Thirsty Pelican: 2018-Scandal

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance by any character or situation to any actual person or event is purely coincidental. All characters presented in this narrative are over the age of 18.

Last Call at the Thirsty Pelican

Chapter Three:

2018-Scandal

By Royce F. Houton

As battered as the housing market was at the end of the first decade of the 21st century when the sub-prime mortgage industry collapsed and threw the nation into its worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression, things had recovered remarkably well.

The meltdown in the credit markets resulted from lenders granting mortgages to borrowers with little to no regard for their creditworthiness. Adjustable-rate mortgages proved irresistible. They felt too good to be true and they were because people never read the fine print. When the introductory subprime interest rate period expired and the higher rates kicked in, people lacking either the means or the intention to continue servicing the loans defaulted in unsustainable numbers.

As the smoking wreckage was eventually cleared away, a chastened lending industry found itself much more careful in writing home loans. But lenders couldn't afford to make the process so cumbersome and daunting that it frightened qualified borrowers. Financial institutions had to find a way to exercise due diligence but do it much faster and more efficiently. That set off a veritable arms race to leverage technology that could research a prospective borrower's credit history, ability to pay, collateral or security, references, employment and so forth fast and marshal all those data points into one unified dashboard that loan officers and their superiors could use to expedite decisions.

The software suite our bank had purchased, installed and trained our staff on in 20010 lagged badly behind today's powerful, lightning-fast, cloud-based systems that aggregate a dizzying volume of data and produce essential information in minutes compared with hours or even a day for the old system.

Ron Casey, the assistant CIO, had been warning for years that we were falling behind competitors who used "computer learning" -- artificial intelligence applications such as IBM Watson -- to speed up and streamline our loan application vetting. He had been working brutal 70- to 80-hour weeks analyzing bid specifications from a dozen vendors before recommending two finalists to the CEO and the board of directors. He had gotten voluminous input from me and a handful of my top mortgage loan officers at some of our biggest branches across the Southeast.

Finally, after months of endless hemming and hawing by various internal "select committees," mind-numbing presentations by independent consultants and our own board of directors' interminable delays, the decision was made to invite two vendors to conduct a two-week side-by-side trial of their software suites. It would involve separate panels of loan officers, executives and IT support personnel from our bank being deployed to work with the competing systems running in parallel, simultaneous performance tests. Afterward, we would review data and input from all those teams with both companies and award the contract to the better of the two.

That decision was made in April. It would be another four months -- early August -- before the actual competition would take place. During that time, I worked almost exclusively on assembling the teams of loan pros from our offices across the region, and Ron spent his time physically setting up the workspace the competing teams would use -- on separate floors in our building and segregated in every way down to different Internet service providers and phone systems to avoid intercepting or intermingling proprietary data and trade secrets.

Before I knew it, most of 2018 had zipped past me and I had become a flesh-and-blood automaton, thinking night and day about the capstone event in this project that had occupied so much time and talent at Anchor Bank for several years.

On the Friday before the trials would begin on the subsequent Monday, we met separately with technical advisory teams from both of the competitors who would be embedded with the bank's two teams. They weren't to run things -- that would be bank personnel only -- but were there for advisory and informational purposes, to observe, act as liaisons with their companies to answer questions should they arise.

The morning meeting was with LoanFast, a Taiwan-based corporation that had emerged swiftly as a provider of specialized data and information services for large financial institutions. These were very serious coding, math and cutting edge computer hardware elites. Many of them were Asian who spoke decent English (certainly much better than I spoke Taiwanese) but missed a lot of cultural and interpersonal cues. I found it odd that nobody from LoanFast sales or marketing departments was there to help smooth things out. We were introduced to three men who would be LoanFast's on-site contacts during the 14 days of product testing by what we had designated as our red team.

The afternoon meeting, in the same conference room on the top floor of our high-rise office building, was with WAS Solutions, which is based in Chicago. I was pouring myself the day's third cup of coffee to stave off the post-lunch torpor that is a particular problem for me during eye-glazing meetings like these.

"Kirk, let me introduce you to one of the WAS consultants who lives right here in Birmingham and will be assigned to the blue test team," Ron called to me from just outside the main door to the conference room a few feet away.

I was still stirring a packet of Splenda into my coffee when I rounded the door and encountered Ron speaking to a business-suited woman whose back was to me.

"Here he is," Ron said, motioning to me. "Kirk's the Alabama district mortgage lending supervisor for the bank."

Her face and name registered instantly. She was as surprised to see me as I was at seeing her.

"Kirk meet Sarah...," he said before I cut him off.

"Sarah Zanone," I said, watching a bashful smile animate her face. "A proud alum of the University of North Alabama -- go Lions!"

She extended her hand and I reached for it. "Good to see you again, Kirk."

Ron stood there a bit flummoxed. "So you know each other."

"Not well, but we've met. We got paired unannounced by Darlene Dunton at a Tide Club watch party a couple of years ago at the Pelican," I said, turning to Sarah. "I was sort of expecting to see you when football season started last year."

She shrugged. "Nobody's invited me."

"I'll have to speak to Darlice about that," I said.

"So, will you be on the blue team I am being tasked to advise?" she said.

