One way and another, last weekend's system mishap continued to draw a lot of attention the next day. There were a lot of unanswered questions in several people's minds, and the search for answers went on.
Two Internal EDP auditors set up at 9.30 in their standby Mulgrave office, and began an investigation, as far as the system would allow them from its truncated records of the incident and the sequence of events. They spoke to the Operations Supervisors, and got more puzzles than answers for their trouble.
The program that appeared to cause all the trouble had been run in the wrong week, on the wrong shift, according to the schedule. Why? They were ‘way behind in the Accounts Department, and this had been the first chance after the base information was corrected – “or so we believed”, the duty supervisor understood.
"But a fortnight late? Our creditors must have been kicking up merry hell," Ms Atkinson asked, "What would happen to our Dun and Bradstreet rating with this kind of thing. It seems very irregular."
"I think it was only ten days," the Supervisor corrected, "and I wouldn't know about any other stuff. And the Accounts people held the run up: they pushed through several emergency payments, but you'd have to talk to them about the rest of the delay."
Gratefully, he escaped after half an hour, and the audit pair could find little to progress with until their "tutor” arrived for his day's stint of duty.
Lester wasn't much help on the cause of the mishap - all attempts to trace that had already failed. As to procedures, the Systems Programming group had their own rules for a "crash," but all the senior people had been out, so the players on deck didn't know those rules.
"Every one - even outside of contact? How did that happen?"
"Well, my boss could fill you in on that more, but you’ll recall I was with you, and I gather your boss was holding my messages."
Whoops!
So the questioning moved onto the normal procedure for handling a System fault during an Operational run. What Fred's group normally did in a crash wasn't much interest to Audit; and the discussion had frequently to be redirected to the subjects where he was competent – and relevant.
"What happened to the Payables tape while this was going on?"
"The Operations people keep it in quarantine until we decide what to do with it. You'd have to ask them."
"Why not use the backup tape?"
"I wasn't here, as you know, but we'd be very careful before we did that. We might have had a fault that corrupted the primary tape. If you put the backup tape up, you might destroy that, too. So you try very hard, very carefully, to find out exactly what went wrong before you chance running the backup instead. It's your last chance, so to speak."
"So what do you do next?” the girl asked." You don't know what went wrong, you can't use the backup, are we ever going to pay our bills?"
"We've done that," Lester assured her. "When we were finally stuck, we checked out the Payables Program tape, and found it did have some errors. Heaven knows how they got there; no way to find out now. Anyway, the boys were able to fix them up by copying bits from other masters, and get what should be a "virgin" tape again. We ran the program again yesterday, and there was no trouble. The Accounts people would doubtless have been very careful about validating and sending out the cheques that were printed then, but that's their procedure."
"How could it run perfectly the second time?"
"Any number of reasons," he answered promptly. "It looks like there was nothing wrong with it. Something else probably caused the crash, and damaged the program in the process. The machine might be doing fifty things at the same time. On Friday morning, somebody (maybe somebody in Singapore, for all we know) did something wrong, and on Tuesday afternoon, fortunately they didn't do it again. So everything went OK the second time."
"Tell us about what steps you took on Monday," Jenny Atkinson asked.
"After your learning experience last week," Lester told her, "I think I want you to tell me what I did. How about it, Jenny? I know you can find those records, and read some sense out of them. What did I do?"
In half an hour, they had thoroughly traced his work, as well as Paul Towner's, for the previous Monday. Lester breathed a silent sigh of relief: he hadn't touched the backup tape and it showed. He explained why nobody normally would, and only he knew how difficult it had been to resist temptation. Those changes he'd made to Marland's name were very minor, but he ought to shift them eventually: not now; things were a bit warm at the moment. Best to let this whole business die down.
The Audit people thanked him again for his help, and turned their attention to the Accounts staff.
