STOCKPILED KNOWLEDGE PART OF WRITER'S `CALCULATED RISK'

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, January 5, 1993                   TAG: 9301050006
SECTION: CURRENT                    PAGE: NRV3   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: JEANNE JOHNSON DUDZIAK SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: RADFORD                                LENGTH: Medium
STOCKPILED KNOWLEDGE PART OF WRITER'S `CALCULATED RISK'
Author Katherine Neville is a treasure trove of esoteric trivia.
For example, while flipping through a book on the works of medieval artist Hieronymous Bosch, she spots a picture of Christ with his hand raised in a salutation that shows two adjoining fingers pointing up and two pointing down.
She's able to point out that the gesture is a symbol in the ancient art of alchemy that means, "as above, so below."
How does Neville, a former vice president of the Bank of America, know such things? Because, as well as writing books, she reads and researches them. Lots of them.
On a recent tour to promote her second novel, "A Calculated Risk" (Ballantine Books), Neville had 16 boxes of books shipped back to the Radford home she shares with Radford University's Eminent Scholar, brain scientist Karl Pribram.
Between the two of them, they've filled every book shelf in their stylish contemporary home and have to build more.
Neville, who also wrote the very successful 1988 historical mystery "The Eight," has written about a world she's quite familiar with in "A Calculated Risk" - the world of high finance and big-stakes wheeling and dealing.
She used to come home from her work at the Bank of America and write from about 6 p.m. to midnight every night, spinning out her tale of two romantically linked players who set out to prove the laxity of banking security by stealing millions of dollars.
The challenge takes the form of a contest in which the protagonist, Verity Banks, is allowed to use a computer to carry out her scheme, while her cohort, Zoltan Tor, is restricted to stealing money the old-fashioned way - by skirting the rules.
In the midst of their competition, the ersatz white-collar criminals fall in love and spend several scenes doing lusty things in exotic locales.
When Neville conceived "A Calculated Risk" in 1980, the scams portrayed in the book were figments of her imagination.
They turned out to be prophetic.
"I invented all the capers just by knowing that they would be possible," she said.
"By the time the final version was complete in 1984, almost everything had happened at least once - wire scams, foreign exchange manipulation. BCCI did a lot of that stuff."
Eerily enough, one of the banks that the Bank of Credit and Commerce International was involved with was the Bank of America.
It wouldn't be the first time she's chanced upon information that would seem to be beyond first-hand experience.
In researching her current projects, she's studying alchemy and coming into contact with many people who are knowledgeable about the esoteric arts, including people such as psychics and even the head librarian at the Vatican.
"These are people I found by writing `The Eight,' " she said.
"It was just an accident that I found out a bunch of things on my own without reading lot of alchemists, and I was right about so much of it. It makes you wonder about synchronicity."

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB