Harvey White has been found barely conscious in a trashy warehouse while his wife tries desperately to explain a situation she clearly knows little about.

“This him?” asked Gabriel,  whose life had been a lot less than sheltered, but who was shocked nevertheless.

“That’s him. He’s a multimillionaire, you know.”

“Poor bastard.”

Hearing their voices had livened White up enough to be aware of them. He looked at David.

“YOU…….,” he choked.

The ambulance guys said White was lucky not to be dead of tetanus from the rat bites, exposure, and the various injuries that the warehouse had donated to him as part of its user awareness program. He’d broken a leg, and that was also just on the verge of turning septic. The police said that anyone going anywhere near the place was obviously no criminal, just an idiot. One reason the gangs avoided the place was it was just too dangerous. They took David’s word for it that White wasn’t some vagrant.

Mrs. White was in the same hospital, under sedation. She’d gone into shock while in the office, and Hannah had needed to call for some help. Despite the virtual encyclopedia of reasons for thinking otherwise, Hannah had established that Mrs. White was as innocent as she seemed. She thought Harvey was just a businessman, everything he appeared to be. That bit of information later made everyone who heard it shudder. Only really efficient criminals can do that to their own families.

They can also clean out their partners very effectively. It was soon discovered that Harvey White was now as broke as his leg. White’s bank and a lot of other people were looking for him. A hundred and twenty million or so had got up and left in various directions at about the same time he was on the plane to New York. Other things turned up, too. Tony Fazzina was found in a shelter. He’d been with White, but had panicked when they saw the warehouse. They’d had an argument, and Fazzina had run away when White had grabbed him and tried to make him go inside with him. Fazzina had been cleaned out, too. That was a few extra thousand to someone.

The money was in theory findable, but in practice nobody was under any illusions. David found himself paying for the surgery for White and Mrs. White’s rest. Hannah had insisted. “If we go as low as them, we’re as bad as them,” she’d said. David couldn’t argue. She’d also threatened to pay for it herself. It crossed his mind that was why he’d never wondered why he married her.

He had however thought that if White was prepared to give some information, it might be cheap at the price. White didn’t know very much, about anything, including his own business, it seemed. He’d gone to New York because the “shipping company” had sent him a bounced cheque. A lot of his clients had suddenly begun vanishing, and this one had really worried him because it was one of the best he had.

It took David all his tact and patience to get White off the subject of the “shipping company” and down to a bit of the recent history of Stone Gold White, like how he got involved with the agency to start with. Keeping very much in character, White managed to jumble the sequence of events. David began to feel like a hypnotist asking his subject to go further back. 

White, naturally, began in the middle of the story. He knew that someone had been very keen for him to get into partnership with Stone Gold, and that the bank had been very helpful when he’d been trying to raise the money. Accounts had been provided, loans agreed, and work done. He’d been legitimate as far as that was concerned. The only underhanded stuff he’d really done was actually rather minor. He hadn’t asked where the money came from, or why he was anonymously getting some rather healthy deposits in his various business and personal accounts. His lack of curiosity made some sense, though. If someone throws you a few million, do you ask where it comes from?

Then, eventually, the start of the story emerged. It took a while to get it out of him, but his real name was Harvey Weirman, and he was originally a bus driver. He’d been an art student, and done some basic commercial writing courses. A friend had offered to set him up in business, feeding him some simple stuff to work with and finding him a supply of customers. Harvey Weirman had a prior conviction for an insurance fraud, so Harvey White was born. The friend had introduced him to a lot of people over those four years, all businessmen, all well off and prosperous enough to give White an appetite for some luxuries for himself.

The friend had also introduced him to Mick Featherman. Featherman had showed White how to invest, how to minimize taxes, and put up some of the money and references when he’d asked the bank for the money to buy into Stone Gold. Featherman was everything White wasn’t. He was confident in the presence of big money, and sharp with his ideas. He also knew a truly incredible number of people. He overawed White.

The agency is trying to help with a new decoder, but it’s a fussy market and it’s demanding. This is product placement but people need to know what the product is, what it does, and what its values are.

“You mentioned the legals. What about jurisdictions? There are laws, everywhere, for everything, and I don’t really believe we can make a One Size Fits All disclaimer.”

