Chapter 14

It turned out that every page in all four files Claire had discovered had been scanned and were now available upon request, to be displayed on one of two fifty inch plasma screens set up at one end of the conference room. A man and woman sat amidst a sea of computer equipment to make this wizardry happen. A third screen was set up at the opposite end of the room. A man wearing glasses seemed to peer out of it into the room while he fiddled with papers on a table in front of him. Another woman stood ready to operate what looked like a full-fledged movie studio camera. Four people were seated at the conference table on one side. There was only one chair on the other side of the table.

Slaymaker ushered Claire to that chair. All four original files were laid out in front of her seat. Only one was open.

She sat down and lifted the corners of a few pages of the open file. She noticed immediately that somebody had used some kind of numbering machine to give each page a number stamped in red ink.

"Okay, people," said Slaymaker. "This is Claire Bonneville. She's the accountant who discovered the issues with the four files most of you have seen. She's going to show us how she did that, and then teach us how to do it as well."

Claire looked up at him and raised one eyebrow.

"Any time you're ready," he said, smiling.

Claire looked around. Everyone was staring at her.

"Okay," she said, feeling a little nervous. "We use templates for most of the accounting in contract files. Depending on what kind of debits and credits are involved, they all get put into a template by the contract administrator. At the end of the contract, or at specific intervals, if it's a progress payment type contract, the numbers get crunched. That tells us what we are owed by the client we're doing the work for."

She looked around. Nobody said a word. She swallowed.

"So these templates have formulas embedded in them. Those formulas aren't supposed to change. In fact, they can't change unless someone goes into them and manually makes those changes. That's what I discovered. Somebody manually changed the formulas on these four files."

"Can you show us an example?" asked Slaymaker.

She leafed through the open file until she got to the page she was looking for. It had the number AR57 stamped on it.

"Alpha Romeo Five Seven," called out Slaymaker.

The four people across the table all turned to that page in their copies of the file. Claire looked up to see the page displayed on the right hand 50 inch plasma screen as well. On the left screen, the whole file in front of her was visible, as if viewed from above. She looked up to see a camera suspended from the ceiling. When she looked at the movie camera, it was on her, and a little red light was blinking on and off on one side.

"This is creepy," she said.

"Please, go on," said Slaymaker. His hand appeared at her shoulder holding what looked for all the world like half of a pair of chopsticks. "You can use this as a pointer."

She took the chopstick and moved her hand to the file in front of her. As she did so, movement in her peripheral vision drew her eyes to the left plasma screen, where her hand was moving across the file on that screen.

When she put the tip of the pointer on the box she was going to talk about, the image enlarged until only the page was visible, rather than the whole file.

She explained the formula that determined what the number in that box should be.

"Question!" came a voice from across the table.

"Yes?"

"How do you know that?"

"Because I work with these formulas all day long," she said.

"Is there a master copy of the template somewhere?"

Claire shrugged.

Quentin Halloran spoke up, startling Claire. She hadn't been aware he was still in the room.

"That's all kept on the main frame," he said. "Access to those computer files is restricted, both physically and electronically. A copy is downloaded from the mainframe each time a contract file is established. If those files had been compromised, then the figures in all contracts would have been faulty. That has not been found to be the case. Our conclusion is that the formulas were changed in the templates once they were downloaded for use in the contract."

"Let's try to let Claire get all the way through a file before we bombard her with questions," said Slaymaker.

She showed them all the boxes she'd found that contained altered formulas. Then she tried to explain how she audited the numbers to find out what they should have been.

"I plugged in the correct formula in a dummy file and compared the numbers. When I figured out what had happened, I took the files to my boss."

The bombardment Slaymaker had delayed got in progress and questions flew at her in rapid fire. How had she first realized that something was wrong? Did she use dummy files every time she audited a contract file? Was the dummy file a complete refiguring of the entire contract, or just specific parts? Did she add things up in her head?

Once it was determined that she used her computer extensively during an audit, there was a break while still more energetic young people went and got her computer, moving it in its entirety to the conference room. It was slaved into the left plasma screen, which then was switched back and forth between what she was doing on the computer, and what she was pointing at in a file. It was so high tech it made her dizzy, and it was very, very impressive.

Lunch was brought in, boxes and boxes of various kinds of mostly fast food, which people chose from while they continued studying how to detect and prove the fraud. At one point Quentin pulled a chair up beside Claire while he ate lunch. He stayed there, occasionally asking her if she needed anything.

It was two in the afternoon before the four people across the conference table felt like they were ready to take an unseen file and try auditing it like Claire had done.

And it was at that point that somebody pointed out that all four needed a computer to do that.

There was an hour delay while they argued about how to proceed. None of the four wanted to go to separate offices, away from Claire, their mentor. Eventually Slaymaker asked Quentin if it would be possible to simply upload Martin's software onto the mainframe at FBI Headquarters. If that could be done, any agent could access it on his FBI issued laptop.

"It's proprietary software," said Quentin. "Our competitors would give millions to get their hands on it."

"We're not in the habit of giving software away willy nilly," said Slaymaker.

"I'd have to get clearance to do that," said Quentin.

"Go ahead."

Then another hour went by as Mr. Zimmerman and members of legal were contacted. Zimmerman wanted guarantees in writing, signed by more than "Johnny FBI Agent on the scene," as he put it. The fact that Martin might be able to cash in on this investigation, to the tune of billions of dollars, may have tipped the balance.