"I won't. I'll be in constant communication with both teams to see what's happening and checking each day's measurables and analyzing it from the banking side for the C-suite to review after the trials are over. I provide input but don't make the decision," I said.

That's when the chief operations officer took the mic and asked for those involved in the meeting to take their seats and for Sarah and her two WAS colleagues to join him at lead table to help answer questions.

I sat to the rear of the meeting room. I knew most of what would be discussed -- the functionalities we were most interested in testing and so forth. From this point on, it was more proper for those who would be on the teams to do most of the interaction lest I risk appearing to put my thumb on the scales.

The meeting ran on for more than two hours, and I caught Sarah on the way out.

"Wonderful seeing you again. Had no idea that you worked for a company that provides support services for the lending and banking industry, but then we really didn't have much of a chance to learn anything about each other spring before last," I said.

"And I had no clue you worked here. I have my personal banking accounts with Anchor," she said.

"Well let's catch up with each other after the trials and evaluations are all done. But we don't want to give any perceptions of favoritism," I said.

"Exactly," she said. "We've got important work ahead."

I extended my hand and she took it, this time without the same businesslike firmness as before.

She walked to the elevators and awaited for a car to whisk her 12 floors down to the lobby, her purse clutched in her hands. Just as the chime sounded and the pink down arrow atop the elevator door illuminated, she glanced over her shoulder and caught me still watching her. She grinned and flashed a brief goodbye wave before joining half a dozen others inside the elevator car as its doors slid shut.

I turned to go back inside the conference room to collect the legal pad on which I had made notes from both the morning and afternoon presentations. Ron had already grabbed it and was walking it toward me.

"Well that was interesting, Kirk," he said, a wry smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.

"What?"

"The way you lit up when you saw Sarah Zanone's face for one. The way you staked her out on the way to the elevators. The way you gawked at her til she stepped into the elevator," Ron said.

"Dude, I met her one time. We sat next to each other in one of Darlice's ambush matchmaking attempts. I still don't so much as have her phone number."

"Mmmm hmmm," he said, an airy smirk on his lips and his eyes studying my increasingly flustered response.

"Seriously, I couldn't contact her if I wanted to," I protested yet again.

"Are you trying to convince me or yourself?" he asked, his gaze still locked mercilessly on me.

I chuckled at him and shook my head.

"Man, you're a bigger busybody than Darlice," I said. "Look, if I ever go out with her or even meet her at the coffee pot, I'll let you know. But I can tell you that if that happens, it sure as hell won't be in the next two weeks while we're reviewing WAS's service."

"I hear ya," he said, still smiling but finally looking away. "But I said it before: you'll come off the sidelines when the right girl comes along. Got my eyes on you, bruh."

"You're impossible."

▼ ▼ ▼

Ron wasn't wrong. His intuition was, let's say, closer to right than wrong. There was interest and it was undeniable that I felt drawn to her, even though I had only see her once before a year and a half earlier and could measure the totality of all our conversations in a handful of sentences. I hadn't even thought about her more than a time or two for the first eight months of 2018. I could not predict what would happen beyond these two weeks when she would no longer be in our building every day.

I made it a point not to go looking Sarah up as our trial teams tested the competing business information systems. When our paths occasionally crossed by chance, we were professional. I called her Miss Zanone and she addressed me as Mr. Weeks. But there was always the smile -- on both our parts -- and, for me at least, the look that lingered just a beat too long in passing. One day in the elevator, it was all I could do not to ask her if she had lunch plans. But that would cross an unwritten but clearly understood line of professional ethics and decorum.

Every day, I received summaries from team leaders encapsulating what went right with the competing services, what went wrong, and the ease or difficulty of remediating that which went wrong. Fortunately, neither system was live to our officers in the field -- they would be using the old system probably for another year until we could install the software and set up the network enterprise-wide, thoroughly train, test and certify each officer in the use of the new product and, in most cases, buy the new hardware required to run the more powerful system.

Every other day, I would receive a batch of raw data in spreadsheet format that provided a second-to-second record both of how the products were performing as well as the team members using it.

It was a long two weeks. On the final Friday of the trial, Sarah asked me if I was also working over the weekend to watch the final two days of the testing.

"I'll log in from time to time at home, but I doubt I will be physically here. I live just a few blocks away so I can get her fast if I need to. I suppose you have to be here though, don't you?"

"Don't have to, but I will be. This is a big deal to WAS and we don't leave things to chance. I think things have gone pretty smoothly for the first twelve days, but that doesn't mean little things can't turn into big things."

I nodded. I was tempted to commend her for her dedication to duty, but that might be misconstrued as favoritism toward her of her employer, so I let my smile do the communicating. I also took note about her allusion to "little things turning into big things." Isn't that essentially an allegory for Ron Casey's observations about a potential relationship between Sarah and me?

"Well, I look forward to completing this evaluation process and putting things into the hands of folks with higher pay grades than mine so we can relax a little," I said, immediately regretting the use of the second-person plural pronoun that could almost be construed as an invitation. She showed no sign she interpreted it that way. She was poised and cool.

"I'm sure, Mr. Weeks," Sarah said, her tone perfectly suited for the workplace. "We've all been on our A-game, but it's been nice being here, getting to know the bank's professionals on your lending and Ron's IT departments. Who knows, maybe there's room for more collaboration down the line if things work out."

