Читать книгу Mysteries Unlimited Ltd. - Donald Ph.D. Ladew - Страница 4

The Japanese came silently in the night in an unmarked van. They didn’t come stealthily out of the rising sun, screaming Tora! Tora! Tora! As has happened in the past, they had an invitation.

They came to the underground entrance of Intercoastal Bank headquarters in San Francisco, where they were let through steel doors that could have stopped a medium tank. Why bother to attack if the enemy will open the gates? Another tragedy in a Comic Opera world.

The man who let them in wore a military style uniform and was coldly polite.

The Japanese unloaded ten large cartons. Each weighed nearly a hundred pounds. These were carefully opened by two employees while a third oversaw the operation.

As this was taking place, a second van arrived, was passed in and unloaded another ten cartons. Altogether they contained more than a ton of US currency. Most of the bills were in denominations of one hundred dollars each. The total was over ninety million dollars. The uninformed criminal often thinks robbing a bank is pretty simple: walk in, grab forty or fifty million dollars and leave. They seldom think about the problems of moving anything that weighs a ton rapidly.

As soon as all the cases were unwrapped the bank employees began the tedious process of counting the money, twice.

When they were done the third man went inside the building and sent a wire to Japan confirming the deposit, in the correct amount. Subsequently a ninety million dollar adjustment was made to the sender’s account.

By the time the employees who unloaded, unpacked and counted the currency went home it was almost five o’clock in the morning. On the surface of things it seemed an ordinary transaction. Banks, after all, are in the business of handling cash.

However, two other people were in the bank, using a computer which should only have been accessed by another person who was not there. The account, so recently flush with credit, began to show extraordinary activity via the mechanism known as the wire transfer of funds. The route these funds took was tortured to say the least.

But the first step, getting it out of Intercoastal Bank, was relatively simple. It went to a location in New York called the Clearing House Interbank System—CHIPS—in eighteen increments of five million dollars each to eighteen different overseas accounts. That these eighteen accounts were located in exotic places like the Netherlands Antilles and the Seychelle Islands meant nothing to the CHIPS system. What do computers know? Or care?

From these locations the money, still in the form of electronic wire transfers, moved to other accounts in equally protected locations and eventually were converted into certificates of deposit, which were then flown back to the States, placed in the account of a shell company via a small bank in upstate New York.

The chances of it being traced were nil, and would take the cooperation of no less than ten different countries and their investigative apparatus. None of the countries had cooperative agreements with US investigative agencies.

Add to this the fact that the FBI detests and considers itself superior to all other investigative agencies, such as the DEA, the Secret Service, the IRS, the Customs Service, and you have the clever criminal’s happiest dream.

Of the ninety million, two million went to a Bank in Belgium. This transaction wasn’t nearly as well hidden.