'Because I need him,' she said patiently. 'Technical questions that only an expert can answer.'
'How much does he charge?'
'A hundred dollars an hour.'
'What!' Trevalyan bellowed. 'Are you crazy? A hundred an hour? That means the Company will be paying twenty-five bucks every time this guy takes a crap!'
'Mike,' Dora said, sighing, 'must you be so vulgar and disgusting? Look, if you needed brain surgery-which sometimes I think you do-would you shop around for the cheapest surgeon you could find? You have to pay for expertise; you know that.'
'Are you sure this guy's an expert?'
'The best in the business,' she said, not mentioning that he had done time for computer fraud.
'Well… all right,' Trevalyan said grudgingly. 'But try to use him only for an hour.'
'I'll try,' she promised, keeping her fingers carefully crossed.
Her third call of the morning was to Gregor Pinchik, whose address in the directory was on West 23rd Street.
Dora gave her name and asked if Mr. Arthur Rushkin had informed Pinchik that she'd be phoning.
'Yeah, he called,' the computer consultant acknowledged in a gravelly voice. 'He tell you what my fees are?'
'A hundred an hour?'
'That's right. And believe me, lady, I'm worth it. What's this about?'
'I'd rather not talk about it on the phone. Could we meet somewhere?'
'Why not. How's about you coming down here to my loft.'
'Sure,' Dora said, 'I could do that. What time?'
'Noon. How does that sound?'
'I'll be there,' she said.
'It's just west of Ninth Avenue. Don't let the building scare you. It's being demolished, and right now I'm the only tenant left. But the intercom still works. You ring from downstairs-three short rings and one long one-and I'll buzz you in. Okay?'
'Okay,' Dora said. 'I'm on my way.'
The decrepit building on West 23rd Street had scaffolding in place, and workmen were prying at crumbling ornamental stonework and brick facing, allowing the debris to tumble down within plywood walls protecting the sidewalk.
Dora nervously ducked into the littered vestibule and pressed the only button in sight: three shorts and a long. The electric lock buzzed; she pushed her way in and cautiously climbed five flights of rickety wood stairs, thinking that at a hundred dollars an hour Gregor Pinchik could afford a business address more impressive than this.
The man who greeted her at the door of the top-floor loft was short, blocky, with a head of Einstein hair and a full Smith Brothers beard, hopelessly snarled. But the eyes were alive, the smile bright.
'Nice place, huh?' he said grinning. 'I'm moving to SoHo next week, as soon as they bring in power cables for my hardware. Watch where you step and what you touch; everything is muck and mire.'
He led her into one enormous room, jammed with sealed wooden crates and cardboard cartons. His desk was a card table, the phone covered with a plastic cozy. He used his pocket handkerchief to wipe clean a steel folding chair so Dora could sit down. She rummaged through her shoulder bag, found a business card, handed it over.
Pinchik inspected it and laughed. 'I know the Company,' he said. 'Their computer system has more holes than a cribbage board. I got into it once-just for the fun of it, you understand-and looked around, but there was nothing interesting. Tell your boss his computer security is a joke.'
'I'll tell him,' Dora said. 'You're a hacker?'
'I'm a superhacker,' he said. 'I protect my clients against electronic snoops like me. Which means I have to stay one step ahead of the Nosy Parkers, and it ain't easy. By the way, your first hour of consultation started when you rang the doorbell.'
Dora nodded. 'Mr. Rushkin tells me you reviewed the computer printout from Starrett Jewelry and found nothing wrong.'
Pinchik made a dismissive gesture. 'That wasn't real computer stuff,' he said. 'It was just data processing. You could have done the same thing with an adding machine or pocket calculator, if you wanted to spend the time.'
'But it was accurate?' she persisted.
'Accurate?' Pinchik said, and coughed a laugh. 'As accurate as what was put into it. You know the expression GIGO? It means Garbage In, Garbage Out. If you feed a computer false data, what you get out is false data. A lot of people find it hard to realize that a computer has no conscience. It doesn't know right or wrong, good or evil. You program it to give you the best way to blow up the world, and it'll chug along for a few seconds and tell you; it doesn't care. Did Rushkin say I've done time?'
She nodded.
'Let me tell you how that happened,' he said, 'if you don't mind wasting part of your hundred-dollar hour.'
'I don't mind,' Dora said.
'I've got an eighth-grade education,' Pinchik said, 'but I'm a computer whiz. Most hackers have the passion. With me, it's an obsession. I was a salesman in a computer store on West Forty-sixth Street. I could buy new equipment at an employee's discount, and I was living up here paying bupkes for rent. I worked eight hours a day at the store and spent eight hours hacking. I mean I was writing programs and corresponding electronically with people all over the world as nutty as I was. I can't begin to tell you the systems I got into: government, universities, research labs, military, banks-the whole schmear.
'Now you gotta know I'm a divorced man. My wife claimed she was a computer widow, and she was right. She's living in Hawaii now, and I understand she's bedding some young stud who wears earrings, beats a drum, and roasts pigs for tourists. But that's her problem. Mine was that I had to send her an alimony check every month. Getting bored?'
'No, no,' Dora said, thinking of Detective John Wenden and his alimony problems. 'It's interesting.'
'Well, those monthly alimony checks were killing me,' Pinchik went on. 'I could have afforded them if it hadn't been for my obsession; all my loose bucks were going for new hardware, modems, programs, and so forth. So one night I'm up here noodling around, and I break into the computer system of an upstate New York bank. Just for the fun of it, you understand.'
'How did you get in?' Dora asked curiously.
Pinchik gave her his bright smile. 'If you want to know the truth, lady, most bankers are morons. This was the case of a brand-new integrated computer system installed in an old bank that had more than twenty local branches. There were seven top bank executives who were given private access code words to the entire system. All right, you have seven guys who can tap into the system and move it any way they want anytime they want. Now you guess what passwords those seven guys selected.'
'Days of the week?' Dora suggested.
'Try again.'
'The Seven Deadly Sins?'
'Try again.'
Dora thought a moment. 'The Seven Dwarfs?' she said. 'From 'Snow White'?'
'Now you've got it,' Pinchik said approvingly. 'They thought they were being so cute. It's easy for hackers to break into so-called secure systems. It took me about ten minutes to get into this bank's records, using the password 'Dopey.' I was just looking around, reading all their confidential stuff, and I got this absolutely brilliant idea.'
'And that's what put you in jail,' Dora said.
'Yeah, lady,' the expert said ruefully, 'but it wasn't the idea; that was a winner. I just screwed it up, that's all. Here's how it worked… The bank I invaded, like most banks everywhere, carried a lot of what they call dormant accounts. These are old savings and checking accounts that haven't had any action-deposits or withdrawals-for years and years. Maybe the depositor forgot he had money in that bank. Maybe he died and his heirs didn't know he had the account. Maybe he's in jail and doesn't want to touch it until he gets out. Maybe he's hiding the money
