Almost 7p.m., Annette was wolfing down the last of what had been a very large bowl of chili con carne, when she heard the front door of their flat rattle. Annette wasn't pretty, she knew that, but she was clever - so good at her job as a systems analyst for Digital Equipment that she could get away with looking like a modern Medusa, even at work.
Surprised a bit by the entry, she called from the kitchen. "Thought you were going to be late tonight, Less. Bad day at the office?"
"The worst! Too bad to talk about the wrong side of a stiff Scotch." Lester Bayliss plodded up the hall, hands thrust deep in his pockets. "What do you say we go out to dinner? Can't stand the thought of...”
He stopped, as he saw the spoon poised over the almost empty bowl. Bad timing, he conceded.
"Rest of the chili will only take five minutes. Anyway, I can't be bothered eating another dinner just to keep you happy. Go drown in the whiskey while I put that chili back on."
It was a very convenient relationship. They'd met at a Computer Society Annual Conference a couple of years ago, discovered common intellectual interests over the two days, and managed with difficulty to meet a couple of times over the next few months.
The "courtship" was a rough passage. Lester was a Systems Programmer for a large Australian public company - one of a team of six highly trained specialists with a lot of standby responsibility. Annette worked with sales staff for a U.S. computer multinational, designing and setting up customer computer systems, sometimes training the more technical user staff with their new toy, then responding to queries while they got going.
Neither of them had any need to travel, except very seldom to professional training courses, usually in Sydney. That wasn't the problem. They missed, both of them, about half of their social appointments because of unpredictable work demands.
Annette lived grudgingly with a succession of customers on short timetables and salespeople on shorter fuses. The current deadline usually won when her preference was dinner with a friend. The high salary was supposed to compensate, but you can't sleep with the money.
So meeting Less, another shy technologist looking mostly for company and reasonable contact, was a breakthrough. At 35 he was untidy, paunchy, drank and smoked too much, often came across as preoccupied or downright rude. Being a workaholic does that to you. She understood, because she was academically aware she shared most of those complaints. So there looked to be a basis for a longer term relationship, with little risk of third- party competition for that kind of partner's affection.
And affection it became. The pair lived in quite separate pigeonholes of the computer software industry, Annette close to the commercial user's needs and wants, Lester to the very complex internal operations of IBM's large computers. They could share ideas for hours about business, society and nuclear disarmament, mostly without ever sharing an opinion but invariably coming to understand the subject in a deeper way.
As to business, Lester didn't know what a "customer" looked like, and couldn't recall having met one. On the other hand, Annette couldn't care less about user exit points or machine cycle times; in fact, she dreaded the thought of fooling with Digital's Operating Systems.
Between his job demands, and her Tender and Bid timetables the two months after the Computer Conference became a kind of emotional torture - a good thing was just out of reach. So, after the third or fourth broken dinner date, they decided to live together, and did the negotiating over lunch in a bistro in central Melbourne.
Behind their mutual need for some understanding human companionship, there was a cool, rational business relationship. She would move into his Caulfield flat, about halfway between their work places, they'd reimburse a joint account which paid for everything but clothes - in practice, a remarkably minor component of both their budgets, but they agreed the principle was important. There would be no children, and both had to make sure of that. The contract was without term, to be terminated by either party on one hour's notice from the next Bank opening time.
In the two years they'd had a few gruff words from time to time; but both wanted the liaison to work, and it did - admirably. They saw things, people and places that would have been a bother alone, and both enjoyed the chance to share confidences or outrageous personal judgments.
Tonight had better be "give" time, she judged. He hadn't expected to be home before midnight. Since the job was testing, he needed the whole machine, and the West Australian operators couldn't really be kicked off the system until after eight local time. It was supposed to be urgent, important enough to warrant staying there all night to get the job finished. Wonder what went wrong?
No answer on offer. She strolled up to the lounge, suspecting she knew the reason for all the silence. Sure enough, the diagonally-placed body took up most of the spare floor in the snug room, with its arms spread-eagled. Dvorak’s music healed a lot of wounds, and the headphones gave a good helping - without having to negotiate volume levels with the philistines who lived next door. Terrace houses have their problems. She pointed to her mouth, and he nodded lazily as he rolled up to a sitting position, rattling an ice cube around the empty tumbler.
Dinner took all of fifteen minutes as his appetite returned to normal. Collecting a plate of cheese and a wine cask from the table, he headed back to the lounge, in time for the tail-end of a TV news broadcast. Annette let the weather girl finish her tightly-packed spiel, before switching her off and loading an organ concerto into the cassette player.
Lester stared grimly at the darkened television screen from his armchair.
"So what's up your nose?" she prodded bluntly. Not much sense trying to be diplomatic until you knew what the problem was.
"Disk broke."
"Not that big new storage disk they just got a few weeks ago."
"Yep"
"You had to test all the driver programs you'd written, the last week of 25-hours days," she tried again to draw him out.
"Well, Ray Agnew did most of the writing. Bastard left before he got the testing started." Back into brooding silence.
"So what happens next?"
"Gonna have to get it fixed"
"I guessed that much. When?"