Wow. Sarah saw my double entendre and deftly went one better. All of it, on its face, has a perfectly professional connotation. But when viewed through the prism of the underlying whatever was between us, another message was unmistakable.

At least for now.

▼ ▼ ▼

One of the few relaxing moments I allowed myself over the final test weekend was a quick trip to the Pelican for a beer, a burger and an Atlanta Braves game on the big screen. And wouldn't you know it, there in a booth with her boyfriend was Darlice Dunton, the self-appointed Cupid of the Tide Club.

"So how's the transition going," she asked me. "Single life agreeing with you? You've slimmed down a little."

"It's a process," I said.

"Are you back out there, dating and such?"

"Not so much."

"What does that mean? Either you are or you aren't."

The game had just started, and the Braves had already given up a single to the Reds' lead-off hitter, but Darlice was in full gossip vampire mode.

"It means I'm taking things slow. I was married for 24 years. I just can't change relationships the way I do neckties."

Darlice nodded. On the big screen, the Reds had struck for another single and advanced the lead-off batter to third base on a fielding error. Concentrating on the game was impossible with Darlice chewing on my ear.

"Why don't you look up Sarah, the girl I introduced you to last spring?"

I could feel myself swallow hard and hoped Darlice didn't notice. I didn't want the conversation to take this turn, not in the thirteenth day of a 14-day IT systems tryout at work in which Sarah was a key participant. I certainly didn't want her knowing that.

"I never got her number, Darlice. Remember?"

Sure, the response was disingenuous, but what Darlice didn't know wouldn't hurt her. And I was truthful in that I still didn't have Sarah's contact info.

"Oh. Right," she said, a bit dismayed that two years had lapsed without me asking her to help me reach Sarah.

Somehow, the Braves got the second batter to fly out and the third to fire a double-play grounder to shortstop to end the top of the first with no runs scored. With the commercial break, I excused myself for the restroom and then took my seat at the bar outside Darlice's immediate reach. Finally, I could relax and watch the game. And that felt good.

▼ ▼ ▼

I spent the Monday after the end of the side-by-side IT system trial buried in emails and data I had accumulated over the past 14 days.

Ron Casey would advise the CEO on technical aspects of the two systems: connection speed, security and reliability; the strength of the software and how well it interacted with our latest-generation IBM-based hardware; downtime from bugs in the system and the difficulty of troubleshooting.

I would advise the CEO on which system was more user friendly and intuitive for our loan professionals, the data it presented them in the most useful and streamlined format, how aligned the service was with how the mortgage loan industry actually works and, finally, how helpful the competing companies' support staffs (both on-site for the trial and in remote service centers) had been.

From a strict technical perspective, Ron rated the two about even. He said LoanFast's system speed was a marginally faster and encountered slightly fewer bugs over the 14 days. But, in his recommendation to the CEO, he cautioned that the tiny advantages he saw in the Tiawan-based vendor had to be measured against data that, at some point, was held on the other side of the globe and in the backyard of the People's Republic of China, a larcenous regime with no qualms about pirating Western data and has spoken openly about its intention to subsume Taiwan.

After poring over two weeks of comments and emails from both trial teams and reaching out to key members of both, I gave a qualitative edge to WAS in terms of functionality, familiarity with our work and responsiveness to needs of our staff. Part of the reason was the cultural and language barrier: dealing with remote support staff in Naperville, Illinois, proved to be a much better experience than support techs based in multiple locations, often in the Pacific Rim, whose command of English (especially with Southern drawls) and the staggering time differences (they were ending their workday when ours began) on a few occasions presented significant communication gaps and bothersome delays. Why a global conglomerate like that couldn't or wouldn't invest more in a help center in North America, the globe's largest economy, didn't make sense to me and demonstrated a lack of understanding of or commitment to our needs.

My report was dispassionate, honest, based on solid data and sufficiently buttressed to withstand rigorous challenges. But as I wrote it, I couldn't help but wonder how my assessment in support of WAS might be construed should a relationship develop with one of the on-site WAS advisors, Sarah Zanone. There's no tangible reason I could point to for thinking that such a thing were on the horizon or even possible. I knew nothing about her other than she works for WAS, went to college up in Florence in northwestern Alabama, and we both somehow know Darlice Dunton. I also know beyond doubt that my conclusions would be exactly the same if Sarah did not exist, and that to protect myself from raised eyebrows by recommending LoanFast would be unconscionable bordering on malpractice. Still, appearances will be what they will be notwithstanding a mountain of fact that stands against it, so the thought kept nagging me throughout the side-by-side test.

I gritted my teeth and swallowed hard before I clicked "send" on our secure, encrypted internal communications system.

It was only 4 p. m. that Wednesday afternoon, 58 hours after the tests had ended, but after finishing that report with its voluminous tables and charts drawn from raw data I included as an appendix I was so exhausted that my arms and legs were shaky. Two weeks of escalating professional tension resulting from my focus on this project had deprived me of sleep, so I checked out early and walked the three blocks home. I stripped to my boxers, collapsed into bed and was asleep by 5. I slept through supper and woke Tuesday before 6 o'clock with a grinding appetite.

