Frumious Bandersnatch by Ed McBain

Author:Ed McBain [McBain, Ed]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General, Fiction, Mystery & Detective, Police Procedural
ISBN: 9780743253888
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2003-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

THE WHOLE IDEAof this thing was to keep the girl alive for forty-eight hours. That was all the time they needed.

Avery had got all the fake stuff for the gig from a man he’d done business with before, a purveyor of false identity documents like social security cards, birth certificates, divorce decrees, gun permits, college diplomas, drivers’ licenses, press credentials, and of course credit cards that actually worked when you used them. The man’s name was Benny Lu, or at least that was the name he used here in the United States, preferring the nickname to the full Benjamin Lu that was on his Hong Kong birth certificate, if even that was real. Benny had migrated to the United States four years ago, after he’d almost been busted by Hong Kong’s ICAC.

Avery had met him two and a half years ago, when he’d needed several false documents in order to casually prove to a certain rich fat lady in Palm Beach that he was, in fact, one Judson Fears of Gloucester County, Virginia, before she would let him into her luxurious waterfront mansion and incidentally her bed, the suspicious old bitch. He had later run off with $200,000 worth of her nice jewelry, thank you, but it served her right for not accepting him at face value, and besides, the jewelry was insured.

“I used to work in a Hong Kong restaurant,” Benny told him the first time they met. Benny was tall and slender, with a droll smile and eyes that always seemed amused. He had the long narrow fingers of a Flower Dancer, precious assets in the delicate operations he performed. “I was making coolie wages,” he told Avery, “until I realized I was in a position to be of valuable assistance to certain people who had need of certain information.”

Avery thought it odd that a Chinese man would use an expression like “coolie wages,” but he made no comment because he believed it was important for a person to listen carefully while he was being educated.

“This was six years ago,” Benny said, “when the economy in Japan was still very big. You had all these Japanese tourists coming to Hong Kong, spending lots and lots of money, and paying for everything with credit cards. These certain people came to me with what is called a ‘skimmer.’ What it is…”

A skimmer, Avery learned, was a battery-operated, wireless device that cost some three to five hundred dollars, and that fit easily into the inside pocket of Benny’s jacket. Whenever Benny swiped a customer’s credit card through this little machine, it read onto its very own computer chip all the data embedded in the card’s magnetic security stripe.

“I’m not just talking name, number, and expiration date,” Benny said, grinning at the simplicity of it all. “What the skimmeralso copies is the card’s verification code. This is what’s electronically forwarded from the merchant to the card company’s central computer anytime a purchase is made. The code tells the company the card is valid.

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