Driving back to the office, Lester took a good, hard look at progress so far. There was no doubt in his mind that a good, stable alternative identity was essential. He threw the spotlight on the arrangements so far, playing all the imaginable misadventures through the setup.
He had a street address, but the people who lived there didn't know him, hadn't heard of him in that unit. The local mailman would be unlikely to remember all the names of tenants who had passed through those townhouses in the last couple of years. It shouldn't matter, though. He didn't plan to have any deliveries there. Just in case, he'd called in at the townhouse one evening and introduced himself. He was Roger Conley, a visiting businessman, staying a couple of days at an inner-city hotel.
"We just missed the proof error," he apologized over a cup of coffee. "After you've read a couple of pages of advertising material about ten times, you're just not looking at the formal things like addresses and phone number; even section headings get overlooked. You look right through the most obvious errors.
"The point is, your address mailed out on 12,000 brochures, all over Australia, and about 500 went to New Zealand. Now we've done what we can to protect you. The company doesn't have anyone resident in Melbourne yet, so we've put a Mail Redirection Order in place at your Post Office. That should work, but Posties are human too. If anything does come through for Regis Investments, you just mark it "Return to Post Office" and stick it in your nearest mail box. We expect a couple of hundred responses, and it is possible you'll have some inconvenience. We hope you'll accept this little gift as a peace offering if it does get to be a nuisance. It really was a careless error, and we don't know quite how it happened.
He put a small carton gently on the coffee table, and the girl opened it gingerly. The ornament was a piece of Jarrah, a very hard, dark timber, and the little, hand-carved prospector stooping with his sieve over an imaginary stream was a really beautiful piece of work. You couldn't readily price the painstaking detail that made the carving so striking, and her indrawn breath assured him the $70 would do the job. That investment would insure the Dillons would do what they could to redirect any stray mail unopened.
It hadn't been quite so easy at the Post Office. Mulgrave didn't have any spare boxes for rent at the moment, and he didn’t like a Private Bag as an alternative. You had to collect that over the counter, and it just didn't seem to offer the same degree of separation as key access to an outside box. He got one at Oakleigh, though, and that was no more than five or six kilometers from work. He didn't think there'd be any trouble scheduling a weekly trip. That would take him no more than thirty minutes to clear, and weekly would be more than adequate at the moment. There were some advantages in that situation too. He had the real (and the dud, for that matter,) Conley in Caulfield, his dummy address in Mulgrave, and the real collection point in Oakleigh, all well separated from each other.
There had been a bit of discomfort over the redirection of mail to a postal box, however. There wasn't any law against it, as far as he could tell with gentle exploration. It seemed as though the Postmaster would really prefer to have some physical address to refer to.
"We don't have an office here yet," he explained, "but we have an option on one in Mulgrave. It would be very damaging to our forward marketing if people had to inquire on an Auckland address. It just wouldn't sound real."
The Postmaster nodded stealthily to the Clerk, and the transaction was over in a couple of minutes. That completed the setup of a temporary contact chain.
Reaching the computer site, he strode past the vigilant Artie, a name he had devised for whatever Security Guard was in place at the time. The first time or two, they'd wonder if he was a bit simple, then they'd assume he was blind. It was his private joke against a system of frequently, irregularly rotated Security Guards. He detested the impersonal "Hey, You!" approach to somebody you greeted on a routine basis, so he generated a convenient generic name for all these Artful Dodgers who moved on after such a short period of duty. As far as he was concerned, they'd all have to answer to the name Artie. They all did too, after a while.
The activity chain had two separate threads: there was the extraction of his startup funds, and then there was the whole woolly area of what he did with them. He had booked in to an Investment Course in early November; that ran two hours nightly for about a week, Monday to Thursday. It was going to be a bit challenging to fit that in with his job, but the lectures weren't on during the day, and he really needed that education before he was in any position to tackle the disposal of that million-odd.