I wolfed down a bowl of instant oatmeal and then, still with nearly three hours before I was due at my desk, struck out on a brisk hourlong walk through the heart of downtown, around the city's Railroad Park, through the University of Alabama at Birmingham campus and back home. By the time I reached my office, I felt a spring in my step and a lift in my spirit that I hadn't felt in quite a while, something I ascribed to an unseasonably cool morning, the completion of my part in perhaps the bank's biggest project during my years there and the best night's sleep I've had in years. I was ready to take on the world.

Years of experience should have taught me that if anything feels too good to be true, that's because it is.

Ron Casey seldom knocked on my door before 10 or 11. But there he was, standing in the open doorway to my office tapping lightly on the wall. I saw him when I turned around and away from my computer monitor where I was reading morning emails. The humor I always see in Ron's countenance was not there.

"Ron, I feel like the weight of the world has been lifted from my shoulders."

He hesitated a beat. Another foreboding sign.

"Got a sec?"

I waved him to the chair across the desk from me. He was carrying a yellow legal pad and handling it somewhat gingerly. He closed the door behind him.

"I just left Waymon McClendon's office. Waymon hadn't even sat down this morning before he got a phone call from chief marketing officer of LoanFast's U. S. division asking him why his company graded so poorly," Ron said, a thread of fear in his voice.

I had to shake my head to make sure I understood Ron right. How could that be possible? I had just sent that report to Waymon the previous afternoon. Had I slept an entire day and night, right through the whole day Thursday? Was this actually Friday?

"Waymon told me that LoanFast wasn't thrilled with my assessment -- that its technical performance was much better than I had rated it. But they were really pissed about your giving WAS a qualitative edge in functionality," Ron said. "And you want to know what's really scary about that, Kirk? Waymon hadn't even looked at your report yet. He had no idea what the fuck the LoanFast guy was talking about."

I was aghast. I could feel the blood drain from my face.

Until 17 hours ago, I was the only human who had seen my report. I didn't finish it until 2:30 the previous afternoon. I took another 90 minutes to re-read it from front to back, line by line, and make edits before I saved it, attached it to a secure internal email and sent it to Waymon with Ron copied in. That's it.

"Ho-ly Lord. How?" I muttered.

"A security breach. That's the only answer. When I left Waymon's office, he was on the phone with the FBI," Ron said, a noticeable tremor in his voice. "I don't know who did it or how, but if they were able to get hold of our reports before our own CEO read them, it was someone or something with a high degree of access and sophistication."

I nodded blankly at Ron. We could smell each other's fear.

"Technical sophistication, yes, no doubt. But not a lot of business sophistication or common sense. By calling Waymon and trying to play hardball this early, they've tipped their hand that they're spying on us. And someone somewhere, whether it's Taiwan or the states or somewhere else, is probably realizing that fuck-up right about now," I said.

"Kirk, think about this: you hit send on your email at 4:17 p. m. yesterday. That means someone in Taiwan was looking at it just after 5 o'clock in the morning over there. It was at the top of the inbox for probably every member of LoanFast's C-suite by the time they woke up. Somewhere along the way, nobody stopped to figure out that it was sent at close of business in Alabama. Nobody realized that the phone call to the bank's CEO would happen even before anybody here had a chance see those reports, much less discuss them."

"That's a huge break for us, but... if they were able to get their hands on this report, how much of our data, our confidential communications, our business plans and our depositors' and customers' accounts have been compromised?" I said.

"We're running that to ground now, battle stations and code red. It may be that they just hacked our email, but that in itself contains all sorts of information that could make other systems vulnerable," Ron said. "We should have a pretty good initial assessment by midafternoon. If our financial systems were breached, this is going to be a PR and litigation nightmare. It could destroy us."

"The feds will be crawling all over this office within the hour," I muttered.

Ron nodded. "Probably. But there's also another concern. Evidently, LoanFast has some actual human spies loose in here. Somebody who sees and hears a lot. The LoanFast CEO told Waymon he was concerned that your report may have been influenced by your relationship with a WAS on-site advisor during the trial."

"What!" I said, slamming my palms on my desk. "There is no relationship. I've made sure of it. You've witnessed the extent of it. Someone unsuccessfully tried to fix us up for a Tide Club watch party, and the only other times I've seen her, shared more than a passing hello,... you were there. Others, too! That's bullshit."

"I agree, but it's still blood in the water and Waymon's likely to ask you about it. I think once he reads the report -- he still hasn't -- he'll see that it's supported by hard data and solid research and stands on its own merit. But he's going to inquire. And most likely, so will the FBI."

▼ ▼ ▼

My appointment with special agent Michael Holton started promptly at 2 p. m. in my office. I was right: agents from the FBI, the Financial Industry Regulatory Agency (FINRA for short) and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency were swarming our offices in Birmingham and in Atlanta.

My sit-down with Holton was in a small conference room on our top floor because agents with all sorts of specialized gadgetry were sweeping my office for bugs. Their forensic geeks were also poring over my personal iPhone as well as my bank-issued laptop for malware or vulnerabilities hackers could exploit to access our systems.

