Chapter Eight

On the twentieth floor people were packing up and leaving for lunch. Or it could be that they were packing up now he was back. Savage sat down at his oversized terminal screen and punched in the new log-in codes.

Man-breast and Max had gone too. But Savage could still hear loud tapping from behind the screen opposite. He ignored it and opened the files Thomson had left for him, all the critical path work he could stand.

He checked the online diary of the only other person who hadn't been at the meeting that morning. When he dialled the CEO's number a woman picked up.

'Natasja?'

'Savage,' she said. Said too humble a word for what Natasja could do with her voice, she oozed at you like liquid sex, seduced you with her honeyed tones. A click of the tongue and you could almost feel her lips against your ear. Savage wouldn't have been surprised if the phone melted.

'I need to see him Natasja. What's the danger?'

'I'm afraid today is totally out of the question John. He's in meetings all day.'

'That's not what his diary says.'

'He is, trust me.'

'Now why would I go and do something foolish like that?'

He heard her lips part in a smile, baring her fangs perhaps?

'Oh John—' she said, as if they were old friends.

'He understands this is an FSA investigation doesn't he? He will have to comply, one way or another.'

'I am trying to help the FSA in their enquiries. Would you like to make an appointment?'

'Yeah, as I said, there's a slot free this afternoon.'

'Must be a glitch at your end John. Next week is the earliest I have. Wednesday afternoon?'

'Right.' He clicked through the diary. 'How about putting me on the guest list for the anniversary event tomorrow lunchtime?'

'I'm afraid that's really not the right platform for discussion, too many important clients take precedence.'

'You're saying the FSA isn't important?'

She stayed silent. Savage listened to her breathe, tried not to imagine her naked.

'Next Wednesday?' she said.

'Sure, book it in. I may need access to your office before then. Depends what I find.'

More of the silent treatment.

'You're a real help Tash, just like the old days.'

He went to hang up but she beat him to it.

Snubbed by the CEO. A fine start. Savage hadn't known the man during his own time at Maclays. Daniel Sutherland had a reputation though. When his investment arm overtook the corporate side of the bank in terms of profitability he initially refused the group CEO job – Sutherland preferred the hunt for big bucks and the kill that followed. He then gave in under the sheer weight of numbers in the salary and bonuses on offer. He also had a rep for using people.

The shared network files sat on the screen taunting Savage.

Critical path be damned.

He rolled up his sleeves and ran over the presentation from the morning. What did Thomson want him to look for?

According to the report money had been disappearing from the bank for the last two years. 30 million a year and rising. Lunch money for a multi-billion operation like Maclays.

The critical path analysis showed, using jaunty little graphics, a list of all activities required for the money to disappear categorised by task breakdowns, the time that each activity took to complete, and the dependencies between the activities. Or in non-corporate speak: what happened, when and who made out like a bandit.

A few missing pots of gold had been labelled 'ignore' by Thomson and signed off by the executive.

These included a HR manager sharing a bed with one of the main suppliers. However, between them, they provided the key contracts behind the bank's IT infrastructure. To dismiss them would cost far more to the business than the illicit couple were skimming from the top, £300k.

They stayed, but they would be watched.

IT was a hot department, two of its members had been suckered by small time hoods into giving up sensitive client information – low level corporate espionage. They were fed bogus information, counter intelligence, a trick Savage had first learned watching WWII movies. Thomson had them fired. But no money left the building.

There were the usual criminal hacker gangs using bought or stolen log-ins, they accounted for several million plus. But all that was considered basic operating costs. The company preferred silence. Tell the police, they'd leak it to the papers. Then your customers would lose confidence and move their business to your competitors.

That was the thing with corporate crime, there were always people like him paid to keep it quiet.

The stock market was like a highly strung girlfriend with expensive tastes. Just so high maintenance. Say the wrong thing and it crumpled into a heap and cried while you desperately looked around for a few baubled billions to plug the gap and make it happy again.

Economists, bankers and financiers Savage decided, are like gamblers with better PR. They all knew there was a sucker born every minute. You.