One floor up, the discussion at Ken Murray's weekly review meeting had been highly parallel. There'd been no suggestion of unusual performance anywhere but among the Systems staff, but several areas of their operations were shrouded in mystery. Ken really was surprised with the way Fred Hart's people had reacted to the "crash."
"What caused it, Fred?" he began.
"We don't know, Ken. There weren't enough clues left to piece the causes together. It's very disappointing," Fred picked his words carefully, hoping not to open the newcomers’ supervision oversight to scrutiny. "We tried all the weekend and Monday, the suspect program ran again without a problem yesterday; it's just a mystery at this stage."
Ken had done his homework, though; nothing was going to be covered up.
"It seems like the big inconvenience was to Database users," Murray took up the discussion. Yet I understood your people weren't called in, Jack. Why didn't you get help from the Database group, Fred?"
"My people didn't seem to need them," was all he could think of.
"Jack," Murray turned the discussion, "wouldn't it be normal for your DB people to come in, too? How long should they wait?"
"An hour or so, usually," Jack Arnold supplied. "Bailey, Towner, any of the senior people there would usually call us as soon as they even smelt a joint problem. Apparently they weren't across it."
"Who was across it, Fred?" Murray turned back.
"One of the seniors, Nicholson; he had the two newer people on it, and I think he wanted them to find a solution on their own."
"Tough luck about the Company, I suppose," Murray summed up provocatively. "Is the mess cleaned up now?"
That last comment had everything pigeonholed nicely, Fred felt, having no place to hide. Clearly, he had let junior staff go too far. He hadn't tried, really tried, to get past Rosen's secretary and her boss’s ban on messages; he hadn't wanted to interfere with Nicholson's way of getting the system back on the air; in a crisis, he had been superfluous.
"Now what about the Operations side of that problem," Murray asked, switching his tack. He didn't have any Operations people in his area, so everyone wondered what was coming.
"How do we know something didn't go seriously wrong by design on Friday? We don't know who or what caused the problem, and we've stopped looking. Have I got that right, Fred?"
"I'm not sure what else we can do," Fred started, as all the eyes turned to him," this sort of thing could happen any time."
"When was the last time?" Murray asked calmly.
"What, a system crash? Five or six months ago, I guess." Fred still didn't see what the big deal was about.
"No," Murray explained, "a crash in a cheque-writing program."
"I haven't any idea,” Fred said, “certainly a long time ago."
"That's what I mean," Murray was patient still. "Have you got any other investigative resources?"
"Well, the Internal Audit people have decided to have a look around, but I don't think they can do much now."
"Oh?" Murray was interested. "Why do you say that?"
"The trail's cold. Everything seems OK now. In any case, Lester Bayliss spent all last week training them how to use the Security Reporting system, and he's given up trying to find what went wrong. When Alf Rosen asked me to help, I told him there wasn't much chance, but Bayliss is probably with them now, just in case."
"You didn't really call Database or Audit in then, and when they found out, they got on the scene a bit late." Murray was looking a bit disgusted now. "So, if we've got a crooked operator, he's quite safe this time. I think you ought to develop some lateral thinking habits, Fred. I want a full report from you when the Audit teams are finished. I want names and dates, of everyone involved at all, and I suggest you need a better procedure for dealing with this kind of crash. You might also ask the Auditors to see me before they close the books on the incident."
Fred didn't absorb much of the rest of the management meeting. He was busy licking his wounds: they didn't understand how complex the situation was, and he reviewed the sequence of events sorrowfully, looking for the point when he should have strode masterfully into the middle of all that effort. Was there one?
Meeting closed, Fred went back to work, and Ken Murray picked up the phone to his boss.
“John,” he came right to the point, "I think we might have had an attempt to steal from the computer last weekend. The indications are our own Audit people might be out of their depth. I suggest we get some outsiders in to have a quick look at procedures and competence. Who do I have to convince, and where do I start?"
The situation was quite simple: they had had a system fault, in a cheque-payment program probably, and after four days’ work there were no facts. No causes, no results, no problems, no real damage, apparently nothing missing; not a lot of sensitivity to the dangers either, as far as he could see. Something smelt fishy.
