with $300,000.00 each, and send them to the PO Box specified as the postal address on the bank account, that would be perfect.
In the end they put me onto the manager of the branch I had called, who said it was unusual, but for such a good customer we can pull a few strings. Doors open with money. I was told the money would be sent out shortly, but that I would have to go into the bank and sign an authorisation form. I had no qualms about signing that form with a dead mans signature.
It added security too, I would never use that identity again, and if the police or anyone tried to track it down all they would find was a man who had died over ten years before. The trail ends with a dead man.
A week later I split the packages, gave Josh his, sent Julia's to her P O Box, and went around to Stan's apartment to give him his.
I also included a list of real estate agents and investment schemes that would not ask too closely where the money had came from (Stan had helped me with this), along with potential cover stories.
It was strange, finishing the job. I felt empty and I wanted to live some more, find something else that would give me the same kind of rush as what I had just been through.
I guess thats the end of the story. Well it's not really, stories never end, life goes on, but writers like to tie up all the lose ends. Well some don't I guess, I like to try to but they never all get tied up.
Yes well I waged war yes well theres plenty more. Out in the dark space out all alone living and breathing and stealing just to live, living just a lie, writing off some words and living in real time.
A little while after everything.
5:42. Pizza time. Oven baked, cheap ass $2.50 pizza eating time.
Everything went perfectly and we're rich. I'm just waiting for the money to clear and then I can eat as much Hells Pizza as I want.
Peace out. I think I'll get a bag of fruit burst lollies. Maybe I'll share them, maybe I won't.
6:07pm. Pizzas over with. I don't care about Hells Pizza. I don't care about money. I just wanted someone to love me for a little bit and now she's gone and I'm sitting by myself feeling horrible.
At least I'm rich I guess.
7:01pm. Fuck. I think I might start smoking again, I shouldn't have taken the ones Julia offered me.
7:17pm. Call Julia. Her partner picks up the phone. Mumble quickly and hang up.
7:42pm. Put on some depressing music, dance alone with no one watching and no one caring.
8:26pm. I guess this is where the story ends. Life doesn't tho.