It was time to have a good look at extraction mechanisms. That business of diverting a supplier's cheque wasn't optimum. With a large lump of money, you might find the Treasurer at the receiving end was very interested in its whereabouts, and just might start a search while you were sweating with bank clearances and the like. Someone just might be impatient enough to screw the whole damned thing up.
He put in a full day's work at the computer centre that afternoon, as he did the rest of that second week back. It wouldn't do any harm, he judged, to keep a reputation for one of the most active, prolific people on the floor. It ought to support his argument for supervisory responsibility.
It didn't interfere with his homework, either. He had a few years of back numbers of the company's Annual Reports, and he looked at them from a new perspective, at home those next couple of evenings. He wanted to take a fresh look at the Company’s holdings, to look for areas where he could lift a cool five big ones, from places it wouldn't be noticed for a while. It was a productive search too, and the second night he needed a pencil and paper to keep track, as he ploughed through the Notes on the Accounts.
Depreciation Reserve.
Bad Debt Reserve.
Deferred Development Expenses.
Employee Benefit Reserve.
Unappropriated Profit Account.
Interests in other Corporations.
Unsecured Short-term Deposits.
Asset Revaluation Reserve.
Reserves sounded attractive; some of those pots of money were especially set up just in case, and might sit untouched for years, quite possibly. There were too many possibilities in that list, though. He ought really to work out an order of merit, when another aspect occurred to him. Keep the list, he decided, but think about the characteristics of a perfect crime. When is the best time, what is the best method, to relocate a large amount of money to a more accessible place?
Christmas was a couple of months away; he and Annie had talked in general terms about a couple of weeks in New Zealand in January. The whole of Australian Consolidated Merchandising Ltd would be largely on holiday during those three weeks from Christmas.
Accountants would be scurrying around balancing and collating for a quarterly report. Manufacturing operations would be in the complete control of watchmen, nationwide. A few internal service groups, the more heavily pressed, would get onto procedure reviews. Everywhere, there'd be skeleton staffs. If anybody had a suspicion of something amiss, they just wouldn't have any resources to chase after the dissolving traces of a misappropriation.
Outside, it would be much the same. Police would be patrolling for traffic offenders, banks would be short-staffed, and loaded up with transfers of funds to vacationers at every point of the compass, and investigators never reacted fast - ever, he suspected.
It had to be Christmas. It would be a Sunday this year, and Friday was likely to be a half-day. There'd be a breakup party of Computer Centre staff at midday, and nobody but the cleaners would be there until the Wednesday of the next week. The Banks might operate on the Tuesday, but he'd be sure and plan to get his own Bank activities well started by the Wednesday after Christmas, and get out of the country that same afternoon for New Zealand.
Christmas it was!
Then over the next few evenings, he got around to defining his sketch of the perfect crime. Slowly, with his subconscious mind working on the task in odd moments, he drew up some guidelines for the “job”. The main ones were;
The proceeds had to be more than $1 Million.
There was no upper limit.
The task was to shift them out of Company control.
He wanted a week's start after the shift;
eventually, any successful effort would be traced, anyway.
Even crystallising his thinking that much was a big help; he could mark the company’s static reserve accounts on a dollar-score in order of merit. He managed to shave the list down to three asset accounts, and then he would be able to go inspect how often each of them was reviewed, or discreetly try to establish when they might next be looked at. Finally, the Income Tax area, one of the most lucrative potentially, was worth a lot of further study.
The more he thought about it, the more attractive the prospect of an attack on Tax revenue became. Nobody had a lot of time for the Tax man, and their offices would be quieter than many over the early New Year period. The Annual Report only identified Company Tax, but there was that other component, the employee income tax that was taken out of everyone's pay packet.
The way he worked it out, there would be enough involved to make such an area of endeavor quite viable. He reckoned as a very rough approximation, that 15% would be the total wages and salaries bill withheld by the company as Income Tax, and sent direct to the Tax Office. He supposed this year's payroll bill wouldn't be too different over the period, because he didn't expect that staff numbers would have changed significantly.
