Magdalene (58 page)

“Does it connect up to Jep Industries in any
way?”

“No, but we can get him on this, and then
maybe he’ll cough up the J.I. information. It’ll take a while, a
year, maybe more, for this to spin out. We have to wait and watch,
but now that Cassie’s team and I know what we’re looking for, it’ll
be easy.”

Sebastian shook his head as he plopped food
onto his plate. “Wish we’d had that
before
today. So
whatever happened with Vorcester & Minden?”

“I shut it down,” I said. “They were upside
down on their annuities. The guy who called wanted a cash infusion
and an investment manager.”

Eilis snorted. “Oh, that’s rich.”

“I laughed in his face and sent him packing.
Then one of my analysts comes to me and points out that every
single contract that Agent 4360923 wrote was bad. You know, you
have a lot of hits and misses, but nobody comes up all winners or
all losers. I thought Agent 4360923 was just a catchall for bad
contracts, because there were a bunch of different names attached
to that number. When my people couldn’t track down any of the
Agents 4360923, I sent it over to Nigel.”

“So I’m looking at this list of names for
this agent,” Nigel continued. “Nothing’s gelling. One of my
analysts walks in to ask me something— She happens to look down and
sees this weird—very precise mathematical—pattern of letters in the
names, with a high ratio of G’s and S’s.” He smirked. “It’s not
every fund manager who has an ex-NSA cryptographer on staff.”

Sebastian chuckled.

“She read the code easily enough, but that
still didn’t tell us who these people were. Now, I could buy that
there’s a fake agent number to throw all your department’s bad
contracts in. And I could buy that a whole department’s doing this.
I could even buy that an entire department is colluding to defraud
the company, which is what Cassie thought was happening with
Vorcester & Minden. What I
can’t
buy is that an entire
department that’s burying its bad contracts would all be able to
use the same code without making an error.”

“Well, sure,” Sebastian said. “You’d have
one guy writing the code and making the master list of names.”

“Not for four years,” Nigel returned.
“Nobody would be able to keep a team like that together very long
without infighting, sabotage—” He shrugged. “Plain ol’ mistakes,
like somebody using a name out of order. No, this is flawless all
the way through.”

“Which means,” Knox rumbled, “that there’s
only one thief, he’s using one agent number because he won’t get
paid otherwise, but in case anybody looks at the contracts, it
looks like a bunch of different people are writing them—
and
he can keep track of his contracts at a glance.”

“Right,” Nigel said. “We knew this, but we
still couldn’t figure out who he was.”

“Until,” I said, “I really looked at the
list of names my friend gave me.”

“And they,” Nigel said, “all match up to the
contracts Agent 4360923 wrote.”

“Explaining the high ratio of G’s and S’s,”
Knox concluded.

“But how would you do that?” Sebastian asked
Knox. “You run the numbers, you see agent number whatever with a
bunch of names attached to it, they’re all bad contracts, and you
know you’ve got a problem.”

“A lot of older companies like that run two,
three accounting programs, maybe even one for each department they
have,” Knox replied. “Sometimes they have separate databases for
commission payments and contract analysis. Usually, they’re on
incompatible operating systems and have never been consolidated. So
you’ve got your contract data on, say, XP, your accounting on an
old Unix system in the basement. Maybe somebody else is on a Mac.
The sales guys bring spreadsheets to sales meetings and talk names,
who’s out in the field really cooking, whatever. Get rid of the bad
performers, right? The payroll people don’t get invited to those
meetings and even if they did, they only know agent number
whatever. Ne’er the twain shall meet. Payroll doesn’t know shit
about who’s who or what they’re doing; they only know to cut
commission checks to agent number whatever. Sales knows it has a
couple of bad contracts written by this guy or that guy, no big.
Shit happens. You might never notice that all these guys have the
same agent number because that’s not what you’re sorting for.
Payroll will never have the opportunity to make the connection. And
if you have a high turnover in the sales department, shit falls
through the cracks because no one’s there long enough to start
making connections.”

“So Payroll’s already paid agent whatever
his commissions,” Sebastian murmured.