Two minutes later his “suggestion” was all authorised.
It added to the impartiality of an investigation if he stayed clear of the Company's statutory auditors, and brought in a complete outsider. Ken suggested he knew a friend in the multinational accounting firm Peat Marwick who might organise a speedy reaction, and broke the connection.
John was highly pleased. He'd gone looking for a trouble-shooter, without being able to define what the trouble was. If Ken thought something stank, that was good enough for him. If Ken found any substance for his concerns, he, John Wragg, would be the first to know. He'd probably better mention it to the Audit man, though. Otherwise they just might regard Ken's help as interference.
Ken Murray wasn't going to make that kind of political mistake. Marshalling his facts in a different order, he made his next call to Alf Rosen, the Audit Manager.
"I believe your people are working on the results of an interesting problem we had here last weekend," he said. I'm disgusted my people chose to call you so late. Would you be prepared to let me make amends?"
Naturally, Rosen wanted to hear more.
"Your people have just had a training session with one of our senior programmers. I think we ought to regard the skills they've picked up as imperfect at the moment. I want to get an outside team in to pick through the debris. I'll pay for it, of course, though we could both profit by sharing the reports we got."
Rosen was delighted, and he said so. This man Murray certainly seemed to have his priorities right. This sort of chance occurrence - if it was chance, and he left that possibility open - cropped up once in five years. At their lowest level of resource availability, the computer system had faltered over a highly reliable cheque-producing program. Just when Systems Programming had all their senior people elsewhere, a system crash had occurred, and been badly analyzed. Unfortunate, wasn't it?
"You could say that," Murray agreed tentatively, "Frankly, I'd like to see some facts, and I rather hoped you wouldn't mind my efforts to find some. There isn't much time to lose on this one."
Replacing the phone, Murray sat back and chewed his lip for a while. Nicholson, Chu and McAllister: he'd remember those names. The one thing you could be sure of with white-collar crime, was that the culprit would be a surprise. He'd be very interested to talk to those internal auditors, too: it should prove highly instructive about Bayliss and his ability to communicate across disciplines. Hart wouldn’t hold that job down much longer, he suspected.
Lester didn't feel his ear itch on the floor below as he settled in for the afternoon's work. It had been a very untidy business, these last few days, and he was disgusted, too, with Fred's handling of it. However, that was the past, and this afternoon there was little cause to brood. The rest of the day was self-training. He had to be ready for queries on a new statistical maths package that a couple of applications programmers were starting to use.
He had to read the manual. Most of the queries he'd get were because those lazy bastards wouldn't read the bloody manual. Taking that simple step would put him streets ahead of the competition.
He had plenty of spare mental capacity, he found, to explore what he ought to be planning for Christmas. He found his subconscious had answered many of the open questions, while he wasn't watching over the last few weeks.
When I have a million or so spare, he led himself in, I can't come back here. I have to go somewhere else, and do something else.
Where? What?
Sydney had lots of big IBM machines. He could set up a consulting group, through a personnel agency, ready for a February start. He'd need some industry names to create some credibility, and a sales/marketing man, probably in January, to start beating the bushes for work. A creative accountant would be useful, too, if the startup money was a trifle grubby.
No, he thought, he'd been nursing a few reservations like that, which carried an ongoing risk. It was time for a couple more rules to be stated explicitly.
Now, where was it he started?
Anything more than $1 million
A minimum of a week's clear start.
That was probably all. However, he had thought quite a bit, and there were some more strong preferences now. Like, for instance:
No accomplices.
No criminal involvement.
He wasn't a criminal; he was fighting an injustice, and he would have to launder the proceeds some way without giving pursuers any additional sources of information. Little Annie was a real risk as time wore one, but on balance he decided she had to be kept in the dark, for both their sakes, till the last available moment. After all, she mightn't want to come to Sydney.