When The Devil Whistles by Rick Acker Read Free Book Online Page A

days my ship voyage takes.”
She gave him a quizzical look. “You here for a cruise?”
“No. Perhaps I am unclear.” He made himself smile and look a little embarrassed. “My English is not so good. I am here for a business voyage. My company rents the ship, and I am crew.”
She looked at his papers again, studying them closely. Lines of concentration formed around her mouth and between her eyebrows. He felt the muscles in the back of his neck stiffen and performed mental calming exercises to prevent himself from sweating.
After nearly a minute, the woman turned and waved over a beefy man wearing a blazer and tie. She handed him the documents and the two of them had a conversation that the visitor couldn’t quite hear. They were both poring over his documents now, shooting quick glances at him as they spoke.
He looked past the customs checkpoint and spotted an exit about twenty feet away. He was confident that he could get past these two and through the door in no more than fifteen seconds, but what then? He would be on the run in a strange country with no safe houses, no weapons, and his only cover identity blown.
The conversation ended and the woman looked up again. The lines on her face relaxed. “Okay, I see. All right.” She handed the documents back to him and smiled. “Welcome to America, Mr. Cho.”

10
A MAZING . A LLIE SHOOK HER HEAD AND LEANED BACK IN THE CHAIR IN HER cubicle at Blue Sea. During her orientation, the HR director had bragged about how the company had grown from a little salvage and commercial diving outfit twenty years ago into a billion dollar company today. Maybe they were worth a billion dollars, but their accounting system wasn’t worth the week-old leftovers in the back of Allie’s fridge. She had literally seen gas stations with more financial sophistication.
Based on what her supervisor told her, five years ago the company had tried to modernize their records by computerizing everything. They bought an accounting software package that they didn’t really understand and hired some temps to convert all of their financial information to the new program. They left the job of keeping it current to secretaries—none of whom had any accounting training, naturally.
The result, of course, was a colossal mess. Now the company was a finalist for a $360 million government contract and, in the words of Allie’s supervisor, needed to “tidy up the books a little” before submitting their final bid. And that bid was due in just over two weeks.
This was all music to Allie’s ears. All the permanent employees around her would be distracted, so no one would have the time to pay close attention to what she was doing. Better yet, Blue Sea would need to have people working on this “tidying up” project around the clock, so no one would find anything suspicious about a temp poking around in the files after hours. And Allie didn’t mind working after hours. Not at all. Work was an easy way to keep her mind focused on the here and now—which was exactly what she wanted this week.
Allie scanned her computer’s directory and pulled up half a dozen project files at random. Each was supposed to contain an Excel spreadsheet showing every transaction and PDFs of all backup documents. Three of the spreadsheets featured at least one phantom entry with no accounting backup. Another spreadsheet was completely blank. Only one file held a spreadsheet that actually matched the supporting PDFs.
Then Allie pulled up the electronic general ledger to see whether the numbers in it matched what the spreadsheets showed. Surprisingly, they all did. Allie surmised that the IT staff had linked the spreadsheets directly to the general ledger to prevent errors. Not bad.
Having a good general ledger system wouldn’t save them, though. If all the files were as bad as the ones she’d seen, the general ledger was garbage. Blue Sea had no idea whether its invoices were accurate, which almost certainly meant they were