Stolen Prey

gone—but it probably wouldn’t have helped much anyway.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because if they’ve got a brain in their heads, and they do, they would have gone to Best Buy and bought some cheap laptops with cash, and signed on from Starbucks. When they finished, they would have dropped the laptops in the river.”
    “You know Kline was attacked.”
    “Yeah, the DEA guys told me what happened,” she said. “I feel kind of bad about it. Not too bad, because he’s such an asshole.”
    “You kept telling me that he’s too lazy to steal.”
    “He’s pretty lazy,” she agreed.
    “So the question I have is this: From the time he found out he was going to be fired until he walked out the door, would he have had time to program in this back door? Those systems are supposed to be pretty secure.”
    “Hmm. Well, I don’t know their work schedules down there. It’s not something you’d do just casually. Usually, if you’re going to be fired, they don’t let you have access to the systems anymore. They don’t want some pissed-off programmer bombing them out. On the other hand, programmers, by definition, are pretty smart, and would probably know they were going to be fired before they actually were. He might have been proactive, so to speak.”
    “Okay. Now answer me this: Could you get into Polaris’ssystems from another bank’s secure systems? Without a back door?”
    There was a long silence, then she said, “Damnit. You know, we didn’t look at that. All the banks’ systems have links between them. If you had the protocols for the target bank, you might be able to get in from a secure link from another bank. You’d need administrator’s status, but, you know, people have ways to get that.”
    “So they could have gotten in without a back door?”
    “But there was a back door,” she said. “I found it.”
    “It just seems to me that if you were coming in from another bank, because you didn’t have a back door…”
    “You’d probably build one,” she finished. “Genius. Yes. That’s what I would have done … if I didn’t have the back door to begin with. Do you have any reason to think that’s what he did?”
    “I’m not sure—it could go either way. I think he planned the theft with two other people he works with, from Hennepin National,” Lucas said. “He knew about the account, but didn’t move to steal from it until he got to Hennepin. He didn’t steal while he was at Polaris, as far as we know, and he didn’t start stealing until he’d been at Hennepin for quite a while. Didn’t even try to steal when he was unemployed, and he was out of work for months, which makes me think he didn’t have the back door then. Then he ran into these other people, at Hennepin. He’s lazy, he’s depressed, but somebody gave him a push.”
    “I’d buy that,” ICE said. “I’ll tell you what—if that’s what happened, there won’t be any sign of it anymore. They’ll have taken everything out.”
    “Shoot. You’re sure?”
    “I would have. It wouldn’t be hard.”
    W HEN HE got off the phone, Lucas spent some time thinking about Bone’s theory that the thieves were buying gold or diamonds—probably gold. If they were, they’d have to send it somewhere to be collected, and that would probably be the Twin Cities, simply because they were based there. They couldn’t just stick it in a suitcase and bring it on a plane. It’d be too heavy, and might bring questions from the TSA.
    He didn’t know how gold was normally delivered, though he’d been told once that the post office would handle it via registered mail. The problem with the post office, from the police point of view, was that you had to jump through your ass to get any information about deliveries—they seemed to delight in making sure every legal technicality was observed before they’d cooperate with the cops.
    But once a package was delivered, all he’d need was a search warrant. If Kline was taking deliveries…
    He thought about that, looked at his watch again. Getting late, but fuck it, people were being killed. He went to his black book, got the number of Martin Clark, the head of Minneapolis Homicide—Homicide would have covered the Kline shooting—and called him.
    When Clark came up, Lucas asked, “Are you done with the crime scene at the Kline shooting?”
    “Pretty much,” Clark said. “Kline told us the story, and everything we saw jibed with what he said.”
    “Get anything I need to know