In short order he learned that XL SysCorp had gotten its start as Excelsior Computers in 1974, became Excelsior Systems in 1981, then Excel Systems Corporation in 1990 and finally metamorphosed into XL SysCorp last year.
It was a model of a modern, vertically integrated company, and after a severe downsizing three years before, lean and mean and extremely competitive in a softening information-systems market.
Smith saw with horror that XL SysCorp serviced
any government accounts, including but not limited to the CIA. An article on the eight-billion-dollar XL program to upgrade the Internal Revenue Service's antiquated Zilog computer system made Smith gasp audibly.
The possibility had not occurred to him before, but the suggestion was so obvious it filled Harold Smith with cold horror.
The unknown mind had sicced the IRS on Folcroft. It was part of the master plan. Smith knew he had not received written notification of a coming audit. Somehow the IRS computers had been penetrated and a file changed to show both the notification and a reply Smith had never given.
It was very neat. The IRS's computer checks and balances had been satisfied, so the system kicked out instructions to audit Folcroft, and human beings, with no way of differentiating reliable on-screen data from a fabrication, had obeyed like mindless robots.
Grimly Smith read on as the day lengthened. He learned that XL had successfully transformed itself into a so-called virtual corporation. That brought a hard frown to Smith's thin face.
It meant that any one of possibly thousands of freelance programmers or installers or subcontractors might in fact be responsible for the looting of the Grand Cayman Trust and the multipronged electronic assault on CURE.
Smith had secretly hoped—even as the notion filled him with dread—that the plot could go to the highest reaches of XL SysCorp. It would mean a more grandiose plan, but the problem would be infinitely more tractable than the prospect of investigating every far- flung employee of the largest virtual corporation in America. Individual background checks alone could take months.
Harold Smith pressed on, sustained only by an iron will and regular glasses of water fortified by Bromo- Seltzer to soothe his growling stomach. As he roved cyberspace looking for answers, one thought kept nagging him.
Where on earth did the money go?
Jeremy Lippincott was to the manor born, but he worked in a bank.
Jeremy Lippincott had by his twenty-fifth year shown absolutely no discernible aptitudes in life. He possessed no known skills, no overriding interests that suggested gainful employment and only managed to balance his personal checkbook because his personal valet helped. He had graduated from Yale on the strength of his very gentlemanly C's—and because the university understood that the Lippincott Chair of High Finance depended on the goodwill of the Lippincott family. And the goodwill of the Lippincott family manifested itself in the form of raw money, and no other way.
Jeremy Lippincott did, however, possess a lockjaw old-world accent and the imperial bearing of an East Coast WASP. He was the kind of a person whom old money found comfortable to be around. He projected solidity, reserve and frugality.
There was only one thing that could be done with him: get him a job in a bank.
Since he came from wealth—the Lippincotts were among America's oldest, most monied families—the matter was as simple as his uncle William dropping in on his personal banker and dropping a broad hint.
The hint, couched in crisp sentences that emerged from teeth that did not part even as the lips around them writhed in time with the bitten-off words, did not actually come out and say, Employ my idle and useless nephew or I will withdraw the family millions and entrust them to your worst rival. But they conveyed that unmistakable message nevertheless.
This was how it was done. By oblique suggestion rather than pointed request, or worse yet, implied threat.
Jeremy Lippincott was installed in a corner office of the Nickel Bank of Long Island where he could do no harm. He looked properly conservative in his Brooks Brothers suit and wingtip oxfords. His haircut was eternal. His jaw tightly shaven. From time to time he was sent to the homes of rich widows to sip weak tea and murmur to them in terse but reassuring sentences so they continued trusting the bank with their investments, which they understood very little and Jeremy Lippincott understood not at all.
It was a perfect but boring existence, and on weekends Jeremy could sail the sound in his forty-foot yacht, dreaming of the America's Cup and looking forward to retirement twenty-some years into the next century.
It all went amiss during the banking crisis. The Nickel Bank of Long Island fell victim to a mountain of troubled loans during the savings-and-loan crisis. Only a transfusion of investment capital could bail it out.
And so the Lippincott family dug into its very deep pockets and purchased the bank. They had three reasons for resorting to this awkward remedy. One, although the Lippincott family owned Lippincott Bancorp, which in turn controlled numerous banks bearing the name Lippincott, they were fast running out of banks in which to safely house the Lippincott family fortune beneath the wholly insufficient one- hundred-thousand-dollar FDIC insurance limit and stood to sustain staggering losses.
Two, Nickel Bank was a fabulous bargain. The Resolution Trust Corporation people were virtually giving it away.
And three, something had to be done with Jeremy, who in a dozen years in his corner office hadn't advanced beyond the excruciatingly undemanding trust department.
So they made him president.
It was not as rash as it sounded. The chief purpose of buying the Lippincott Savings Bank—as it had been renamed the instant the deal was consummated—was to watch over Lippincott capital.
Jeremy, being a Lippincott to the bone, could be trusted to do that admirably. And to hang with the rest of the depositors.
Jeremy Lippincott arrived for work at the gentlemanly hour of 10:00 a.m., strode past the ranks of multicultural tellers hired to project a friendly appearance for the common trade and satisfy federal labor laws that would never have been debated outside cheap barrooms in the halcyon days when the Lippincotts and those like them dominated the fabric of American society. He looked neither right nor left, acknowledging not even the loan officers at their desks—some of these people had foreign accents, for God's sake—and went right to his private office.
Good morning, Miss Chalmers," he deigned to say to his secretary.
Miss Chalmers smiled with an utter lack of warmth that reminded Jeremy of his beloved mother and took his mail into the office with him. He closed the door.
He always closed the door.
Tossing the mail onto his desk, Jeremy doffed his uncomfortable Brooks Brothers suit, stripping off his school tie as he stepped out of his shoes. The rug felt better when he walked across it in his stocking feet.
Lowering the shades, he discarded his shirt, dropped his trousers and climbed into his pink bunny suit. Attired for the rigors of the day, Jeremy Lippincott settled behind his officious desk and began to go through his mail.
It was the usual. He tossed most of it into the waste- paper basket.
The intercom tweedled.
"It's Mr. Rawlings. Line one."
"Put him on," said Jeremy, stabbing the wrong button. He had never learned to work the phones properly and had made his multiline ROLM phone into a single-line phone with a sprinkling of fancy lights and buttons. No matter which button he pressed, Jeremy always got line one.
"Yes, Rawlings?" he said, giving one long white- silk-lined ear an annoyed puff. It had fallen in front of his eye again. He would have to reprimand the valet. The damn ears were never properly starched.
"We seem to have had some unusual activity with one of our commercial accounts."
"Which one?"
"Folcroft Sanitarium."
"Horrid name."
"Overnight their account has mushroomed twelve million dollars and some change."
"Quite a jump."
"It seems to have come in by wire transfer, but there are no confirmation slips to be found."
"Does it matter?"
"Well, it is unusual. And no one in clerical recalls processing any such transfer."
"Well, someone must have. Otherwise, the money would not be on deposit, now, would it?" "True, Mr. Lippincott. But it's highly, superlatively, unusually irregular."