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    * * *
    Stan Dysart stood looking out the plate glass window of his ninth floor office. Midnight had come and gone. The other office buildings nearby were mostly dark. He had considered going home but knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep. Instead he paced in his office and waited for a bunch of keyboard tappers to tell him whether he was likely to lose his bank.
    After all the years of calculating risks and hustling to make deals, everything could come crashing down because his computer people were incompetent. What an unbelievable fiasco. The muscles at the base of his neck throbbed from hours of unrelenting tension.
    Dysart heard a tap on his door and John Kelleher stuck his head in.
    “Got a minute?” Kelleher said.
    “What do you think,” Dysart said, “I’ve got something else to do this time of night?”
    “I think we’ve identified the problem,” Kelleher said as Paul Dees followed him into the room. The two men ended up standing in front of Dysart’s desk.
    For the first time that night, Dysart felt a spark of optimism.
    “We’ve been over the system from top to bottom,” Kelleher said, “and the only possible place the attacker’s program could be hiding is inside AMS itself.”
    “I don’t follow you,” Dysart said.
    “It’s called an Easter Egg,” Dees said, “when someone slips their own procedure into a larger program. It can happen with all kinds of software. For instance Rob told us he owns a computer game where if you press a weird combination of keys, like the question mark twenty times or something, then one of the female characters flashes her boobs. Apparently one of the video game programmers put it in for a joke and it ended up in the commercial version.”
    Dysart felt like screaming. He should have known better than to get his hopes up.
    “You’re saying that scrambling bank accounts is someone’s idea of a joke?”
    “Not at all,” Dees said, “just that it’s possible to hide one program inside another.”
    Dysart picked up a wooden-handled letter opener from his desk and started slapping his palm with it in agitation.
    “Can you look inside AMS and see if anything nasty is in there?”
    “Yes and no,” Dees said. “It’s kind of complicated because a computer program like AMS actually exists in two different forms. When we build the thing, the programmers write source code using a textual language that people can understand. Then we convert it into a different format the computer can execute. A person can make sense of the source code but the executable program is just a jumble of ones and zeros. Normally that’s no problem, since the source code tells you all you need to know.”
    “I hear a ‘but’ coming,” Dysart said.
    Dees nodded. “I found something strange tonight. I keep the master copy of all AMS source code files. I’m the only one who’s supposed to be able to update them and none of them should have been touched since the AMS executable was created four months ago. Tonight I discovered several files were changed a few hours after the executable was created. That means someone tampered with them, because I certainly didn’t change them.”
    “Someone could have inserted a scrambling function into the source code,” Kelleher said, “and then waited until after the executable was created before changing the code back again.”
    “Someone,” Dysart said. His lips were thin white lines. “You mean someone who works here.”
    “It would have to be,” Dees said, “and almost certainly an AMS team member. No one else would have the system knowledge or the access privileges to pull this off.”
    Dysart pointed the letter opener at Dees. “And you’re the only one who has access to the system files?”
    “I’m supposed to be. Of course anyone who knows the system administrator password can do whatever they want on the whole computer. Or someone could have looked over my shoulder and stolen my password.”
    “Or you’re the one who