The simmering discontent carried a sharper edge by the time he returned to the office again that afternoon. It was almost five o'clock, he had been caught up in the start of the standard peak-hour exodus from the Central Business District, and so found the drive slow and wearing.
Home office wasn't much fun to be at, either. The Accounts staff didn't understand why they should discontinue that balance report - been doing it for years, and it’s supposed to be an important crosscheck. He read the caustic complaints on his desk from several sources, and strolled off to find his partner in the cheque-balancing victory.
Paul Towner was feeling just as frustrated. They compared notes over a cup of "plastic" coffee, and mapped out a strategy for return of common sense. Briefly, it went like this.
Their findings had saved the Accounts staff a monthly task; if that saving was to be reversed, dumb as that might sound, then they'd expect the Audit Manager at least to agree, if not to instruct.
Copy to Fred, copy to Audit, and that ought to put the battleground somewhere else for a few days at least.
Rather satisfied with having moved the storm on, Paul went back to his current problem, and Lester wondered whether to pack it in for the day. Perhaps he wouldn't yet. Just for interest sake, he'd have a look at the more recent Audit software, to see how IBM's bean counters had closed that loophole. It could be interesting to see how they attacked the problem for their local equivalents two or three years back that he had just solved. A different approach often had something to offer, and anyway he didn't have much else to do. In the morning, he'd have to let whoever was on the Problem Desk know that he was free.
In theory, nobody was supposed to touch the Security software, so the first task was to get in to it. He used the screen on his desk to sign on to the system. This session, he'd use the special password he'd got from Audit a week or so ago to track down a possible journal error. No problem, he'd made sure it was defined as a top-level access means - go anywhere, do anything -and they hadn't canceled it yet. Normally, they wouldn't bother for a week or two; they didn't have much chance of understanding what he was doing. He would usually tell the EDP Audit Manager himself that there was no further need for it, and then it would be canceled. Probably, if he forgot, the trusting soul would never realise anyway.
This "Auditor" operator designation was deliberately structured to allow password holders to have almost unlimited freedom. They couldn't destroy much, but they had the presumed right to look anywhere they pleased in the dark corners of the computer's huge filing system.
There'd have been other options, of course. When old Miles Carson worked on the site, he never bothered to log off his terminal when he went home, and never locked his office either. After half-an-hour or so, though, the computer would sign the terminal off automatically, because there'd been no keyboard usage. If you took over his terminal as Miles walked out, you usually didn't need a password at all, for most functions.
This wasn't going to be a simple function, though. Miles wouldn't be expected to want to browse in the machine-language areas of the control software. The machine knew, it had been told, and learnt from his work patterns, that Miles didn't ever look at program details, so his password would probably not be good enough this time. At very least, Lester suspected, the System would ask for a repeat of the password every so often; then it would log a Security violation when the "user" didn't know his own password. Then there'd be a fuss in the morning.
Jenny Atkinson was always good for a try, too, late at night, when "authority" had all gone home. She was a damned good Accountant, as far as he could see, but she didn't trust her memory. She always had to write important things down. You could read today's password, and have a pretty good stab at tomorrow's, from the string of words across the top of Jenny's desk blotter. Last time he'd dropped in to get some advice on a Receivables procedure, it had seemed such a silly way to protect her access code. Across the top of the blotter, he'd read:
CAPRICORN AQUARIUS PISCES ARIES
He'd only need to borrow a women's magazine and he'd have Auditor passwords for the next week or so. There wasn't any need for that, though. The System accepted "LESSLEUTH", and he began hunting among the cross-balancing procedures.
After a couple of hours, and tracking down a few file references he had not recognised, there wasn't much else he felt interested in doing.
This new method was a pretty thorough series of checks. It went right back to the Accounts Payable database, and only used the transaction file of payments as a second check point. From one place it derived the value and number of payments due that month. Then it added in the daily files - if they existed - of emergency and special supplier payments, and collated them with the detail of the check-print run. It logged a match as routine, and only reported to the Accounts Department if there was a mismatch. That report, though, was a real gem of precision and detail. Extra, altered or missing cheques were spelt out in minute and historical detail. He'd have taken a month, instead of a week, to find and present all that diagnostic stuff. It was a good scheme, that principle of exception reporting. If you didn't get a monthly report, that was because you didn't need to do anything about the subject. IBM wins again.
Now he could go home, and tomorrow he would fire those memos into the admin system. That old report of his really was obsolete.
As he drove home, the annoyance of that interview with Margery What's- her-name crept back. They owed him, owed him for eight years of presumption, interference with his home life, and they planned to go right on doing that - if he let them.
He could get away with millions, if he chose to, and they all knew he wouldn't. As of today, he felt sure he could get himself a fat cheque out of a monthly Payables run; and once he removed that fancy exception report, they'd take weeks to discover anything was amiss. Maybe he wouldn't call at the Problem Desk first thing. Maybe he'd frighten the bastards into taking him seriously.
"What's that? Did you say something?" He hadn't been taking the least interest in the TV program, a documentary on homeless teenagers. It didn't have any relevance to his situation, and his mind had wandered back to collecting a cheque for a half-million dollars, addressed to him. What a great conversation piece to table at the Tuesday Review in the Conference Room!