“You don’t need to. Nor should you. You’re marketing to an industry which hates crappy merchandise. You just include in your ads that you’ll replace or credit anything which is found to be unsatisfactory. Cheaper than lawsuits, and it helps your market image as a responsible, trustworthy, supplier. You’d have to do it anyway, and you do need to know if any of your stuff is faulty. With your unit cost, you don’t really have a problem. It’s one thing people never seem to understand; complaints are the best sort of quality control you can have. If the shipping goes haywire, you’re covered. If the delivery screws up, it’s covered. Nobody can say that you didn’t respond, and your own people will know that they have to do it.”

“Er, Al, what about if the decoder doesn’t decode, for whatever reason?” asked Bill, whose instincts were inclined to believe that Murphy’s Law was likely to intrude on this idyllic vision.

Simon looked puzzled, then intrigued.

“Interesting point. The decoder can operate with any version of any known computer language. That said, there’s a lot of custom code which is only for special users. It’s not supposed to be read by anyone else. We tried synthesizing an unreadable code, a thing that uses symbols with variable random values to operate hardware and software, meaning that the same line of code doesn’t mean the same thing twice, but the code still runs. We made sure it wouldn’t run on any normal computer or even on mainframes with special software to read codes. The old decoder read it, gave us an analysis of how it worked, and wrote a new bit of code for itself to read it in future. The new model decoder did that and then went in and rewrote the synthetic code, eliminating about half of our original design and getting it to run six times faster….  

In theory, you can write a code that can’t be decoded unless you can establish values for enough of the elements to read it. You could only write a code that was really unbreakable if you were unable to read it yourself. Most computer code is really a numerical interaction, like a calculator, just expressed as code. To make a code like that, you’d need hardware which could handle a different configuration of data, into something like sign language. Even then you’d still have to create a code that didn’t use the same sort of operating systems, and used a fundamentally different sort of processing.

You might not even use conductors, at all. Semiconductors are just that. One of the reasons computers work the way they do is because they have to deal with data and code through the conductors, which are only so efficient. It’d be more efficient to use much bigger loads than they can currently handle. To do which, you’d have to send it whole, direct to the processors. Actually, that’s not such a bad idea. If you can’t conduct enough data……. Transmit it.”

This digression had started Al thinking, hard.

“So for your decoder not to work, someone would have to retool virtually the whole of a computer’s operating systems, and the hardware, and the code?”

“Yeah, although the decoder can understand electrical impulses as a pattern, as well as something it reads directly. It can act like a system diagnostic, even for an electrician. It doesn’t matter how you say ABCDE. You show my decoder A and D, and it can figure out what and where the other letters are supposed to be, all the way to Z.”

“I actually meant faulty goods, but I wouldn’t have missed that for anything. I thought all you computer guys were about was saying how good your systems are?” asked Bill.

“Quite the opposite. We’re screaming for bigger and better data handling, because we’re getting bigger data loads and it’s getting harder to handle. The only thing going for us at the moment is that the processors can handle the current codes, because people don’t write gigantic codes….yet. The tasks don’t yet need anyone to write a hundred million lines of code. Like building the pyramids, one grain of sand at a time.”

“Sorry to interrupt, Simon; you said a minute ago that your decoder can “sense” impulses…… how, and why?” asked Al, a bit more intensely than he’d intended.

“Initially it was the wireless systems. We decided to experiment with remote coding and decoding, and it developed into something quite else. Some of our security work means that we can’t openly start tinkering with systems. We needed a remote reader, and so we built in this thing like a sort of microwave targeting system, but with a much wider range. It can read things as the processors handle them, and it can do the same job without being physically present in the building. Same decoder, but with a bit extra.”

“You mean you could read our computer here from across the street?”

“Anywhere within about two miles, as long as it’s reading enough code. At least in theory it could read, copy and run your software and anything on your computer faster than you could.”

“Hacker’s dream?”

“Not really. The remote decoder’s got a series of locks on it, security protocols, and we keep track of users. It’d be a tough thing to copy, too. To make one you need a particular series of metals, and it has a range of characteristics that would stick out a mile if used in any system, if you knew what to look for. Anyone using one of the decoders would also leave quite a trail of evidence. The use of a decoder, even a copy, would be enough to give away an unauthorized user, and find him. Decoders can sense and identify other decoders, so hacking would be like leaving your name and address with the police…… you’ve got to be a bit perverse to do good computer security. The decoder works like an anonymizer in reverse, to other decoders, if you know how to configure them to do that….. I’ll spare you the details, but there isn’t much about the decoder that could be misused by anyone without us knowing about it.”

