exactly how millions of dollars of the bank’s deposits managed to wander away without anyone noticing, and they were ready to ask the directors a lot of tough questions.
It was a Thursday afternoon when Barry told everyone he was exhausted and was going to knock off and go to Acapulco for a few days, so no one really wondered very much why they hadn’t heard from him until he failed to turn up for a conference with some Treasury Department people the following Wednesday. Then on Thursday, exactly a week after Barry had last been seen, a maintenance man found the body in a lap pool behind the guesthouse off Preston Road.
“Your ghost was right on the money,” Nata pointed out. “No useable fingerprints and the corpse’s face was too badly smashed up to get an ID except with dental records.”
“Was there an autopsy?” Darcy asked Nata. I had apparently been relegated to the roll of a silent observer.
“If there was,” Nata said consulting her screens again. “there’s nothing about it here.”
“That manhole cover looks like a pretty big loose end,” Darcy mused. “What do those suckers weigh? They’d have to go at least seventy-five, maybe a hundred pounds, wouldn’t they?”
Nata nodded absentmindedly, still studying one of the screens.
“Staggering around with a cast-iron manhole cover, using barbed wire to tie it around your neck, and then leaping into a swimming pool sounds looks to me like a pretty hard way to commit suicide,” Darcy said. “At least, it is if you’re doing the committing entirely on your own.”
“It sounds like the Russians,” Nata nodded. “Those guys love stuff like that.”
Darcy bent forward, reading a
“Wilkins had been buying currency futures for a year or more before he disappeared. He was running all the positions himself using an account in the name of Westmoreland Oil and Gas, which was apparently a real oil trader in Dallas.”
“How could he do that?” Nata asked. “Wouldn’t somebody have started asking questions?”
“Not necessarily,” I offered.
Darcy and Nata both looked at me as if they had just remembered that I was there.
“If Westmoreland had been reasonably active in the foreign exchange markets hedging their exposure on future deliveries like most oil traders do, it would have looked normal enough. And I’m sure Wilkins would have been smart enough to route all the dummy accounts to himself. If he was, Westmoreland would never have noticed anything and there would have been nobody else to blow the whistle.”
Darcy and Nata took that in, glancing at each other, then all three of us went back to reading silently through the rest of the story. As we read, the rest fell into place. Wilkins had been using accounts he had set up in Westmoreland’s name to conduct his trading operations all right. He was buying and selling futures contracts in a half-dozen different currencies for what on the surface appeared to be routine hedging of exposure on crude oil deliveries that provided for payments in Japanese yen and Singapore dollars. When the market turned on Wilkins, however, his losses quickly began to pyramid.
He kept ahead of them for a while-mostly by running hard, shuffling papers fast, and doubling up his losses- but when the magnitude of the debacle became so large that he couldn’t hide it any longer, the entire mess collapsed in a heap. That was when Wilkins disappeared without a trace. He left his house to drive to the bank one morning and stepped right off into the twilight zone.
Two weeks later, Barry Gale-or someone-was found at the bottom of the swimming pool at the guest house. His suicide was quickly attributed to the working relationship between Gale and Wilkins. There was even some speculation that Barry Gale could have been the real mastermind behind the whole currency futures scam and that he might have been using the less experienced Wilkins as a front man; but with one man dead and the other missing, following up the speculation would have been difficult.
In the end, apparently no one even bothered to try.
SEVEN
When Nata finished reading the story, she looked at Darcy. “Maybe this guy Gale really
“Then who was the stiff in the pool?” Darcy asked.
No one said anything since the answer was pretty obvious. If Barry Gale was still alive, Wilkins was the prime candidate for the Esther Williams role. Moreover, that opened the possibility that Barry might have had something to do with arranging the casting.
“You think this guy might be indexed somewhere with EDGAR?” Darcy asked Nata.
“Who’s-” I started to ask.
“Never mind,” Darcy interrupted, and obediently I fell silent.
Nata typed briefly and then slid her hand over a trackball sitting next to the keyboard. As she rolled the cursor around one of the screens and clicked here and there, both she and Darcy leaned in closer. After a moment I saw them exchange a look and then Darcy leaned over Nata’s shoulder and typed a few keystrokes. After that they both watched the other screen in silence.
“That’s pretty amazing,” Nata finally said, more to herself than to Darcy or me.
She clicked the left mouse button on the trackball twice, looked at the screen for a long time in silence, and finally rotated her chair until she was facing me.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Jack.”
Up until then I thought we had been doing just fine.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I found the name Barry Gale in a keyword search of EDGAR’s primary data index,” Nata explained. “But when I went to the locations referenced in the search, there was nothing there. All the references came up as invalid entries.”
“Does that happen a lot?”
Darcy glanced at Nata for a moment and then shook her head. “Never.”
“What are you saying?” I asked, looking from one to the other.
“There are a couple of possibilities, I guess,” Nata took over again. “Three, really. Mistakes in data paths can occur. Maybe this is just the result of a simple input error.”
“But you don’t think so.” I was sure, at least, of that much. Nata’s face made it plain. “What else?” I asked.
“The references may have been there once, then deleted for some reason and the index entries were overlooked.”
“I didn’t think database entries were ever deleted, just updated.”
“Right. Usually they’re not.”
“So then what’s the third reason?” I asked.
Nata hesitated, glancing at Darcy, who nodded once.
“The entries may be encrypted with a unique key that we don’t have,” she said. “That’s never happened before either, but theoretically I suppose it’s possible.”
“And what would that mean?”
“There’s generally a turf battle of some kind going on in Washington, Jack. It might just be that one agency has something going and it’s taking particular care to make sure that another agency can’t find out about it. It could be that sort of thing.”
“Look, Jack, we’re good, but we’re not perfect. Some of the really big hitters can bury stuff so deep we can’t get to it. To tell you the absolute truth, it hasn’t happened before, but it
