A week earlier—near Boston, Massachusetts
Sunday evening
Louis Massina bent forward and refocused his eyes on the ATM screen.
Account Balance = $0.00
“What?” He tapped the screen to ask for a new transaction, then once again requested his balance.
Account Balance = $0.00
“Impossible.”
Massina re-swiped his ATM card and keyed his PIN on the touch screen. There was only one account connected to the card, which he used solely for petty cash. Not only did he know there was money in the account—he had used it on the way to mass this morning—but the sum was $5,437.14.
Massina was very good with numbers.
He tapped the screen, then waited. The machine thought about it, then responded exactly as it had earlier:
Account Balance = $0.00
Either the bank’s computer network was down, Massina thought, or his accountant had drained it without telling him.
Damn it.
Massina had more patience with computers than with accountants, but only a little. He had considerable experience with both: he ran a robotics and applied AI, or artificial intelligence, firm called Smart Metal, and had in fact been a programmer himself through his early twenties.
That was two decades and three dozen patents ago. In the interim, Massina had built a business worth exponentially more than the amount that should have been in the bank account. But he was not so far removed from a childhood raised by a single mother that he would ignore the disappearance of five thousand dollars, or even five.
He called his accountant as soon as he got back to his car; though it was nearly 11:00 p.m., the phone was answered on the first ring.
“Wasn’t me,” said the accountant, who was used to getting calls at odd hours and on odd subjects. “I’ll check with the bank first thing in the morning.” Robert Pesche, now the head of a sizable firm, had first done Massina’s taxes in a McDonald’s when they were both a year out of school. “It’s probably just a computer glitch.”
“There are no such things as glitches,” said Massina. “Just bad programming.”
But this turned out to be neither a glitch nor bad programming: it was theft. The account had been drained an hour before Massina’s visit to the ATM—one of two dozen that had similarly been robbed. The bank promised to make good immediately, something Massina was surprised to find it didn’t have to do, according to the banking laws.
The felonious transfer both annoyed and intrigued Massina. Not only was his sense of morality and fairness offended—theft, obviously, was a grave sin—but his scientific curiosity was aroused. How did the theft occur? Why was the bank vulnerable in the first place? It was a math problem as well as one of morality.
His accountant couldn’t answer any of his questions. Nor could the bank manager, who came out to meet him when he stopped by just before 5:00 p.m. to collect a new ATM card and some cash.
The manager hesitated as she grabbed Massina’s hand to shake. Massina was testing a new prosthetic—he had lost his right arm from just above the elbow some thirty years before—and people who knew his hand was artificial sometimes thought he was going to crush their fingers.
Which he could have, if he wanted.
“I’m very sorry about this theft,” said the manager. “And your troubles. You are a good customer.”
The manager continued on in an overly sympathetic vein until Massina asked how the account might have been drained.
“It was definitely due to an ATM transaction,” she said. “There were a large number of simultaneous transfers that were just under the amount our security programs would detect.”
“Excuse me—so the ATM system was definitely involved,” Massina said. “Interesting. How?”
She suggested that perhaps he had authorized someone else to use his card and been careless with the PIN.
“How would that account for the other thefts that you said happened at the same time?”
“They, uh, just waited.” She nodded gravely. “You really have to guard your PIN number as if it were your Social Security number. More so.”
“I don’t want to get angry with you,” Massina answered, “but you sound like you’re saying this theft is my fault.”
“No, sir. You are our valued customer.” She glanced at his hand, somewhat nervously. “We value your business.”
Massina resisted the impulse to scoff as he left.