You'd throw your money at them when markets were overpriced, then, when they burned, you'd throw your tax money away to rescue them and then work extra hard, even starve, to pay off their tax debt.

A scam of the highest order.

The worst thing was economists believed their own lies. Savage preferred dictators to fat gloating oligarchs, at least they didn't pretend to be doing you a noble favour.

But here was something interesting, Man-Breast, or Richard White to use his god given, had a thing going with a strip club. An extra hundred thou a year. Extra dances, extra lunches, extra drinks and cover charges, extra hotel rooms tacked onto existing bills. Amateur hour.

White had been watched for a period of three weeks earlier in the year and the figures added up. Again it was an ignore, he was one of the Relationship Department's big hitters. And, Savage raised his head, he was walking back to his desk.

He stalled a step when he saw Savage's lopsided grin and then carried on.

Savage was still smiling when White sat down.

'Hey,' he said.

'Hey White,' killer opening line, 'I hear you like strip clubs?'

Savage congratulated himself on his investigative subtlety.

White hesitated, he knew what Savage was there to do, but couldn't help himself. 'I love them.' He licked his lips.

'And how about your customers?'

'Live for them. The male ones anyway. Occasionally there's a chick that's into them, but—’ he pulled a face. ‘Well, you know, right?'

'What? It's just not the same?'

Like putting your mother in amongst brown-faced collateral-damage in foreign lands, then trying to justify what you do with a gun.

'It says here your customers always come back,’ Savage said, ‘and you always sell them more services, sorry, “enhance the business-to-client relationship”.'

'That's true,' White said. Waiting for whatever was coming next.

Savage let the silence open up. White tried to look busy. His man-breasts jiggled. Why do women never find those attractive?

'Do you mind?' White said, pointing at his screen.

'They know, you know?'

'Know what?'

'Two words. Extra charges.'

White went, well, whiter.

'They don't mind,' Savage said, 'Just as long as you keep the customers buying more and more and more.'

The man's bottom lip quivered, 'The executive know?'

'Yup. But don't go expecting a full payout on your bonus this year.'

His jowls flapped like a puppy's in the wind.

'Why are you telling me this?'

'Because I don't give a damn about it. They've effectively signed off on it, which means I can choose to investigate further...or not.'

'What do you want?' he said, voice rising.

Savage waved a hand for him to keep it down. 'Nothing,' he said. 'Information if I need it. Maybe a favour one day, that's all.'

'Really?'

'Yeah, but here's some advice. Whatever's driving you to do this, gambling debts, a mistress,' White opened his mouth to speak. 'Whatever it is,' Savage continued, 'work it out. At some point this will bite you in the arse.'

Man-Breast's face went blank.

'You hear me?'

'Yes.'

'Alright then, we're done.' He pointed White to his screen.

Savage moved back to his.

Well, that was nice, but added up, with all the leg work that had gone into Thomson's presentation they were still coming up short. Over 24 million this year. And if that much went missing without anyone noticing, was there more?

He rested his chin on steepled fingers and wondered where to start. A bank holds so much data you had to now what to look for.

The money disappeared, but they didn't know how, all accounts appeared above board, signed off, authorised, all procedures followed.

He opened up the transaction summary accounts for the Relationship Department's last quarter and checked how many lines of figures there were, 87,000. Eye-watering. But there was always a human behind the numbers.

The most obvious scams involved lovers or blackmailers and you usually needed two people to make it work. At least one in Services for sign off. That was the security protocol, one department was supposed to watch the other.

Why did nobody ever spot the obvious flaw?

In a building full of people motivated by money, putting two of them together was supposed to make them less inclined to steal rather than more. Why? Out of shyness perhaps?

He crunched names, matching pairs to see if Thomson's investigative software had missed any irregular patterns. Thirty minutes later it felt like his brain was dribbling out of his ears.

White stood up suddenly, avoided eye contact and wandered over to a neighbouring desk for a chat. The typing behind the opposite screen stopped and Echo peered into view.

'Savage,' she said.

'Yah-huh.'

