Stolen Prey

He was too depressed to care—what would he do, go shopping? He didn’t even drive.
    To the others, he was beginning to look like a threat, a loose cannon. What can you do with a crook who, if caught, wouldn’t even try to run?
    S ANDERSON , on the other hand, was a woman with a plan. Her mother had early Alzheimer’s and lived in a crappy nursing home paid for by the state. If Sanderson had the money, she’d like to spend a few hundred dollars a month for an upgrade in her care.
    Then there were the animals. She had her eye on a 160-acre semi-wooded acreage in southeast Minnesota. The owners wanted a half-million dollars for it, which she didn’t have. She actually didn’t have half of a thousand dollars, not at the moment. If she
could
get the half-million dollars, or even qualify for a mortgage on it, she would start a farm for rescue horses and rescue dogs. Maybe rescue chickens—she had a soft spot for good-looking chickens.
    She lay awake at night, thinking of herself as a kind of saint, surrounded by the animals, and the souls of the animals, she’d saved. With her various instabilities, her schizophrenia, her OCD, she could actually experience the farm, the animals, and her impending sainthood.
    Like, the karma cash-out was enormous.
    So she didn’t want the money for herself … it wasn’t like she was
greedy.
    T HE MOVEMENT toward the theft began casually, when Kline noticed the odd ebb and flow of cash in the Bois Brule account while he was working at Polaris National. Money would flow in from Bois Brule, but always in individual amounts of less than ten thousand dollars, which made him suspicious. Amounts of less than ten thousand were not reportable to the government.
    Then the money would leave again, in much larger amounts, on its way to a variety of obscure investment funds. Where it went from there, he didn’t know—but he did know that as much as twenty-five million dollars a month flowed into and out of the account. He also noticed other oddities: the money was dead for each calendar month, earning minimal interest. The large amounts moving out always moved on the last business day of the month.
    Almost, he thought, as if everything were on autopilot.
    He did an experiment, which would have gotten him fired if he’d been caught. He deliberately entered an error on the account, sending money to a fake account he set up inside the bank. He heard nothing—and a week before the usual transfer, he put the money back.
    The next month, he moved more money, a lot of it, into the fake account. He waited even deeper into the month before replacing it. Again he heard nothing. He carefully erased his tracks and thought it over.
    Interesting. The account
was
on some kind of autopilot. He could think of only one reason that might be: it was being run with an eye to minimal involvement.
    He filed the information in the back of his head. The idea of stealing some of the money occurred to him right away, but planning a theft, working out all the contingencies, all the details, was a total drag. So he didn’t do it.
    A few weeks later, he realized he was about to be fired for absenteeism and general neglect of duties. Before they could do it, he set up a back door into the bank accounts that would allow him to come in from the outside. He had no specific plan in mind, he just did it.
    During the exit interview, the firing supervisor was kind but firm. Kline was the one who showed a streak of nastiness. “I will not be fired,” he said. “I will resign. I want decent recommendations when I go for a new job. If you don’t agree, I’ll sue you for firing me, claiming you did it because of my well-documented disability. I will get my disabled friends to march naked outside the bank. I will shit in the revolving door. I am not joking.”
    After considering their options, they gave him a decent severance and a good-enough, if not hearty, letter of recommendation. After he spent the severance, he got a job at Hennepin National, where he met Turicek, who’d had a previous life as a minor Lithuanian criminal while studying computer programming at Kaunas University of Technology, and Sanderson.
    Turicek had mostly done credit-card scams around Western Europe, and thought it was criminal not to steal what you could. Turicek didn’t think that working out a huge theft was a drag. Not at all. He came from a country with a glorious history in chess-playing.
    Turicek and Kline worked out the details,