It was five-thirty by the time Bill Baldwin, the supervisor of IT, was finally found, brought in and consulted as to how to proceed.

He blinked, and shook his head.

"You can't do that," he said.

"We have Mr. Zimmerman's approval," said Slaymaker.

"That doesn't matter," said Baldwin. "What I'm saying is that it's physically impossible to upload the whole package. Not to mention that it would probably take three or four days to do it if you could."

"We have the fastest connections in the world," said one of the FBI techies.

"You're an IT guy, right?" asked Baldwin. It was unclear how he recognized one of his own, but he did. The man nodded.

"So how do you guarantee server security?"

"Easy, "said the man." Restrict access."

"I said guarantee," said Baldwin.

The man blinked and then hit his head with his forehand. "Shit!" he groaned.

"What?" asked Slaymaker.

"The mainframe isn't connected to the internet," said the man.

"Exactly," said Baldwin. "The only way you can access anything on our mainframe is from a Martin computer with a special chip in it. One of our subsidiaries custom makes them for us. They don't even know what they're for. That chip prevents any computer outside the company from accessing any data on the mainframe."

"So we install those chips in our computers," said someone.

"That's fine, as long as you use them inside this building," said Baldwin. "If you try it from outside the building the lines detect illegal impedance values and it shuts down the circuit."

"So what you're saying is we'd have to have a physical copy of the software to load onto an FBI server," said Slaymaker.

"Sure. That would work. If, by 'server' you mean you have a spare supercomputer, and several million dollars' worth of drives to copy things onto."

"Shit," groaned Slaymaker.

"Can I ask why you people are here?" Baldwin looked around.

"Nobody told him?"

"You said to go get him," an agent said. "We did that. You didn't say to brief him."

Quentin said he'd take care of that and took Baldwin into a corner of the room, where they put their heads together. When they were done, they came back to the table.

"I understand now," said Baldwin, looking forlorn. "Unfortunately, I still can't think of a way to solve this problem."

"I can," said Claire, casually.

Everyone looked at her.

"How many people are you going to put on this who will be doing the actual audits?"

"Four for now," said Slaymaker. "More later if necessary."

"So we hire four of your people as auditors," said Claire, shrugging. "They appear to be working for Quentin and nobody thinks a thing about it."

Slaymaker's face went slack.

"Shit. An undercover op. Why didn't I think of that?"

"You're not an auditor," said Claire, sweetly.

In the end, Claire didn't get back to Cindy's until almost midnight. By then she had supervised each of the four brand new Martin Aerospace Industries auditors as they audited five files picked at random by each. In the process she'd gotten to know them all, and their initial aloofness dissipated.

By the time SAC Slaymaker said she could go, she was on a first name basis with a number of the agents, including Alan Sinderson and Jeremy Nelson, who had picked her up. They offered to take her home too. On the way she gave them directions to Cindy's house.

"We didn't get anything painted," she said. "I really don't want to sleep in that room until we get it painted."

"I hear that," said Alan. "He really tried to have you knocked off?"

"Hired three guys who ambushed us while we were running. They had knives."

"Us?"

"I run with a guy I know. We're serious runners."

"How serious?"

"I'm told I've done marathons, and Chad does that too."

"You're told?"

She had to explain the accident, and her amnesia.

"So how'd you get away from the three guys with knives?"

"I didn't. I kicked their asses."

Jeremy laughed. "Why do I believe you?"

"Because it's true. I'm pretty good at martial arts."

"What kind?"

"I can't remember."

Both laughed then.

"Don't laugh at me! I broke one's knee and another one's elbow. I got in a kick to the head on the third one, but I must have hit him wrong, because he went down, but got up and took off."

They stopped laughing.

"Where have you been?" asked Cindy, her voice low and raspy. "I've been worried sick!"

"Long story," said Claire, tiredly.

"I even called Mr. Zimmerman!" squealed Cindy, and then lowered her voice. "Danny's sleeping," she whispered.

"You should be too," said Claire.

"After you disappear off into the blue with two guys who look like linebackers in suits?"

"They were FBI agents," said Claire.

"I knew they were feds! Why didn't you just tell me that?"

"Because they insisted you didn't need to know," said Claire.

"That's what Mr. Zimmerman said, too," said Cindy, her voice grumpy. "He just told me not to worry about you and said everything would be fine."

"Then why didn't you?"

"Because I wanted to know!" snapped her friend.

"Do you still want to know? Because it's going to take me hours to tell you about it."

Cindy looked her over. "Are you really okay?"

"Never better."

"Then I can wait until tomorrow."

"Thanks."

"Chad came by," said Cindy. "He was looking for you."

"Crap," groaned Claire. "I was supposed to run with him."

"I didn't tell him you sashayed off with two hunks who could have graced the cover of Esquire."

"What did you tell him?"

"I said I'd have you call him when you got home, or in the morning, whichever came first."

"You didn't!"

"I was pretty miffed when he happened by. We waited for you at your house until supper time."

"I'm sorry. I wasn't allowed to leave or use the phone."

"But you're not in trouble."

"Not at all. In fact, I have some new friends, all of whom carry guns."

"You sure could have used one or two of them a week ago."

"Yeah," sighed Claire. "Crap. I can't call him now," she groaned.

"Why not?"

"It's midnight!"

"So?"

"How would you feel if I called you at midnight?"

"If I was worried about you, I'd be very happy that you called me. I speak with the voice of experience."