She hesitated, 'Did you kill that man?'

'Michael?' He thought about it. 'Not intentionally.'

'Oh,' she frowned and leaned back to her screen.

She leaned back out. 'Have you ever killed a man intentionally?'

He sat back and looked at her. She was foxy but unconfident, full of that big city fashion sense that is really just a disguise. He could just bet that she had a closet full of shoes too. It was what women were supposed to want wasn't it?

Then again, he was supposed to grunt a lot, drink beer and obsess about football.

'Why do you want to know?' he said.

'I'm wondering whether I should cancel your invite to dinner.'

He shrugged. 'I'll make it easy for you. I was planning on washing my hair that night anyway.'

'Thanks,' she said, and smiled. 'Just do me a favour.’

‘What?’

‘Try not to kill anyone else.'

‘What, ever?’

She sighed, ‘As long as you can.’

‘Why do you care?’

‘Promise me.'

'Fine. I promise.'

She stood up, gave him a sly grin. 'I'm going to get coffee,' she gave White a nod to join her. 'How do you take it, John?' She had those shiny reflective cheeks some women have, dimpled and very pinchable, bright open eyes. It'd been way too long.

'Tall and strong,' he said, looking her up and down. Oh, nice work Savage, does she come here often too?

She gave him an offbeat look and walked away.

By the time Echo and White came back Savage was even deeper in the numbers. He'd eliminated the obvious, it wasn't a pair.

Stumped, he sipped coffee and turned to White. 'If you were going to commit fraud by signing off on something and you didn't have a partner in Services, what would you do?'

White's mouth flapped up and down.

'Not saying you did, just a hypothetical.'

'Why ask me then?'

'Yeah,' Echo joined in, 'Why not me?'

'Because you think like a criminal,' Savage said to White. Then, quietly, 'you are a criminal, damn it.'

'Hey, like you said, I'm not officially doing anything wrong.'

A wheeling sound to his right made him look up. 'There's an Echo in the room.' Savage said without thinking. She pulled in between them.

'Ooh, never heard that one before.'

White laughed. Savage glared at him.

'I want in,' Echo said.

'Give me the scary eyes all you like,' White said, 'I didn't trot out that cheesy cliché.'

'Better than my second choice.'

White's brows formed a question.

'Echo Warrior,' Savage said.

'Yuck.'

'I know, shocking.'

'Boys, what were you talking about?'

'It's better than the names we call her anyway,' Echo punched him in the arm. 'Ow, we were talking hypotheticals. Fraud.'

'So hit me,' she said.

'Savage?' White said.

'Guys, I'm not really a team player.'

They stared at him.

'Okay, what the hell, if money is disappearing from the system, the usual scenario is mutual sign-offs that appear clean. Usually two people working together in relationships and services, but, hypothetically, I can't see that here. You both work in relationships, how would you do it?'

'Well I'd keep it below the reporting minimum for a start,' she said. 'Any services assistant can sign off on a transaction less than five grand. Any more and it's got to be reported.'

'FSA money laundering rules,' White said, 'You should know that.'

'Of course I do, go on.'

'Okay, well,' Echo said, 'Anything up to 25k and it's a services manager sign-off.'

'Over 25k is signed off by the services director,' White added, and he would know.

'So how would you sign-off if you had no-one working with you?'

'Easy,' she said.

'In the old days.'

'Sure, in the old days you just forged a signature,' then she realised who she was talking to, 'not that we ever did that mind you.'

'So what's changed?'

'Digital sign-off. A signature and an email.'

'Okay guys, thanks. That's great.'

The two colleagues looked at each other.

'You think that's it?' White said.

'Yeah, we're part of your crime-fighting team now Savage. Didn't your keen investigative mind tell you?'

'It told me you already know too much,' he said. 'Back to work.' He pointed at the screens.

'Awww,' Echo said, 'I was just beginning to like you.'

'Get to it.'