The interview was recorded. It was essentially a detailed recap of my role with the evaluation process, what I observed and noted during those two weeks, where and how I stored my notes and data, how I did the analysis, whom I spoke with regarding the analysis (several of my most trusted senior aides), when and where I wrote it and a second-to-second timeline of when it was finished and emailed.

I made it a point to stress to Holton that, as I was instructed, there were only two recipients to the email containing my attached report and they were our CEO, Waymon McClendon, and my friend, peer and co-author in the evaluation, Ron Casey.

Then, as Ron predicted, agent Holton asked about Sarah Zanone.

"Mr. McClendon said the caller from LoanFast alluded to a relationship he alleges you had with one of the WAS representatives, Miss Sarah Zanone."

"I know who Miss Zanone is, she was here as a support and resource person for her company during the side-by-side trial, we interacted a few times strictly about performance issues with the software, but there is no relationship and never has been," I said. "She represented her company well as far as I could tell, but she had no influence on my recommendation in favor of WAS based on the two-week evaluation period. The recommendation is thoroughly buttressed by hard data that's in the report for all to see."

"Why might someone at her company's competitor get that idea, specifically about one named person?" the agent asked.

"I'd love to know that. When you find out, please tell me," I said.

"Is it true that you and Miss Zanone had seen each other socially?"

"That's an enormous stretch. A mutual friend who is president of the Birmingham chapter of the Tide Club -- I'm an Alabama alumnus -- knew that I was going through a divorce two winters ago and, without asking or alerting either me or Miss Zanone, took it upon herself to do some unwelcome matchmaking. She set up a surprise meet-up one night at a baseball game watch party at the Thirsty Pelican," I said.

Agent Holton asked for Sarah's contact info and I truthfully told him that I never had it and still don't. Then he asked for Darlice Dunton's contact info and I told him it was all in my iPhone that his forensic techs had taken to pore over.

"Miss Zanone and I were both uncomfortable with being put on the spot that evening at the Pelican. That was especially true for me because I had just filed for divorce after 24 years of marriage and the last thing I needed was another relationship. We sat politely beside each other for six or seven innings, left before the game ended and went our separate ways," I said.

"Did you see Miss Zanone between that Tide Club party and the time she showed up here as part of the software evaluation for WAS?"

"No." It felt good to be unequivocally certain of that point. "I wasn't thinking about dating and, as I said, didn't have her contact info even if I was. I still couldn't tell you how to reach her other than to call her employer. Outside that awkward night at the Pelican and the contractor work she did here for two weeks, there's been zero interaction between us."

Holton nodded.

"Let me flip the question around. Was there any animosity between you two?"

"No," I said. "She seemed to be a perfectly delightful person. Any time I had questions, I found her well-informed, knowledgeable about her company's product and its use, attentive to our concerns and able to communicate clearly with us, often about highly technical stuff that Ron Casey understood way better than I did. She also possessed a better-than-average understanding of the mortgage loan industry and the laws and regulations that govern it. That's not common among contractors. She'd done her homework."

Holton nodded. It seemed to make sense to him.

"One last thing -- tell me about when you first realized she would be here in your building working on the side-by-side product trials. Did you recognize her immediately? Did someone introduce you?"

"Yes. And yes," I said, explaining how Ron had made the introductions, but I recognized her as the woman I had last seen the night Darlice tried to set us up.

"We were cordial," I said. "I thought to myself that day, 'Hey, small world.' That was it. That's still it."

"Other than Mr. Casey, do you recall who else might have witnessed this interaction?"

I gave him all the names I could remember, at least of bank officials who were at the blue team's pre-evaluation briefing. It was as varied as the CEO's confidential executive assistant, Glenda Ferry, an AV guy from the internal events staff whose name I can never remember, some of the front-line lending officers I supervise and some of Ron's coders.

And with that, we were done. He told me that his forensic techs should be done with my laptop and phone by the close of business and would return them to my office. I asked him if he had any idea how it might have happened. True to FBI tradition, his lips were sealed, and he admonished me not to speak to anyone about what we had just discussed.

"No problem. Last thing anyone here wants to do is talk. Everybody's scared shitless that it'll be leaked to the news. It won't... right?"

Holton made a zipping motion over his lips. I nodded appreciatively.

"So what class year were you at Bama?" Holton said. "I was 2005. Golf team and Sigma Nu."

"Got a few on you. I was '93," I said. "Won our first football championship since the Bear the season of my senior year." I let the rest drop because I never joined a fraternity.

Holton nodded, closed his notepad, clicked off his tiny recorder and slid them into the interior pockets of his suit jacket. "Roll Tide," he said as he made his way to the conference room door.

I waved, relieved to be done with my first -- hopefully, my last -- FBI interrogation.

My phone was returned to me by 4 p. m., and I excused myself for the day and made a bee line for the Queen's Park bar a couple of blocks from the office and convenient to my walk home.

If ever there was a day for a neat double shot of Blanton's, this was it.

▼ ▼ ▼

The law enforcement presence in our offices was down to a handful the morning after my interview. I came to work early to get a read on who knew what about the state of play with the investigation. So far, nothing had leaked to the press, which was fortunate. And within the bank, people were too fearful of the feds to so much as whisper about it.