So if you took all the assumptions that led towards a low-end bulk personal tax remittance, you had a fairly safe minimum. The Company was paying, he estimated, about $2.7 Million on each fortnightly salary-wages issue, to the Tax Commissioner. It could be several times that much, for example if they paid monthly or included holiday advances at Christmas, but he couldn't see it being much less.
That was about the point where Annette broke into his thoughts with the unsettling comment.
"Been playing with big bucks these last few days, Less. You haven't won the lottery on the side, have you?"
"What do you mean?" Suddenly, surprised, he was wide awake. What had she seen?
"Those bits of paper. You've torn Consolidated apart, the last few days. I wondered why the sudden interest in high finance. I seem to be losing my fatal attraction."
"Haven't finished, yet, but there's no big secret," he started slowly. "It's mainly just looking for something to do. My bank manger was telling me I ought to do something with the nest-egg I've got."
"So?"
"So I've started thinking about it. You want to help? It's fun spending more than you've got."
"But what has Consolidated's Annual Report got to do with your piggy bank? They've got a million for every five bucks of yours."
"Their Investment Analysts do it for a living, though. It's a simple example of an investment portfolio. Where would you put twenty grand if you wanted to beat inflation consistently?" Now, because it seemed he wasn't being believed, he tried harder to draw her into the speculation.
"You seemed to be doing a lot more than that. You can tell me to mind my own business if you want." Annette was getting a bit short. She'd been watching closer than he’d realised.
"No," he answered her, "I don't want you to go away. There wasn't much to do, so I just played with the numbers. Way back one time I learnt a bit about Company Accounts; and I was remembering how to evaluate performance. You didn't answer the question."
"What question - which one?"
"What would you do with twenty grand?" he reminded.
"Well I don't know, but I wouldn't set up an Asset Revaluation Account on the car," she answered.
"Neither would I," he soothed, "but it isn't easy. Do you know anything about the finance market."
"Are you serious about it? Twenty grand isn't a lot of money, you know." She wasn't too interested in the game.
"It's not a pressing problem, but that bank guy says I'm wasting money in the cheque account."
"The cheque account! You bloody idiot, Less, you're going out backwards, you fool." Instant attention, at last. "You really need help, you poor, innocent dummy. Tell you what, toss those Annual Reports out and go talk to that bank man again. He ought to be hammering on the door, offering to split the proceeds. His crummy bank is getting probably fifteen percent on your money, you know. Do it tomorrow, and we'll collect some investment info over the next two or three weeks," she finished in disgust.
"But what if he ties it up?" he asked lamely.
"He won't do anything like that. He'll tell you what you can get for thirty days, while you sort yourself out. Twenty grand, for thirty days, at fifteen percent. Umm, that's twenty-five, no! it's fifty bucks. Annual reports, for Heaven's sake!"
"For a month?" he queried incredulously.
"Work it out, dummy. You're about as much a public menace as these stupid hikers lost in Tasmania."
"No, I'm not," he was glad of a subject change. “I'm not interfering with anyone else like they are.”
"You think people shouldn't go about looking for them?"
"That's right. They didn't ask all those nice Park Rangers to go looking for them. They got them-stupid-selves into that mess. It's even less justifiable to have civilians out in search parties risking their lives. Hikers and rock-climbers choose to risk their necks."
"So do the searchers," Annette claimed. "Nobody forces them. You can't allow hikers the freedom to kill themselves, and deny the rescuers the same right. I bet most times they wait impatiently for the hiking season, just busting for a good, tough rescue. They're like pyromaniac Firemen, or a General who thinks it's a lovely war."
That was good for an hour or two of solid debate, but the outcome was certain. The starting positions were too entrenched for either side to achieve a great deal in one evening.