He span slowly back to his screen. These were big figures. Whoever did this would have had to put something large through the services director while at the same time putting through lots of smaller transactions as well. He scrolled to the top and selected the service director's name from the sign-off list. There were only a few hundred transactions directly under his name for the last year. He'd start with those and then match them with a spread of smaller transactions.

Ten minutes later he had a name.

*

Savage banged on the glass partition.

Scott Armstrong, the relationships director, was in mid-stride and barking into his headset. 'I don't care Steven. They need to be signed off today.' He had a preppy American accent, perfectly coiffured hair and a tennis player's physique. 'You know they do.'

He gestured for Savage to come in.

'My department worked miracles this morning to get those contracts in place and on your desk ahead of time.'

He paced the room, loosened his tie so that his blood pressure had room to rise.

Savage took a seat against the glass and admired the motivational pictures on the wall. Waterfalls and documentary style snaps of pro-footballers with tag lines like:

WINNERS

If you don't hit the target - you don't score.

and

RISK

If you're not living life on the edge, you're not living.

Savage grunted agreement at that one.

Armstrong paced some more. He was really good at it. Maybe he'd been a ball boy once, maybe he was on rails, maybe it was a new exec-exercise routine for the terminally busy.

'Legal,' he said. 'Legal? Those overpaid bunch of halfwits don't know the first thing about how to run a business.'

A quick pirouette.

'They're insisting? Every one of these contracts are standard service agreements, they don't need to check the details. They've been checked already.'

He stopped, shoulders tensed and ready to fight. 'Listen, in case you're living in Uranus over there, do you know what happened this morning? Great. Then you know that when politicians get murdered, clients get jittery, if we wait for Legal to argue the minutiae on indemnity clauses we'll have to renegotiate. And, just so I know you're getting this, for a lot less money than we're getting today. At least 40 per cent.'

He listened. Smiled at Savage. Paced.

'No the board won't be happy, you're right—' He bit his lip at the interruption. 'What's that? You're going to push sign-off through this afternoon? Now there's a surprise. Have it on my desk before close of business.'

He pressed the cut-off button on the handset. And blew off some of the compressed rage he'd been holding back. He rolled his eyes to Savage. 'These guys, you know?'

'Before the rainbow you will have to endure a little rain?' Savage read from the poster with PERSEVERANCE as its headline.

Armstrong frowned. 'Sure thing, sport. What can I do you for?'

'I've found something I need your help with.'

He moved his hand in a wind-on motion. 'Go on.'

'I've found some peculiarities in the accounts of your department.'

'Ye-es?' He checked his watch. Subtle. Get to business.

'What do you know about Cerberus Holdings LLC?'

'Not much.'

'Really? They're an interesting company. I checked them out. Registered in Luxembourg. They don't appear to do anything. They simply process money.'

'The goal of every company. Is that all, or do you have something more?'

'No, their board is totally anonymous. I'll look deeper, of course, but you know about these funds we're looking for right?'

'Yes.'

'The figures match up.'

'The whole amount?'

'Not every last penny.'

'So they don't match up.'

'I can't account for all the missing money from this one source, no, but then I haven't finished my investigations yet.'

Armstrong opened his mouth to ask another dumb-boss question, then rephrased. 'So what do you want from me?'

'You said you know nothing about this company, correct?'

'The name sounds familiar, but I couldn't tell you why.'

'It should,' Savage said. 'because you signed off on every transaction on their account.'

'Did I? Well, really? It's easy to overlook when you have a whole office to run.'

His PA stuck her head through the door. 'RD, conference call in three minutes.'

'Right, Charlotte,' he made pistol fingers at her, turned to Savage, 'Can we wrap this up?'

'Of course.' Savage stood up. 'The problem I'm having is that I've been looking for sign-off pairs. Greedy couples or pals fleecing the company together, that's always an easy in.'

'And that's been happening here?' he said.

'No. Very different. Someone's been too clever by half.'

Armstrong blushed. If Savage played poker he would have raised the stakes right there.

'Anything to add?'

'Like what?

'Like why every Cerberus transaction is with a different services employee? Not one was the same. Not once. It's almost like someone knew what we'd be looking for and tried to hide it.'