By 10, things seemed to settle into a more familiar pattern. I conducted my weekly regional loan managers' videoconference and the subject of yesterday's crisis never came up, possibly because no one outside the Birmingham office was implicated.

At noon, Ron and I went to lunch at a street bratwurst vendor and found a bench in a nearby park to eat and chat.

"Your tech people have any handle on how our emails to Waymon got intercepted?"

"They've gone over every line of code, looked for every known vulnerability, and they can't find anything. They've run the most powerful malware and security software money can buy and they tell me it comes up clean, so I don't know. If it's a hack, it's more sophisticated than anything our folks have ever seen, and they deal with hardcore criminals in Russia, China, North Korea."

"You hearing anything from the FBI folks about it?"

"Nada. You know the FBI -- they ask questions, they don't give answers," he said, shaking his head.

"Then how could LoanFast get hold of that information almost as soon as it was sent?"

Ron shrugged. "The old fashioned way?"

"What's that?"

"A mole. Someone on the inside. If it ain't technical, it's got to be human, right?"

I stared blankly at him for a few seconds. Maybe I just didn't want to believe it was one of our own because the idea terrified me. My mind began a quick inventory of possible suspects, people I had reason to distrust. I came back with nothing.

"Occam's razor," I said.

"Whose razor?"

"Occam's razor. It's a problem-solving principle that says that the simplest explanation is usually the right one. It's named for some Medieval theologian," I said. "It means that your solution -- that we have a rat in our midst -- makes the most sense and is probably right. And if that's the case, it's scary as hell."

"In other words, we don't know who we can trust," he said.

"Exactly."

We sat in silence for a moment. Then, as if choreographed, we each raised our hot dog to take a bite at the same time, stopped before they reached our mouths, cut our eyes suspiciously at each other and laughed out loud.

When we returned to the office, the message light was flashing on my desk phone. I hit the replay button and heard the voice of Waymon McClendon. "Hi, Kirk. Can you come see me in my office when you get back from lunch. Thank you."

Well shit. This didn't sound good. Had there been more claims from LoanFast? Were there people still trying to imply an untoward relationship with Sarah Zanone as a factor in my recommendation? I walked to his corner office on the opposite side of our floor with an expansive view to the west and north over the city and the rolling suburban hills beyond. I tapped on his already open door.

"S'up, chief," I said.

"Kirk, thanks for coming by. Close the door if you would," he said.

"That sounds ominous," I said, trying to make it sound light while my stomach churned about what I don't yet know.

"Oh, no need worry. Just wanted to tell you that I finally got around to reading your report on the side-by-side and I agree with your conclusion that the contract should go to WAS," he said. "I think you did some fine work on that, Kirk. It was supported throughout with solid data and firm conclusions, and that's very important to us right now."

"Thanks, Waymon. That's my goal."

"Well, it takes on added importance because if it weren't ironclad, it would make us vulnerable to claims that we were playing favorites for non-business reasons," he said, his meaning unmistakable.

"You mean the whispering campaign about a romance that isn't... and never was," I said.

"Right. While the FBI's doing its thing, I've done my own little after-action review using some of the bank's security folks. They say there's truly no there there."

"And that's correct. You hearing anything from the feds?"

"Nope. You?"

I shook my head.

"I'll be glad when they do crack this thing. I can't award this contract until this investigation is done. I'm sure you realize the decision to go with WAS has to remain strictly confidential til further notice."

"Of course," I said. "And yes, the uncertainty and paranoia this thing has caused is torture. I asked Casey at lunch what he knew, and he said his best coders and counter-hackers had checked everything and run the most sophisticated leak-detection and anti-spyware applications out there and they swear they found nothing. He thinks it's a human problem. A mole. I hadn't even thought of that, but I have to think he's probably right."

Waymon was staring at me wide-eyed.

"We get so hung up on cybercrime we ignore the old-fashioned explanation," he said.

"Right. A computer snoop can find what we put into the system, but an actual spy can access that data plus whatever is overheard in the restrooms, the commissary, the elevator, boardrooms... anywhere."

Waymon exhaled and stared out his window to his right.

"Thanks for shitting all over any chance I might have had at getting a good night's sleep," he said, affecting a rueful smile.

"Sorry boss," I said. "But thanks for your support. I appreciate it. This, too, shall pass."

As I got up to leave, Waymon said, almost off-handedly, "Oh, on your way out would you ask Glenda to step in for a second?"

▼ ▼ ▼

I told no one, but I worried constantly about Sarah. Knowing that the FBI had or, at some point, would show up unannounced at her workplace or her doorstep, flash a badge and take her into a quiet room for an interrogation saddened me. She did nothing to deserve this -- none of us had -- and the human side of me wanted to warn her, to protect her. But my employer's attorneys had underscored the imperative of the FBI agents' humorless admonitions not to discuss the case with anyone. So I maintained complete silence.

Any way you cut it, this was grossly unfair to her. On false innuendo alone, Sarah would be swept up in the dragnet caused by a competitor's perfidy --

an adversary that chose not to play within the boundaries and resorted to corporate spying. But my hands were tied, not only by legal considerations but a very practical one: I still didn't have her phone number.

