Maddie
Less than ten stone steps separate me from the heavy oak doors I’ve been walking through almost every day for the past two months. Since last week, I’ve been meeting them with rising apprehension.
Squaring my shoulders, I plaster on my brightest smile and make the ascent, entering the DC branch of Cuthbert Bank, the central branch of the third-largest bank in the country. It holds the accounts of some of the wealthiest people in the world, and it’s where most of the upper management sits.
My time here is almost through, and I have yet to untangle the web of lies and deceit I stumbled into last month.
Fluorescent lights and an eerie quiet greet me as I enter the building, my eyes taking a moment to adjust to the fake brightness after the natural morning winter sun. As my rapid heartbeat subsides, I start picking up the soft speech of the earliest of bank patrons already sitting at a clerk’s desk.
“Top of the morning to you, Maddie,” Craig, the security guard, greets me cheerfully from his post a few feet from the doors.
“Craig.” I stride to him with a broad smile, less forced this time, and open the top box of donuts I got for the ground floor employees, the sweet scent of the freshly fried dough easing the sense of pending doom.
“You’re the sweetest.” He salutes me with the donut he picked. “Have a good day, Maddie.”
“You too, Craig.”
My heels click over the white marble floor as I make my way to the rec room, the clerks who don’t have meetings rushing after me to get their hands on their donut of choice before someone else does.
“Dang, just one cronut left,” I say in a purposefully loud voice and laugh at the horrified gasps before taking a step back to reveal a cronut-filled box. Cronuts are surprisingly popular here, and it’s always good to have the little guys on your side when you’re an outsider. It’s much easier to collect information and gain access this way. Not to mention how difficult it would be for someone to make me disappear when I have people who notice me coming and going. “Have a great day, guys.”
I wave over my shoulder at the reciprocations as I head back through the lobby to the elevators that take me down to the server room, my kingdom of solitude. I’ve been cleaning out the bank’s system and improving the resilience of its digital security for the past six weeks, give or take.
Hacking into these systems is what I do for fun. Making sure no one else can is what I do for a living.
I don’t do espionage, hack to gather the secrets of other countries, or get myself involved in politics. I digitally fortify banks all over the world because they hold the money of every Jane and John Doe. I make sure no one is skimming off the top or laundering through the banking system, and whether or not I’m asked to—I make sure the bank plays a fair and legal game with people’s money.
At first, Cuthbert seemed squeaky clean aside from the random identity theft and a couple of clerks half-assing some paperwork. Nothing out of the ordinary, but I’m nothing if not thorough, so I fine-combed every transaction that seemed out of the ordinary.
Two weeks in, something caught my attention—my program flagged a random account because of a sudden cash withdrawal of $2,000. Nothing major in terms of activity I usually sign off on, but something was off with this particular account.
One line of code embedded into the bank’s system, designed to transfer small increments out of a single account to dozens of smaller ones inside the bank. None of these transfers were flagged as suspicious by my code, but experience and instinct trump technology. The small withdrawals, the excess code that seems to exist solely to take money from this account, it all felt wrong.
I’ve been following this account more closely and set up my Federal Reserve issued computer to scan for similar activities in other accounts while digging into the code and its source. So far, I’ve discovered a few more accounts connected to this one. Some are corporate accounts, and some private. It seems like the activity stops when an account reaches either $500,000 or $1,000,000, and up to that point, the only activity is the small deposits from the main account. Other than that, the accounts just sit there.
It’s the most bizarre embezzlement operation I have ever encountered. A complicated trail of too many transactions, spanning over too many years and too many accounts. It’s practically impossible to untangle.
The hacker in me is squealing like a schoolgirl as I shrug off my coat and sit at my station, firing up the computer. These routine jobs seldom present any real challenge, and this code is making me work for it, which is a novelty.
I’m being bested by a specter, some unknown human entity who managed to write a simple line of code that I can’t seem to crack. Me, globally ranked at the top of my field of financial cybersecurity, and somehow a stupid worm in a bank’s mainframe has me chasing my own tail for over a month.
I sip on my coffee as I scroll through the output, seeing the same thing I’ve seen every day. Additional accounts in the web of intricate operations, the social security numbers they’re associated with probably belonging to more deceased individuals and presenting another dead end.
Another sip, and I switch to the output from the command I ran on the code during the night. Still nothing, another sip. This one has the distinct taste of defeat. One last window to check. The data in this one is usually static, so I don’t have high hopes.
“What the…?” I place my coffee on the table and lean closer to the screen.
This doesn’t make sense.
My eyes keep darting over the data, verifying the only logical conclusion—the code was built to appear like a worm, but there are too many variables that don’t add up, specifically the fact that a new account with an almost identical code was opened by someone up in management, who proceeded to deposit the exact amount of cash that was originally deposited into the main account I’ve been investigating.
If someone in upper management has access to these accounts and is depositing money into them, shuffling their own funds around inside the bank just to withdraw them later, it means an embezzlement operation is highly improbable.
I pick up my phone and dial. I’m still not entirely sure what I stumbled onto, but whatever it is, I’ve been doing cybersecurity for banks long enough to know it indicates high-level inside involvement. That means I need to call in the big guns before said involved bank officials catch wind of my discovery.
“Hey, Maddie.” The warm voice of my uncle soothes some of the nervousness that had started to settle in the pit of my stomach.
“Hey, Lee. I’m wrapping up early at the bank today. Want to grab a coffee?” The silence that follows my question tells me that the savvy FBI agent on the other end caught my subtle hint that this isn’t a friendly call.