Simon was thinking at this point that he could spend a month telling them about how much work had gone into the unique bit of hardware he’d invented to make sure it couldn’t be misused. There was even recovery software in case the decoder was burnt or destroyed by someone, molecular technology that would virtually recreate the memory using specially tagged materials. Al and Bill were so receptive to his ideas that it might be worth doing that. He now admitted to himself that he had no idea how to market his own product, at its higher levels. 

“It’s strange, this. Those are all good selling points, and you couldn’t use any of them, because it would give away the game about the security. Tell me, do you have, like, a help desk, or something, for your customers?” asked Bill.

“Yeah, of course. My wife and I do most of it, apart from our technical guy, Jim, the old guy you met downstairs……. So how do we use that stuff, anyway, if we can’t advertise?”

“Am I right to say that you call setting up the decoder “configuring” it? Because, if you do, you can be as non-specific as you like about it when you advertise. All the extras could be introduced as you get to know the what the customer wants. You’re going to wind up with two types of customer; the basic user who just wants to make sure everything runs properly, and the security freak who wants to be able to monitor everything. So you have to market to both, but keep the distinction…..

Another detail is the Trade Practices Act. You don’t want to advertise a service which is so ambiguous that it can be misinterpreted. “Configuring” more or less covers it, particularly if you don’t get too expansive on what you do with it. “Configuring to your own system’s needs,” would about do it. The thing is that however good your decoder can be, it has to be doing what you say it will do in your advertising.

“That’s……so different. I spoke to someone last week who wanted to do a national campaign and really spell out everything the decoder does. She said we needed the coverage, every home should have one, the whole smoke detector thing.”

“Overkill on the overkill. Not necessarily the best bet for your security features, either. I think your best bet is something where word of mouth gets a hearing. Big campaigns work for consumer durables, breakfast cereals, soft drinks, and some forms of deodorant, but you are really stuck with how people see your product being used. They care about what happens on their computers, because they’re dependent on them. Like a car; a reputation can destroy a car faster than the roads will. Your decoder does things that need doing, where they need doing. That’s a bit of a change of culture in the computer industry, where you keep getting add-ons to add to your add-ons. Waste of money. Do a few articles in the daily press, or better still, press releases, and some of the computer zines, and you just don’t need to do much else.”

Al re-entered the conversation,

“Comes to that, Alan might want one of those, and since we had that visit from Featherman I’m starting to think we need to watch our stuff, too. Can we have a couple?”

Harvey White was an interesting character to write. He’s one of those people with so little substance that you have to project images onto him to see him.

It occurred to Mick Featherman that Harvey White was arguably the least interesting person he’d ever met. Featherman was on his way to visit White as part of a ritual which they’d established as a cover for their real partnership. Nominally, they were partners in an investment syndicate. White, decided Featherman, was just a mediocrity trying to be a nobody and make money while he was at it. The thought of the flabby face and its look of porcine cunning actually made Featherman sick, now that he thought of it.

Why am I working with this jerk, anyway? A paid canary could do this. The thoughts got a lot less complimentary as the Rolls Royce slank into the drive of White’s slightly Lookame! residence. Featherman’s experience in Australia and the rest of the world had put him in touch with a lot of white collar criminals, and he’d yet to see a working brain cell in any of them. Every one of them thought Featherman was working for them. It was all a bit too easy.

White was a bit different in that he was an equal in name. White had the sort of self image which was able to include himself in anything, as long as it made him look clever. A perfect pawn, as far as Featherman was concerned.  Today White was going to get an explanation of the situation in Australia, an update to the whole 5% of the operation that White actually knew about. Getting rid of Nigel had been a cheap fix, but a good one.

Nigel knew even less than White about the business, and the other guy, Morgan, who’d passed the cosmetics on to him, was going to be out of the picture soon enough. In practice, Morgan couldn’t tell anyone about anything. A small timer out of his league, his introduction to the world of white-collar scams was going to be terminal. Featherman had introduced Morgan to Nigel as a way of incriminating both of them. There never was an overseas supplier, or market, or network. Several idiots had been persuaded to move a few boxes of cosmetics around Sydney over a period of nearly a year. Morgan had managed to convince himself that he knew what he was doing, and Nigel had been drunk enough and one-of-the-boys-ish enough to suddenly become a mover of hot goods. To listen to them talk you’d think they’d invented organized crime. Then, all he’d had to do was set them up.