It had been a week since we discovered that LoanSafe had somehow gotten almost instant access to our confidential internal bank communication and grossly misplayed it. That was the same day I had sat down with agent Holton of the FBI and submitted to his questions about Sarah. But it seemed longer. It seemed like a month.

All of that was churning within my skull as I walked to the office on the Thursday before Labor Day and my cell phone rang. I answered Ron Casey's call immediately.

"Kirk, you in the building yet?"

"Will be in about two minutes. What's up?"

"Go straight to the big conference room on the top. Waymon's rounding up all our senior managers and execs for some closed-door, hush-hush, must-attend meeting. They're making everybody leave their phones in a box outside before they go in. I don't know what it is, but it's got to be some serious shit."

Nothing had been normal for the past week. We had never encountered a corporate situation like this, one that shook us to our core. I would use the word scandal, but that implies something massively public that includes widespread condemnation, and somehow this had not leaked to the press.

But I could feel the mood was off the instant I walked through the revolving door into the lobby. You could feel the terror, see it in colleagues' eyes and hear it in their hushed tones. Evidently, word about the unprecedented, eyes-only management conclave had spread like wildfire through every echelon of the bank. I rode the elevator 18 full floors with three other people without so much as a syllable being exchanged among us.

When the elevator door opened, I saw no one milling around outside the conference room. So I walked to the door and handed my iPhone to a woman I vaguely recognized who put a plain label with adhesive backing on it, wrote my name on it and stored it with others on a table behind her over which she stood as a protective sentry.

Inside, there were no coffee urns, no linen skirts or tablecloths on the rows of long tables with chairs arrayed behind each. There was no printed agenda. The massive flat screen that covered an entire wall behind the rostrum was blank, no slick PowerPoint presentation ready to roll. This meeting took shape with the shortest of notice, no time to plan. About 20 people sat there silently waiting for Waymon McClendon to enter and address us from behind a lectern emblazoned with the bank's logo. Ron waved me over to a seat he had saved directly beside him. Neither of us spoke.

The tension became nearly unbearable in the minutes after the scheduled 9:15 start of the meeting came and went and Waymon was still not there. He was a former Marine officer who believed that anyone who wasn't five minutes early was late, and he demanded that level of punctuality of his subordinates. He strode in at 9:27 with three other men in suits, including one I recognized as bank chief counsel Larry Brooks. The room was so hushed that the hard leather soles of Waymon's wingtips striking the polished terrazzo floor sounded like pistol shots with each step. The woman who had collected our phones pulled the door shut as Waymon marched to the lectern and faced us. His red eyes and flushed face suggested that he had been crying.

"This is a very hard day for me, personally and professionally, and for Anchor Bank," he began. "My trusted executive assistant for many years, Glenda Ferry, was terminated from employment this morning. She was arrested by the FBI last night as she waited to board a flight to Houston and then to Cozumel. She was carrying about thirty-five thousand dollars in cash taped to her skin and in false bottoms to her luggage. She faces arraignment before a federal magistrate here in Birmingham this afternoon on multiple charges including conspiracy, theft of trade secrets, economic espionage, illegal intercept of electronic communications, lying to federal investigators -- 47 counts in all."

You could hear gasps and muttered oaths across the room as the gravity of the charges and the potential exposure the bank and even individual employees might face. More than anyone in the company, Glenda knew everything. She was wired into every meaningful conduit of information within it as the confidential gatekeeper for its top executive, raising the specter that her tentacles led to a broader spy network in our midst.

Waymon took a moment to clear his throat and collect himself. One of the men standing with him handed him a bottle of water and he took a sip. It was impossible to tell which emotion was dominant within him: sorrow or rage. I suspect both.

"The short version of this: Glenda had been receiving secret cash payments worth many thousands of dollars each month from LoanFast in exchange for covertly funneling confidential bank information and confidential communications among our executives and managers regarding our plans for acquiring a new loan origination and servicing system to give LoanFast a competitive advantage. She had access to all my email, and she texted hundreds of them to her handlers here in the U. S. and in Taiwan, perhaps beyond."

In the back of the room, a woman murmured, "Dear God."

"In a moment, Larry and his folks from the corporate counsel office are going to provide you with more granular detail and to instruct you on how we are to going handle this going forward and the non-negotiable individual requirements we will make of all of you in that regard," he said. "Once the news of Glenda's arrest breaks today, this will become a huge international news story. What has happened here is just the tip of the iceberg to a situation that affects the security of our institution, the banking industry globally, the world economy and U. S. national security."

Again, Waymon paused, giving the weight of what he had just said a moment to sink in.

"Broadly speaking, I can tell you that there will be full and unquestioned adherence to two standing orders. First, you and your staffs will at all times cooperate fully with federal investigators and with the United States attorney's office in all aspects of this matter. Second, you will speak to no one, inside or outside our company, other than these investigators and prosecutors. Any variance from it will not only get you fired, it will likely get you charged with a crime. Am I clear on that?"

There was a mumbled general assent before he informed us that each person in the room would be required to sign a form explicitly acknowledging their understanding and agreement before leaving the room. Those who did not sign would be terminated on the spot.

Waymon was never a happy, chatty type. Tours of duty with the Marines in the Middle East -- including survival of the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, that killed 218 people and the 1991 war in Iraq -- had seen to that. But he had never worn a scowl this deep for this long.