"Just wondering whether you'd like to ignore a movie tonight, or half-do something else instead,” Annette repeated patiently. Absent friends were a common occurrence in that lounge room, and there was no malice in the jibe. It could well be her turn to be a lousy conversationalist tomorrow night, and he'd cope just as well then as she did now.
"Pick a movie that suits you", he responded. "Couple of interesting things turned up today, and I was just thinking them through. “I need a distraction, though, or I probably won't sleep."
"Yes, it must be over a week since the last disaster out a Mulgrave. Must be dead boring for you. Anything interesting on the go? We had a hell of a busy period up to June 30th at Digital, but I'm in a bit of a hole too now. The post-mortems are over on the sales opportunities we lost, and I've handed all the wins over to the customers. Got a new revision Operating System for the Personal Computer, otherwise I'd have practically nothing to do.
Would she be a useful "partner in almost-crime" he wondered? Useful, perhaps, but that wouldn't be wise. If something went wrong, it could really be bad. She might say the wrong thing to somebody, and it might look as though there really was a crime. He could finish up with a real chain, and it wouldn't lead to a programmer's coding pad. The risk of getting locked up was not supposed to be part of this deal.
No; he'd have a good look at this possibility, strictly alone. If it looked feasible, perhaps he'd also pull it off – but strictly alone. No sense pulling Annette in; it wasn't her fight, it shouldn't be her risk, and it would be foolish to let her increase his own risk exposure. Later on, everyone could find out how clever he was.
"So you're bored, too," she assumed. "Take a film, any film. We'll see if the outside world can project some novelty into our humdrum lives."
He didn't even remember the name of that movie. So much for that crap about using the movie as an alibi. By the time the program reached the first commercial break, he was thoroughly engrossed in planning the production of a fat cheque for a non-existent supplier. In his mind's eye, he had it all worked out.
He decided to call it plan A: the first step in the project to get serious consideration of his need for a bit of job variety.
He'd have a look at the Accounts Payable history, and pick up the name of some company they regularly paid a lot of money to, a regular monthly recipient of a good, fat cheque.
There would have to be three changes made to be successful. The cheque would have to be printed with the wrong payee, himself. He was sure there'd be a covering letter, with supplier invoice numbers and such like on it. To do the right thing, he probably ought to change the name and address on that, too. Then, finally, there'd be an envelope needing to be addressed. That depended on the procedures of the Operations staff. He really hadn't taken a lot of notice how they did it.
He was aware the Pay Office had its own cheque printer, for the odd "special" salary item that wasn't paid by Bank transfer, which was the normal case. They locked that room while the printout was progressing. That was probably for privacy reasons; not too many crooks would bother stealing somebody else's cheque.
However, if the Accounts people stood over their cheque production too, he might not be able to remove the re-addressed cheque. He might have to let it go through the mail. If that happened, the envelope had better be addressed to him!
Did he need to bother about the letter? He hadn't seen any window envelopes around, so it was pretty good odds the letter and cheque would go inside the same envelope. Then the letter didn't matter - except that somebody might be matching them up manually. That someone would be putting two documents in the one envelope, so they all had to be the same addressee. Otherwise, the whole thing could come unglued at the worst possible moment. There was no way he'd convince people it wasn't a real crime, if they caught the cheque going into the mail.
So the three changes all looked very desirable. He could make those changes in the database, as long as he could be sure where the three printing programs called them up from. If he did it that way, though, there was another danger area. The Payables sequence updated all the Accounts, straight after the cheque-printing run.
They put the cheque details on a magnetic tape, which was another record of payment, as well as the carbon copies of the cheques. Then they ran that same reel of tape under another program that used the data to update the Accounts Payable database. It was pretty foolproof. Straight after all the cheques were printed, the print data was used to tell each creditor that this cheque for these dollars had been issued today.
He probably needed three days to get the letter through the mail, if it actually came to waiting for the mail. He'd never get that far, though, if the computer found a posting error in the accounts ten minutes later. There'd be an error, for sure, if the computer tried to update an imaginary account on the second run. Immediately, some sharp operator would ask whether - and then why - they'd issued a cheque to a supplier who wasn't listed. The whole thing would come apart in a way guaranteed not to help his career.
There seemed to be only one way. He had to make those three documents (cheque, letter and envelope) printed one way, while the record tape showed the original correct (but different) version. The cheque went to him, but the original supplier's account would be debited as normal.
That added an interesting spinoff, he mused. The creditor, if he enquired, would be told for a couple of days that the cheque was in the mail. If things got delayed too far, they'd check the bank account, and maybe never even go back to the carbon copy before they stopped payment on the cheque.
That was probably all there was to it. It would be quite easy for him to install a small program that ran with the print sequence. The program would watch addresses as they printed out. When the selected "fall guy" took his turn, it would substitute Lester's own name and address, and he would be "rich." He'd make the substitution only to the printers, not to the tape record.
Yet, it was beautiful!
All the cross-checks would balance. Not an extra penny would be gone, the right number of cheques, all the right bills would (seem to) be paid. The only way it could fail, he imagined, was if someone manually checked the documents against the accounts. They'd never do that; the computer did!
He stopped there, forcing himself to watch the last five minutes of the two-hour movie on the TV. Fortunately, Annette wasn't very impressed with the plot either, and their comments were quite superficial as they packed up for the night.