Nigel was a nuisance because he’d had something to do with setting up the scam, even if he didn’t know himself what he’d done. Morgan was a nuisance because he was one of the few people with enough contacts to figure out what Featherman was doing. Morgan was one of the facilitators of a lot of movement of goods and money, and he had to go. Featherman didn’t want his business, just the people he knew.

Now White and that moron Fazzina had to be removed. They were now surplus to requirements. Featherman had already arranged the falling out they were going to have in three months time about splitting the profits from their investment syndicate. This meeting was actually about creating the new equity arrangements. White had been a good contact, if a jerk, and it was surprising how long it had taken for Featherman to meet all White’s associates, legitimate and otherwise. Fazzina, Featherman liked even less than Al did. The guy was one of the few people he’d ever set eyes on who really made the whole idea of humanity look like a bad idea. No loss whatsoever.

One of the interesting things about crime is that the more complex something is, the more likely people are to think it’s “clever”. Nigel, for example, thought that he was helping set up an automatic phone and computer link to a casino operated by an Asian crime gang in Hong Kong, routing the calls through a network of dummy numbers.  Morgan, whose career had begun from the back of a truck, thought that he was pulling a major scam and creating a stockpile of materials for his retirement. He’d forgotten that it was one of his trucks that had been used to do a little rewiring in the Rocks area. The guy who’d done the actual rewiring thought he was setting up a phone tap for a blackmail scam. He was now in jail, busted with a few kilos of grass he didn’t know he had. Morgan hadn’t been betrayed by Nigel, but the paper work in Morgan’s office now contained some intriguing information about his business which would either keep him in court or jail for years. That had been childishly easy.

White’s bland face emerged from his office like a potato chip. After the exchange of mutual insincerities, they moved on to business.

“Nah, they have no idea. I went there, to see Mr. Hickey, and mentioned your name, and was duly given my leave. Nigel was there as my driver, just in case they weren’t already suspicious enough. After that little episode, I doubt if they could possibly take me seriously as anything but an inept, money grubbing criminal with an idiot for a business partner,” said Featherman, grinning in a way he knew White disliked and slightly feared.

“Goldstein’s getting a bit messy. He’s talking about a lawsuit for lost earnings from the partnership.”

“So what’s he gonna use against you? An external partnership would make you a lot of money, on the same grounds. If he tries to become a full partner, you pull out and you make the money anyway. They can’t do anything. I suggest you just stand on your dignity, and make them buy you out. Easier and less legal work, and your backers get their profit. You’d make something like about 20 million on book value.”

That figure hadn’t quite come out of a hat, but almost. As expected, the mention of money had the desired effect; White lost track of everything else.

Harvey White was no genius. He did, however, know how to do what he did pretty efficiently. Featherman, he considered, was easily the most untrustworthy person he’d ever encountered, and he’d been dealing with just about everyone in America who was making more than a million a year from white collar scams, for two decades. Maybe, he considered, he just didn’t know how to read Australians. He’d previously thought they were poor cousins of Americans, hicks, mainly, but Featherman left his other associates for dead. The guy came up with angles that he’d never have even begun to think about for himself, and they were making a lot of money. These meetings were always awkward, though, Featherman talking to him as though he expected him to understand a full blown scam from inception. This meant that White had to keep looking like he was fully aware of the ideas, and that he usually had to do a lot of research afterwards to really understand them.

Featherman had also tidied up the few remaining loose ends at the agency. It was rather a pity that Goldstein was so hard to fool, and that the entire issue at Stone Gold and White had needed to be created, just to get him out of the way. Then Hickey had thrown a large spanner in, although that didn’t really affect the operation. Goldstein was too competent, and Hickey was nearly as bad. Maybe worse. Neither of them had any idea what was really happening, but they were smart enough to figure it out, if the English idiot started talking. Featherman had confused Nigel totally. Any information he had was wrong, and now he was set up with a bogus scam that neither he nor his “partner” Morgan really understood, which had been created just to get rid of both of them and destroy them as witnesses.

The real problem at the moment was that Goldstein was getting very suspicious, and that Stone and Gold would listen to him, even if he had nothing to go on. (Neither Featherman nor White knew anything about Alan’s investigations, or that Fazzina had been quite as unconvincing as he had, and that nobody at that end was buying any of it. This is what happens when you employ people who think they’re geniuses, and let them loose with a few million.) White decided that he’d leave Featherman to figure out for himself what was happening at the US end, and start making arrangements for a clean exit for himself if the need arose.