Chapter 8: The Accountant - free audiobook
What happens when time starts breaking down?
As always, the full text of the chapter is read and shown in the video above. If you'd like to read the full text, feel free to join the paid subscription tier.
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.
Agent Cussler didn’t trust that the agents staking out his home would see what he would see. Things just didn’t stand out to other people like they did to Abe Cussler. He had watched agents looking at the same thing he was with zero reaction. Variables stood out to him like a stiff tag inside the waistband of your underwear. Variables poked, scratched, and irritated him. He would see what the other agents were missing. So he decided to put in a request to go under cover and infiltrate Luis John’s inner circle.
The first time Agent Cussler went under cover, he was surprised to find how much he didn’t hate it. He found a certain freedom in playing the role of another person. It was exhausting being himself. He knew he processed information differently than his coworkers.
He had hundreds of little rules that he had built for himself so he could interact with the world at large. He supposed that everyone had these kinds of rules: when to do something, when not to, what to say, what not to… But he also had a distinct impression that other people’s rules came intuitively to them. Everyone seemed to instinctively know what behaviors, words, facial expressions, and mannerisms were appropriate in every situation. They could “read the room,” something that he was told to do often growing up.
His rules were hard won. Shame and embarrassment were his teachers. He now knew not to laugh too loudly at jokes told at funerals because everyone around him had instinctively known that funerals were somber occasions and quietly chuckled at a joke while he laughed loudly. It was a confusing situation because the joke followed a similar structure to other successful jokes he had observed. These other jokes had elicited much louder laughter than this funeral joke. He started to develop a subset of rules about laughing at jokes that involved the setting in which they were told. He hated rules that were too specific, but he hadn’t worked out all the variables yet. There seemed to be some correlation with the appropriate volume of laughter and intoxication, familiarity, group size, ambient noise, the quality of the napkins on the table, and attractiveness.
That last one had too many variables to really get his head around. It was also a bit of a paradox because women tended to laugh more around men with traditionally recognized attractive traits and/or who displayed visible signals of wealth, but he had observed that less attractive people could use humor to appear more attractive. Wealthy men being treated as if they were funny and poor men using humor to be treated as if they were wealthy caused an unsolvable loop in the equation. He didn’t understand all the variables.
He assumed that humor and sexual attraction had a different set of perimeters at funerals, so for the time being he would have to rely on yet another specific situational rule that nothing louder than a quiet chuckle was appropriate at funerals. This rule was immediately noted during the embarrassment of everyone in the room turning to look directly at him after the first joke in the Eulogy.
Funerals are strange. In no way do corpses look peaceful or like they are sleeping and yet there seems to be an expectation to verbally make those statements in the presence of a corpse at a funeral. People do not make those statements in the presence of a corpse at a crime scene.
There are so many situational rules.
But when Cussler was undercover he was playing the part of someone else, someone who instinctively knew how to read the room; someone with a completely instinctive set of rules. Undercover Cussler did very well socially. Undercover Cussler wore different clothes, had different mannerisms, and used the nearest available pen haphazardly without caring what color the ink was.
Now you might ask at this point why Agent Cussler didn’t just pretend that he was undercover all the time to completely eliminate all of the social awkwardness in his life. The answer is simple: there was no process to be granted permission to be undercover at his desk or in the lunch room, but there are forms and permissions to be filled out and granted to go undercover in the field.
So he was himself, Agent Cussler in his apartment and at his desk, but was occasionally granted permission to be Undercover Cussler in the field if a case warranted it.
This case warranted it. He literally had a court-approved warrant.
He took a deep breath as his eye twitched a little when he looked at the compromised purple ink pen and left his office to request an undercover assignment.