Tales of the Parodyverse

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champagne
Sat Feb 10, 2007 at 08:27:36 pm EST
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Champagne and the Impossible Vault
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    The Lascard Exclusive was one of Switzerland’s oldest and most secure banks. Its vaults were buried in thick steel and cement surrounded by state of the art security and surveillance. But it had one flaw.

    Its customers demanded privacy. They paid very highly for it. So despite all the precautions outside the vaults, the contents and the rooms where patrons could open their deposit boxes and inspect them were unmonitored.

    Champagne lay curled in Box F-91, a claustrophobic three by four metal cabinet. The Duc d’Avignon had deposited the container she was hidden in earlier today. He thought it still contained his Etruscan pottery collection, but he was sadly wrong.

    At 18.21 she decided the guards would have had time to go to their shutdown routine and would be relaxing in the control room in front of their monitor banks. She donned a vapor mask and used acid to cut through the wall of her own container and then through the exterior of the strongbox. Etching her way free took one and a quarter hours.

    Next she needed to baffle the security camera covering the repository area. That was easy. A video still of the view next to the cam was easy to capture, and then affixing a tiny monitor in front of the camera to show that still effectively neutralised the visual security.

    Champagne took another two hours discovering and avoiding the other tricks and traps that laced the repository. It was the usual array of pressure pads, thermal sensors, infrared beams and so on. There was a new-style CO2 detector that took a while to baffle, and some nasty live electrical surfaces that weren’t strictly legal but would certainly ruin a thief’s day.

    It was past midnight when Champagne finally got to the secure keyboard for the bank’s deposit system. The Lascard rightly believed that an air firewall was the safest of all. This terminal was never linked and would never link with the outside world – but it held the details of which boxes belonged to which clients.

    “Oh, this is horrible,” Champagne said to herself (silently, because there were sound monitors that meant she even had to press keys on the keyboard slowly). “So much to choose from and I don’t have the time and means to take it!”

    She located Lucius Van Druden’s deposit box. The data on the secure terminal was the only link between a twenty-six digit numbered account, a secure strongbox in the bank vaults, and the international businessman and software baron.

    The international businessman and software baron owed her seven million dollars plus expenses and really needed to stop trying to kill her. It wasn’t as if his army of lawyers couldn’t stall the criminal charges against him forever.

    Of course, his secret account books from the vaults of the Lascard might prove a bit embarrassing in the hands of a prosecutor.

    Somebody who thought they were clever had put some security onto the computer. Passwords, trip-codes, ID verification questions, all designed to catch the unauthorized user. Champagne bypassed them by parallel-attaching her own hand-held to the hard drive and reading it that way. She smiled to herself as the data scrolled down her screen. She loved her job.

    Something else caught her eye on the file tree. “Surely not,” she said to herself.

    But it was. Somebody had decided the secure vault computer was a safe place to back up the daily account files for the bank’s numbered deposit accounts. Sadly the recognition codes for accessing the accounts weren’t there – those would be held on paper only, even in this modern age – but it was interesting to see who had banked what with the Lascard. Champagne took notes for later.

    She ran a quick calculation of the information now copied to her hand-held. The Lascard paid a typically low rate of interest on its most secret accounts, but even so the annual return on an investment of thirty billion euros was pretty impressive.

    Then she frowned. She checked the columns again and asked her hand-held to do a calculation.

    There was van Druden’s account. He’d got a hundred and eighty million euros deposited - $234m. But he was gaining interest of around $35m a year on it! What bank in the world paid 15% on a secure deposit?

    Champagne’s watch said 2.04. She pushed that mystery aside to continue with the mission. Once she had Van Druden’s books she could make him back off with the assassins – the last ones has completely ruined an aqua chiffon evening dress as she’d dropped them – and make with the compensation payments and trauma bonuses. Champagne calculated that around $17m was about right now. Plus a personal apology.

    It required a bit of careful climbing and one spectacular set of tumbles to avoid the security over to box K-117. It took another hour to disable the alarms around the container so she could slide it out and examine it. More of the acid dissolved the locks and allowed her to open the strongbox.

    The books inside vanished as she touched them, twinkling away as if beamed up to the starship Enterprise.

    “Oh, that’s just not fair!” Champagne said. She wasn’t a big fan of people using magic and things to protect their property. It felt like cheating. Still, this was clearly a supernatural or metahuman event and there was no way to complain to the umpire. The books were gone.

    3.52. Champagne was cross. She mentally listed the various warlocks, shamen, high priestesses etc. that had come to her attention. She kept pretty good files. Which one might be able to do some hokus-pokus and chase the account books for her?

    Champagne mentally reworked Van Druden’s bill. The outlay on the bank vault specs and the specialised equipment and the whole Duc D’Avignon caper had been a substantial investment. She was starting to feel poor. Etruscan pottery was valuable but the market was slow.

    “I’m in the middle of the Lascard Exclusive,” she told herself. “There has to be some way of making a profit.”

    Well, the account details might interest the US Tax Office, for example, but that was a little gauche. But Van Druden had obviously found ways of making money out of the Lascard, according to his accounts. How?

    Champagne returned to the terminal. A quick check at the operating system told her that the software was custom-designed by Polecat, one of Van Druden’s dummy front companies.

    “This is not the place to disassemble code,” Champagne said. But she went ahead anyway. Somehow Van Druden had managed to find a way of syphoning money from the bank or from people’s accounts. But nobody had noticed and nobody had complained.

    None of the accounts seemed off. Every one of them had exactly the right interest, was meticulously maintained. The people who banked here were very serious about their money and they wouldn’t take kindly to screw-ups.

    Van Druden should have earned $5.6m last year. He’d picked up over six times that much. He couldn’t just have made it up. The bank might not notice a few pennies created from nowhere. It would soon know about millions suddenly added to its accounts. So where had the cash come from?

    “Pennies,” said Champagne. “Of course.”

    She took some time to write up her findings in a .txt file and leave it on the secure computer with a little bit of code designed to pop it up in 24 hours time after she was long gone. It only seemed polite to let the bank know what was going on and how their software engineer had defrauded their customers.

    “Dear Lascard. I thought you’d be interested in knowing how Lucius Van Druden, secret owner of Polecat Secure Software, has been stealing money. His program adds up the interest due to each customer and adds it to their account daily based on the prevailing interest rate, of course. But it only calculates their interest based on that daily rate to five decimal places - to hundredths of a euro. Then it rounds down. The tiny rounded-down fraction, only a two-hundredth of a Euro on average, vanishes from your system – an accounting convention. Except that all those 200ths actually go into Van Druden’s account. Over two hundred thousand of them a day. And that adds up. Check the math for yourselves. Have fun. Lots of love. XXX.”

    “P.S. To avoid the publicity and public investigation that would come from this being revealed to the police and public you might want to consider making a voluntary financial contribution to the person who helped you spot the problem. Expect a postcard soon. ”

    After that it was just a matter of returning things to how they were, gambling that nobody would check the broken strongboxes in the next few hours, then hiding herself inside a quite different box that her accomplice would legitimately call and remove when business opened in a couple of hours time.

    Champagne crawled into the cramped confines with her mind racing. How had Van Druden got hold of somebody who could make account books vanish from strongboxes? Who could Champagne get hold of who could make them appear again? Did she really want to dabble in the dark arts? On the other hand, did she really want to get nailed to a railway track by Van Druden’s enforcers?

    Champagne was glad she’d brought the hand-held with her while she waited anyhow. She could at least play Tetris.




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