“Right. And the customer’s still paying,
too, but they’re making the checks out to Agent 4360923, not
feeling cheated, because it just looks like bad luck, but they
still feel compelled to honor the contracts they signed.” Knox
looked at Nigel. “Can you get me that stuff?”

Nigel nodded. “As we speak, it’s all being
scanned and uploaded to my servers. It’ll take a good week, but you
are free to work on it from your end. For the moment, at least,” he
continued, “we can connect him to the ones with the names Cassie’s
friend gave us, and they’re the ones we can use to establish his
pattern of fraud.”

“If nothing else,” Knox said, “we can
proceed with the assumption that he was defrauding Vorcester &
Minden.”

“I have my people on him,” I said, anger
swelling up in me. “Every detail of that asshole’s life will be
mine and I’m going to bury him the way I buried Rivington.”

Gordon sighed. In sorrow or gratitude, I
couldn’t tell.

“The whole rabbit trail is freaky,” Justice
mumbled.

“Exactly,” Nigel said. “I couldn’t recreate
it in a million years. One thing led to another that led to
another, put it all together. We know he did it, but still can’t
figure out how. Then two inconsequential details blow it open for
us. We got him. It’s flimsy, but it’s there.” He paused. “I’m
tempted to call it divine intervention, but that would be a crass
thing to say under the circumstances.”

Justice huffed, but she was the only one to
do so and I looked at Sebastian to see how he took this
supernatural mumbo jumbo. He shocked me by
not
pointing or
mocking. He raised a brow at me. “What, can’t a guy have a religion
around here other than Mormon or Catholic Lite?”

“You
have
one?”

“Pagan.”

I stared at him, speechless, but Nigel
started to laugh.

“So you think...?”

“I don’t believe in coincidence, Cassie,” he
said, completely sober. “I believe in a mated pair of deities and I
don’t think they keep their noses out of our business. What I am
not
is a Christian.”

“Clarify,” Nigel said, curious now.

“Okay,” Sebastian returned as if rising to a
challenge. “Christian myth posits that there is a creator deity.
Made us all in his image. We’re his
children
. And he loves
us. Sends us all out to learn and grow. He says, ‘Be good, kids!’
but isn’t really very specific on how to do that. Now we all know
that the only way to learn is to fail. But then we
do
—fail—and he doesn’t like it. Can’t stand sin in his
presence. Won’t let us back in the house. For anybody to go home to
him after their turn on Earth is done, they have to be sinless.
Think about it. That’s a helluva position to be in, isn’t it? So,
okay, no problem. He’ll just send a half-man/half-god savior as a
sacrifice for all mankind’s failures so he can have all his little
kiddies back in the fold.” He looked at Nigel. “We clear on
that?”

“Right.”

“I think that’s bullshit.” Sebastian pointed
his fork at me. “Would you send your kids out into the world with
no training, no guidance, no nothing, tell them to be perfect or
they can’t come home again, and oh by the way, good luck with that
because they have no way in hell of doing what you told them to
do?”

The clock in the kitchen ticked.

“And then you provide a way for them to come
home, but it means your oldest child has to submit to unimaginable
suffering? Think about it: Every time you sin—which, by definition,
is unavoidable—you are responsible for the torture and murder of an
innocent
man.”

Both Knox and Giselle flinched.

“The idea of a creator deity, who creates
beings in his image and calls his children, who then turns around
and becomes that much of a sociopathic asshole, is not my idea of a
loving parent. I’ll say this for Mormon doctrine,” Taight continued
blithely between bites. “There is no hell, per se. The goal is
proactive—to become a god. It’s not reactive, which is to escape a
burning lake of fire, like the rest of Christianity. So no, you
probably won’t be qualified to become a god, but no matter what you
do, you’ll end up with a decent eternity.”

I looked around the table to see if any of
Sebastian’s family would counter this in some way. Giselle
sighed.

“This is a perennial discussion,” she
murmured. “He doesn’t believe that ultimate justice for what we do
here can truly be served by one pure blood sacrifice, that
everybody should atone for his own sins. I—” She cocked her head
toward Knox and patted Morgan’s arm. “—we. We do. Christ’s
atonement satisfies justice and grants us mercy at the same
time.”

“How?” Nigel asked.