"Not my job. I only get to work long hours on non-deadlines. If you want the Sto Tec Engineer’s opinion he doesn't know either. Doesn't think they have parts for it in Australia yet."
He had gone back to the stirring Bach fugue, but was slowly relaxing, it seemed to Annette, after vocalising the frustration.
"Thanks for the biscuits. Get another whiskey?"
"No," he responded, "I'll just tear into the wine for a while. So what have you been doing this last week. Here it is Friday, and all we've done lately is play musical beds." He was definitely thawing out.
"You missed a good session on computer security at the Society's branch meeting on Tuesday." Seeing his brow furrow with irritation again, she hurried on, mentally cursing her careless reminder of missed opportunities. "The guy works as an independent consultant. He's got a casebook growing of Australian computer crimes, and some of them sounded dandies. No names, of course, and it's surprising how little money changed hands. Most of the big crimes are sabotage, and resource costs, like stolen customer lists. He says all the big ones get hushed up, though."
There was no answer from Lester, but feeling herself on safe ground, Annette decided to explore the tantalising subject further. It had been a very stimulating hour at that presentation, and Lester ought to have a lot of insider understanding.
"Did you know you’re the prime suspect?" That ought to bring him back to life, Annette surmised.
"What ? Haven't done anything. How do you mean?'
"They looked at what sort of people commit crimes," she supplied, "and some people's jobs give them better access than others."
That was vague enough not to destroy the subject, and she waited as Lester's mind caught up with the suggestion.
"I think I see where you're headed," he murmured.
"He was saying the Systems Programmer has the best chance of all. Strange that you mob do so little with all those opportunities. According to him, your profession is paid to monkey around with the computer's operating system. If you know what you're doing, you can change what you like, add anything you please, destroy any records you don't like. You can dodge the Security systems - that's if you don't already have the highest level Password in the installation. You can even cover all your tracks, ruin all traces you've been there."
Lester absorbed all that, a slow smile starting to wash the signs of aggravation from his face, and sipped at the wineglass thoughtfully.
"So why are we living here in abject poverty and destitution?" Annette persisted playfully. It would be a much more pleasant evening if she could draw him off the frustration of the last week's fruitless efforts.
"Mainly because I haven't worked out what to do with the loot," he offered, picking up the subject with a hint of enthusiasm.
"Do you need any help?" she got in, but the conversation wasn't flagging at all.
"No," he volunteered slowly, "at least, that's not the problem. Those descriptions of the chances available are a bit colourful, but they're unrealistic. You've got to look at the whole job. You probably need a very powerful friend to fence a $20 Million cheque. Most banks would wonder where it came from. You'd be caught in an hour. Anyway, the Accountants put audit trails all over the place. In a week or so everybody would be wondering where all the suspicious holes came from."
"Holes in the Operating System?"
"Maybe there; more often holes in the program that made those transactions happen, and holes in the library where the backup copies were kept."
"So it could be done," Annette chortled, "and you're missing the point. There’d be a full scale disaster, at home-base, complete with cops and Board members, while you're out in the slums of West Melbourne trying to fence that $20 million cheque. You'd never work again! You'd never have to," she mused, "if you found the fence."
"I suppose it's the same as most other big crimes involving a lot of money," he went on. "Either of us could buy a black water pistol, and get a few thousand from a Bank at closing time on Friday. That's only the start, though. You'd probably need a new face, name and address a long way away to spend it."
"There's five million people in Victoria, you know." Annette was enjoying the cat-and-mouse game.
"There's only five or ten could do my job. We practically have an annual reunion at the same IBM update course every so often. I'd have to go to Madagascar, and Heaven knows whether they use IBM computers or Australian bank cheques over there."
"So the gnomes of Collins Street have got you chained to your coding pad for life." It was an intriguing thought, nevertheless.
"Seriously, though, if you really had a fence or something, how could you work a really big swindle?"
"There are literally dozens of ways. That's not difficult at all. Our site's interested in good security, but the Systems Programmers have to have access to everything. You never know where a fault will take you, but you have to get there fast a lot of the time, when Supervisors are often in bed."
"I could run the fortnightly payroll twice, if the Paymaster left the cheque blanks in the Operations area for an hour. It would be childishly easy to pay a non-existent supplier, along with the normal month end accounts payable. With a bit of extra effort, you could even balance several books to delay discovery. Creating a new Cost Centre wouldn't take five minutes, and internal transfers you made out of it could look like corrections of bookkeeping errors."
As he spoke, he saw dozens of operational tasks, the need for lots of "bent" friends, and the final blockage, still, of how to get clear away with the proceeds. Laundering, they called it.
"Well, that lecturer certainly made it sound a lot easier," she said, closing the subject wistfully. "Guess we're going to have to stay penniless. You look like you could use a week's sleep. Coming to bed?"
He'd do better than that. He'd have a four-day weekend, to wash some of the tiredness and frustration away. His supervisor, Fred Hart, knew how unjust the last week's work had been, and would raise no objections or paperwork. There had to be some concession for the long hours and unreasonable shifts. With a good run of luck, the disk might be fixed or replaced by the middle of next week.