Chapter 8: The Accountant - free audiobook

What happens when time starts breaking down?

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Chapter 8 - The Accountant

Abe Cussler was often teased by other special agents. He liked things just so. He kept three pens to the left of his keyboard equally spaced apart with the clip on the left and in a specific order. Each pen was used for a different purpose. Agent Cussler didn’t understand people who used the same pen for everything. Somewhere deep in his brain, in a part he wasn’t consciously aware of, using the same pen for a different task seemed to contaminate the task like eating ice cream with a spoon covered in soup.

He has a standard keyboard with a 10 key pad. He has never touched that 10 key pad. Years ago, he had requisitioned a separate, stand alone 10 key pad that he could place at the proper angle and distance from his right hand as it rested on his arm rest.

8.5 years ago he had toyed with a mouse that had a thumb roller ball. He enjoyed the idea of the roller ball to the crassness of dragging a plastic mouse across his desk. No matter how clean he kept his desk, scraping the mouse across the surface gathered some kind of grey desk gunk on the bottom of the mouse. The roller ball kept his mouse in a static position; no gunk.

This was ideal except for one major flaw: the repetitive movements required of his thumb to navigate the cursor around his screen hurt his hand. He suspected he was developing some sort of tendon-based repetitive stress injury. As long as he was required to interface with a computer with his fingers and hands (he dreamed of the days of eye tracking interfaces) he needed his hands to be distraction and pain free.

So, he considered the pain caused by the roller ball to be the result of a fatal flaw in the design and abandoned it for the inferior, but ergonomically sound, traditional mouse.

Each Monday morning, he would come into the office, sit down, take a deep breath, open his top right drawer, remove a razor blade from its cardboard sheath, and methodically clean the gunk off the bottom of his mouse. He’d then use a can of compressed air and some Clorox wipes and clean the rest of his desk before replacing his mouse in its proper position.

He made sure to arrive 12 minutes early to perform this ritual since custodial work was not in his job description and thus he considered it unethical to clean on company time.

He had an agreement with the custodial staff, they cleaned the office, but never touched his desk. The clip on the cap of the pen second in from the left was on the wrong side. Someone had moved one of his pens.

Upon closer inspection, he found that they had replaced the ink cartridge with purple ink. He began to spiral mentally, convincing himself that this would ruin his entire week. He thought back to his government mandated counseling sessions. These sessions were a condition of his employment at the FBI. He began to do some squared breathing. He enjoyed squared breathing. Counting to four on the inhale, pausing for a four count, exhaling for a four count, and, his favorite part, holding for a four count before repeating the cycle.

Inhale two three four. Hold. He didn’t have any tasks scheduled requiring that specific pen this morning. Exhale two three four. Hold. He could switch out the ink cartridge during lunch. Inhale two three four. Hold. There would be no actual disruption to his day. He exhaled.

He opened his eyes and opened Luis John’s file. No one was this good. John had to be doing some kind of insider trading or market manipulation. He never made a bad trade.

He came out of the blue working as some minor functionary in a local SEO company and suddenly began day trading in forex, penny stocks, a crypto coins. He had no background in finances, economics, math, or business.

His personal finances were a disaster. Abe had him tailed for the past few months. Not around the clock, but spot checks to keep tabs on him. Up until recently, he had lived alone in a studio apartment. He didn’t have a bed. He had owned a couch of the quality and age that suggested he picked it up for free off the side of the road somewhere. Every night he ate the same dinner of microwaved burritos and orange juice on this couch while he watched tv, then shifted from a sitting position to laying down and slept. He didn’t brush his teeth after dinner.

He owned no dishes. He drank the orange juice out of the container and drank water from the tap out of his cupped hands. Every 3 months he replenished his store of plastic forks, plastic knives, and paper plates in bulk.

Also, he was an idiot.

Three months ago, he showed up on Agent Cussler’s radar as a statistical anomaly making huge gains all over the market. He was put under surveillance and the agency has watched him quit his job and move from his studio apartment to a giant, paid for, house with multiple, paid for, vehicles in his multi-level garage. He seemed to have no ties to any known organized crime. He seemed to have to no inside knowledge of any of the trades he made. Nothing added up.

Agent Cussler couldn’t stand when things didn’t add up. It was worse than someone moving one of his pens.