Brad nodded. Jerusalem Avenue was one of the main east-west streets in Warsaw and they’d have to cross it on their way to the palace anyway. He shoved the smartphone back into his coat pocket and contritely offered her his arm again. “I’m entirely at your service, Major Rozek.”
“Apology accepted, Captain McLanahan,” she said with a warm smile.
Nadia’s good humor lasted up to the moment they dashed between a stream of slow-moving yellow-and-red buses and saw the line of five people already waiting to use the automated teller machine. She slowed up. “No, to pięknie. Just great,” she murmured. “If this day gets any worse, I may have to kill Martindale myself. Just to even the score.”
Brad decided the better part of valor was keeping his mouth shut.
The elderly man at the front of the line shuffled forward, fumbling in his pocket for a wallet. Peering through thick reading glasses, he fumbled out his bank card and then gingerly inserted it into the ATM, almost as though he expected the machine to bite off his fingers. With that much accomplished, he slowly and with painstaking care punched in his four-digit PIN.
Impatiently tapping her foot at the back of the line, Nadia briefly closed her eyes in exasperation. “Boże, daj mi cierpliwość.” She sighed. “God give me patience.”
But before the old man could even select an option from the ATM’s menu, brightly colored zlotys, Polish bank notes, started popping out of its cash dispenser. They dropped out in ones and twos at first, and then faster and faster, and in larger denominations.
For a moment, he stared in disbelief. “What the devil? What is this?” Then, frantically, he started grabbing at the bills as they emerged. “This machine has gone mad! It’s throwing away my money! All of my money!”
More zlotys spewed out. Caught up in the brisk cold breeze, bank notes whirled away down the sidewalk. At first, only a few startled passersby snatched at them. Then as the haywire ATM kept disgorging cash, others joined in, scooping up bills as they slid along the paving and snagging them out of the air. More and more people turned to watch in astonishment.
“Is this some kind of crazy promotional stunt?” someone asked.
“Who gives a shit?” A younger man with a shaved head and multiple piercings laughed, holding up a fistful of zlotys. “It’s real cash, see!”
Red-faced and shaking with rage, the old man tried to tear the notes out of his hand. “That’s mine,” he yelled. “Give it back, you thieving skinhead!”
“Fuck off, Grandpa,” the younger man said coldly, holding the zlotys high out of his reach with one hand and roughly shoving him away with the other. “I don’t see your name anywhere on these bills.”
“But they’re coming from my account,” the old man shrieked.
“Then go complain to your goddamned Jew bank.” The skinhead laughed again. “Those Żyd moneylenders are your real problem, not me.”
Several others in the gathering crowd nodded, though most looked disgusted.
That’s enough, Brad thought grimly. He stepped forward. “I suggest you give this man his money back,” he said, in halting Polish.
The skinhead laughed contemptuously. “Or what, dickhead?”
“Or I’ll have to kick your ass,” Brad said softly.
“Screw you, foreigner,” the other man retorted. He tugged a switchblade out of his pocket and flicked it open. The long, thin blade glinted in the sun. “Maybe I should carve you up a little, to teach you some manners, eh?”
The crowd went very quiet.
Okay, Brad thought, this just got real. He rolled his shoulders and neck unobtrusively, loosening up. When the guy made his move, he’d have to slide to the right fast, deflect the knife with a rising left-hand block, and then…
“Please move aside, Brad,” he heard Nadia say calmly. He glanced backward, not wanting to take his eyes off the skinhead, now fearful about the sudden distraction… but moments later he obeyed. Nadia had drawn her concealed 9mm Walther P99 pistol. Smiling coldly, she stepped gracefully into a two-handed shooter’s stance — aiming right at the skinhead’s center of mass. “Drop the knife, dupek.”
The other man’s eyes widened in fear. His gaze flicked nervously from side to side, looking for support that wasn’t there. He licked his lips. “Jesus, lady. Are you totally fucking nuts?”
“One,” Nadia said. “Two—”
One of the skinhead’s friends grabbed his arm. “For Christ’s sake, Jerzy. Let it go. Dump the knife!” He waved his cell phone. “I just heard from Eryk. Every damned ATM in the city is going nuts. Zlotys are flying everywhere, man. It’s like manna from heaven. So who needs this shit?”
Blank-faced now, the other man let the switchblade fall out of his hand and slowly backed away. The crowd parted to let him through.
Satisfied, Nadia holstered her pistol, then knelt quickly, and scooped the knife off the sidewalk. She glanced at Brad. “Do you think that other little piece of scum was telling the truth? About all the ATMs running amok?”
Police sirens were wailing now, rising and falling in what seemed like all directions throughout Warsaw’s city center. “Yeah,” he said slowly. “I think he might have been.”
She looked worried. “If so, that would be bad. Very bad.”
Brad’s smartphone buzzed again. He checked the text and looked up. “Yes, it sure would. And you’re not the only one who’s worried. Our flight time just got bumped up. Apparently, all hell is breaking loose, and Martindale and the president want us back at the palace right away.”
Jarosław Rogoski stared at the computer screen with unconcealed bewilderment. In thirty-two years of service with the bank, including five as the senior vice president for retail banking, he had never encountered anything like this. Right now the monitor was displaying the details of just one of the millions of individual accounts owned by the bank’s customers. But what is showed was, well, impossible.
Net Account Balance: 10,521.25 zł
The display flickered briefly.
Net Account Balance: 1,320,499.11 zł
Again, the monitor refreshed.
Net Account Balance: -10.05 zł
He looked up at the bank’s chief technology officer, Marta Stachowska. “Something like this craziness is happening to every account?”
She nodded grimly. “Every single one that we’ve pulled up so far.” She bit her lip. “The numbers jump wildly every second and, as far as we can tell, with total randomness. No matter what we try, we can’t seem to freeze any of them.”
“Oh my God,” Rogoski muttered. He tapped the screen. “Is this problem connected to what’s going on with our ATMs?”
“Probably.” Stachowska looked sick. “I think all of our computer systems have been hacked, Jarosław.” She lowered her voice. “Our phone and computer help lines are jammed with customers who want to know why their checking and savings and investment and retirement-account balances are going nuts. People are starting to panic.”
Rogoski felt the blood drain from his face.
Every banking executive dreaded the possibility of a panic-driven run on his or her institution as more and more customers pulled their money out in a frenzy. To help avert that, it was standard finance-industry practice to maintain cash reserves large enough to deal with any sudden rush of withdrawals. But now, with every automated record-keeping system in chaos, how could the bank let anyone withdraw anything from any account?