Bloodless (Aloysius Pendergast #20)(39)
Wellstone drained his wineglass. “Why don’t you go back to your sycophants and toadies? At least they will laugh at your puerile, stunted attempts at witticism. You remind me of that charming description of S. J. Perelman: Under a forehead roughly comparable to that of the Piltdown Man are visible a pair of tiny pig eyes, lit up alternately by greed and concupiscence.”
“Well…!” Betts said, inhaling, temporarily stunned but preparing his next sally.
“Well, well!” interrupted Wellstone, mimicking Betts’s pompous, theatrical voice. The wine had muzzled his internal traffic cop. “Speaking of wells, how is that well of yours? Find any corpses down there after all?”
The Well had been a pet project of Betts’s two years before. Traveling through Dutchess County, he’d heard about a farmhouse that belonged to a man who—according to local lore—had killed drifters and hitchhikers and thrown the bodies down his well. Betts decided the stories were true, even though the authorities didn’t think so and had never investigated. Betts leased the property and raised money for a special live television event in which the well was dug up to uncover the foul crimes. Nothing was found, Betts was embarrassed, and it set back his career a few years. Rumor was he never allowed the project to be mentioned in his presence.
“Watch it, Frankie boy,” Betts said. Wellstone could see, with a rising sense of triumph, that Betts was losing his cool.
“Now who needs to grow a pair?” Wellstone replied, imperially and drunkenly disdainful from the safety of his banquette. “You can’t sue me for what I say to your face, especially if it’s true. But don’t worry,” he went on in a sarcastic voice, encouraged even more by seeing Betts’s face darken with anger. “My critique of your Well project, which I shall shortly publish, is only three words long—brief enough for even your infantile attention span. Care to hear it?” And he leaned a little unsteadily toward the leather curve of the banquette. “Al. Capone’s. Vault.”
At this mention of the most ridiculous special ever to air on TV, Betts put his napkin aside and stood up. He moved slowly, however, and Wellstone felt in no physical danger—until the producer plucked the sauce boat from Wellstone’s table and poured warm crème anglaise all over the writer’s pants, shirt, and tie, paying particularly careful attention to the crotch, which he decorated in large, inelegant loops as Wellstone sat there, momentarily thunderstruck. But only momentarily: he launched himself over the edge of the banquette toward Betts, who skipped backward with a harsh guffaw. A musclebound crew member leapt up and deflected Wellstone’s charge with a shove of outstretched palms, and he half rolled, half tumbled back into his own banquette, falling across his table—which promptly collapsed. As Wellstone hit the floor, and before he could process the full indignity of what had just transpired, he became aware of two things: the unpleasant musky smell of the carpeting pressing against his nose, and the inverted plate of soufflé that now lay against the nape of his neck, its contents sliding down his back in a sticky warm stream.
26
C?LIFFORD MASOLINO, FORENSIC ACCOUNTANT for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, returned from lunch to find a new assignment waiting for him, delivered from Georgia by special courier, with an attached note written by one Special Agent A. X. L. Pendergast.
As Masolino took his seat in the windowless basement office, he wiped the grease off his hands from the gyro he’d just eaten. He used a paper towel, a roll of which he kept handy, because he was large and soft and had a tendency to sweat. Pendergast, Pendergast…the name was familiar, and he vaguely associated it with something unpleasant. The reason suddenly came to him as he opened the note: that crazy episode years ago at the New York Museum of Natural History, where a bunch of people got killed and, if memory served, there was a cover-up. A special agent named Pendergast was involved with that, and…and now Masolino recalled a spectral image of the man. Masolino had been a rookie forensic accountant in New York at the time, just getting started with the FBI, and he’d assisted in analyzing the museum’s accounts after the bloodbath, where they found significant fraud involving donated monies. It was Masolino’s first case and he had done well. Very well. Those were heady times indeed.
That was years ago. Pendergast’s note was written with indigo-colored ink in an elegant script:
Dear Mr. Masolino,
I hope this finds you well. On the enclosed hard drives are the records of thousands of financial transactions. Could you kindly examine them for anything unusual or illegal, including but not limited to insider trading, money laundering, and financial fraud?
This data came from the computers of a deceased hotel manager in Savannah named Ellerby, who traded equities, puts, and calls in his spare time. It appears he ultimately made a great deal of money doing it. We should like to know how.
Very truly yours,
S. A. Pendergast
The handwritten note was rather an eccentric touch—didn’t the fellow have a computer?—but the project itself was straightforward enough, nothing different from what Masolino had done a thousand times over the past decade.
He plugged in the first hard drive; examined it for viruses, malware, and rootkits; found it clean; and then copied the contents to his powerful, air-gapped Mac Pro, a version ordered to his own specifications, which included a 2.5GHz 28-core Intel processor, 1.5 terabytes of RAM, two Radeon Pro Vega II Duo graphics cards, 4 terabytes of SSD storage, and an Afterburner card. The monster was brand-new and had cost the FBI more than fifty grand—a sign of his value to the organization.