Giselle started to explain, but Morgan cut
her off. “I’m not interested in getting into this tonight.”

There was an awkward silence as each faction
struggled to cool off a bit. Clearly the topic was a bone of
contention in the family, and I marveled at this crack in the
Dunhams’ philosophical unity.

“I started thinking about this on my
mission,” Sebastian said when Nigel cleared his throat and gestured
for him to continue. “About how I create art. I wasn’t born being
able to paint
Wild, Wild West
or
Rape of a Virgin
or
Goddess and Her Lover
or
Morning in Bed
, or any of
the other pieces that hang in museums. Yeah, I had talent, but it
took years of training under dozens of masters and years more of
perfecting technique. But then I got good, more confident in my
skill and vision.

“So at that level of skill, I wondered how
much I’d have to hate a piece I’d created to just toss it. Or let
somebody else
fix
it for me. I couldn’t reconcile it. Did
that mean that the god I worshipped hated some of us and loved
others of us, even though he created us all? Did he like having his
work
fixed
by somebody else? Or were we just practice?
Prototypes? I
have
thrown out practice pieces. I
have
had my work fixed by my instructors. Maybe I can accept that we’re
prototypes, practice, for a being who’s learning how to be a
god.”

I looked down at my wedding ring, the color
wash around it, orange, as always, but iridescent if I turned it
just right and a rich matte if I turned it another way. It looked
almost like metallic paint, but it was the metal itself, precisely,
nanoscopically chiseled for that effect. Sebastian had created this
and I couldn’t fathom how long it must have taken him to do it, how
many practice pieces he must have done.

He nodded as if he knew the direction of my
thoughts, then continued. “I’ve been pagan a long time and never
really thought past my art, but then I had kids. And I look at our
kids—my oldest, Alex, he’s a firecracker—and I think, ‘Eilis and I
made
that,’ because, you know, it took
both
of us
working together. Here’re these little beasts whose bodies function
the same way ours do and who look an awful lot like us— So they’re
in our image. But they’re not practice, like the hundreds of
castings we did for your ring. They can’t be.

“We’d have to really hate our kids—what we
made—to set up such a catch-22 straight out of the gate and if we
did that, then why have ’em to begin with? Are they just toys we
brought into the world to amuse ourselves?

“Or—Better!—dogs. Breed ’em, starve ’em,
poke at ’em, get ’em riled up, and set ’em loose on each other for
our own personal entertainment? And then require your most beloved
child to endure an agonizing death to redeem them? From what? Our
condemnation when they act like the fighting dogs we’ve trained
them to be? Would
you
worship Michael Vick?”

“Oh,
no
,” Gordon breathed.

“That’s what I thought, too. I’m not going
to worship some sadistic motherfucker like that. I worship a pair
of creator deities who love what they created, set us here to
learn, give us as much guidance and help as they think wise, will
welcome us back when we’re done here no matter what we learned or
didn’t, then judge us according to our deeds and mete out justice
and/or mercy accordingly. No sacrifice necessary and no hoops to
jump through.

“Jesus Christ? Prophet, philosopher, wise
man. Just like Mohammed, Buddha, and the Dalai Lama.” He shot a
glare at his cousins. “
Not
a blood sacrifice.” Then he
cocked an eyebrow at me. “And if you’ve never heard of Jesus
because you live in some third-world backwater, you’re not going to
go to a burning lake of fire for a circumstance of your birth.”

I blinked.

“Oh, it’s all bullshit,” Justice muttered.
“I hate it when they do this.”

Sebastian snorted. “And Little Miss Atheist
over there can’t stomach Rand. She’s as fucked up as is the rest of
us are.”

“It gives her and Knox an excuse to argue
when they don’t have anything else to fight about,” Eilis murmured,
shooting an affectionate smile at Justice. “Point and counterpoint.
Mutual mental masturbation leading straight to the bedroom, and
even better if they’ve gone at it across the internet all day.”

Justice laughed, and it even pulled a
chuckle out of Knox.

I sent Clarissa and Trevor out to get
liquor, as I’d drunk my only bottle of wine Tuesday night waiting
for state troopers to come to the door and tell me Mitch had
crashed his car.