"If there's any good news from this, I suppose it is that our IT systems were not compromised. This was an old-fashioned human betrayal. And, because of a misunderstanding either on Glenda's part or others at LoanFast, they showed their cards too fast and what's happening here is likely to take down their entire corrupt enterprise. Through it all, you have conducted yourselves in a way that has helped law enforcement and our bank hold the upper hand and keep this quiet until now. So, I want to thank you -- every one of you."

With that, he excused himself and one of Larry's deputy lawyers opened his briefcase, pulled out a sheaf of collated and stapled papers and had them distributed to everyone in the room with instructions to check the box indicating that we had read the non-disclosure document and then to sign it, indicating our agreement and compliance.

Over the next half hour, all confidential, we learned from Larry and his guys that FBI analysts had been stymied for several days when they had found no eavesdropping bugs in our offices, no spyware or secret rear-door passageways in our IT systems that LoanFast hackers could use to access our computer systems. They had found no emails being forwarded via company email accounts or by private accounts such as Yahoo! or Gmail. There was no evidence that any information had been printed out, allowing the paper to be left in a secret drop location -- an abiding staple of international spycraft.

The pivotal break in the case came when Glenda had left a burner android device she had been sent specifically for her spying on the corner of Waymon's desk by accident when she went to the restroom and he returned unexpectedly to his office and found it. She would call up documents on Waymon's computer screen when he was away so nothing would appear amiss, photograph them with the phone and text the images to her LoanSafe handler.

LoanSafe's plot to game the process and win the contract for our system began to unravel when Glenda texted the images of my report to her connection preceded by the notation that "Kirk Weeks sent this to W (meaning Waymon) yesterday." She likely said it that way because she knew that while it was late Wednesday afternoon in Birmingham, it was already Thursday in Taiwan where the ultimate decisions would be made on the response. Another text, conveying her observations, said she sensed that "Weeks seems sweet on a WAS rep, Sara Zanone."

The contact or someone else farther up the LoanSafe organizational chart mistakenly inferred that Glenda's reference to "yesterday," to mean Tuesday, leading to the fatal assumption that the message was already 36 hours old, that Waymon had already read it and was prepared to act.

Glenda began to panic when she put the call from LoanFast through to Waymon first thing on the next morning and heard his incredulous response through the open door of his office to the premature rebuke from LoanFast. She knew things would unravel quickly afterward. She called in sick a couple of days over the past week, apparently spending that time booking her escape flight, making substantial cash withdrawals from bank accounts and figuring out how to take as much of it as possible with her and wire the rest to numbered accounts in banks in the Cayman Islands.

At the same hour Glenda was apprehended in Birmingham at the departure gate for the first leg of her fugitive flight to Mexico, agents arrested two men in Atlanta -- one a Chinese national and a Michigan man who worked on-and-off as a private eye -- and a Taiwanese immigrant in Seattle who was a LoanFast regional sales executive for the northwestern United States. At least a dozen more arrest warrants were in the process of being executed, and the Justice Department had secured court orders seizing LoanFast's assets in U. S.-based banks.

Because she had demonstrated her clear intent to flee the United States and abscond with as much cash as she could carry, it was a virtual certainty that she would be denied bond and would remain jailed until trial. If convicted of each charge now facing her and sentenced to serve their maximum terms consecutively, her cumulative prison time would total over 140 years, one of our attorneys said.

The reason the government was so concerned about this case was evidence that LoanFast was a front company based in the democratic archipelago of Taiwan for a massive financial conglomerate owned by the communist government of mainland China. The departments of Commerce, Justice and Homeland Security had been investigating LoanFast for almost a year since technicians at a major national bank reported systematically finding and repairing security breaches and secret access portals in LoanFast software. From what the government had been able to put together, the security holes appeared only after LoanFast had won the loan servicing and origination technology contract and the permanent software was installed. We were lucky in that LoanFast never built those vulnerabilities into its test software.

"Here's what's scary," Larry Brooks said, his face ashen. "Imagine that the government of China has full-time access to the most personal financial data of most Americans, not just mortgages but car loans, business loans, personal loans, college loans, you name it. Imagine being able to shut all of that down in seconds. Or imagine they see that a state senator or a judge is behind on his payments and they go to this person with the assurance that they can make it go away in exchange for their help or, if they don't, they can bankrupt them or leak the information to the press or spread it all over social media."

We were told that federal financial regulators were issuing emergency bulletins to every American lending institution that uses LoanFast products instructing them to take emergency steps to check their systems for bugs, thefts or other vulnerabilities and, depending on how widespread things became, temporarily shut them down. Those safeguards in themselves could slow or paralyze a major segment of the U. S. financial services industry for days if not weeks, panic global financial markets and throw American commerce into a tailspin.

"By the end of this week, this is going to be the lead news story worldwide, so you can see why this is so serious. And this is why full compliance, extraordinary vigilance and doing everything right on our part is essential," Brooks said. I noticed a slight tremble in his hand when he sipped from his bottle of water, and sweat was beginning to glisten on his forehead upper lip and chin.

"This is a big deal, people. The biggest I ever saw anyway."

NEXT CHAPTER:

2018-Sarah