Chapter 2

On the way into his luxury townhouse, located in the river valley, Nick noticed his mail box was full. He grabbed a stack of envelopes and shuffled through them. They were all letters from creditors demanding payment on over due bills, which meant his financial situation was much worse than he imagined.

It wasn’t just a matter of a couple of maxed out credit cards. There was one from a luxury car dealer threatening to seize his beloved Porcha unless he immediately got caught up on missed payments, and another from his bank warned him he was behind on his mortgage payments. There was even one from The Brick demanding payment on his furniture and appliances.

Nick tossed the mail on the kitchen table and sighed in frustration. The image he presented to the world as a millionaire dealer in rare coins was just a façade, and it was about to unravel unless he did something drastic.

Fortunately, he knew how to quickly get his hands on enough money to satisfy all his creditors, and continue living the high life. He was going to rob a bank, but not in the usual way where you push through the doors like John Dillinger, with guns blazing, demanding a bank teller open the vault. That was too old fashioned, much too messy, and way too easy to get arrested by the cops.

Nick James was a brilliant computer hacker, and he intended to use his skills to complete a few after hour withdrawals. His speciality was raiding dormant accounts. He knew that every bank had accounts that sat untouched for years. Some contained only a few hundred dollars, but others held thousands of unclaimed money, mainly due to problems with estate inheritances, after a death. There were thousands of people who met untimely deaths before they able to write out a proper will, leaving behind a small fortunes that should have went to the grieving family, instead of sitting forever in bank accounts.

He sat down at his desk, and decided to try the Bank of Montreal first, since it had been a while since he had hacked into it, and because he seemed to have the most luck with it. It was the age of computers, and the tech wizards that looked after the banks’ computers were well aware of hackers, so they went to great lengths to maintain their security. The biggest defence was the constant changing and upgrading of passwords and key codes, but Nick was more than up to the challenges presented by the geeks who monitored the computers.

It only took him a few minutes to defeat and temporarily over ride the Bank of Montreal passwords. He spent the next few hours searching for the perfect dormant account. The ideal one would contain thousands of dollars, and would be untouched for years. His usual method of operation was to drain it, but not completely. That way if somebody did eventually show up to claim it, there would be still money left in it, and hopefully the new owner would accept what was left without too many questions.

Nick rejected account after account, and was about to give up and try another bank, when he hit the jack pot. He had discovered one containing two million dollars, that nobody had touched for five years. His greed and excitement got the best of him, and instead of stopping to question why anybody would be crazy enough to leave that amount of money in an account and forget about it, he stole all but five hundred thousand.

Within minutes Nick made a computer withdrawal, and to hide his tracks, he sent the money bouncing around the world, and in and out of various foreign banks before it ended up in an account owned by him under a fictitious name. He then deposited enough money into his company account to pay off his creditors, and just in case Revenue Canada came snooping, he faked paperwork for the sale of a rare coin to justify the huge deposit.

Satisfied with his night’s work, he went to bed and slept peacefully, totally unaware that his actions had not only set alarm bells ringing in all the wrong places, but also drew the attention of an ambitious journalist who knew something about rare coins.