"Explain what?" Smith said.
The agents gasped. Brull pivoted on his lifts. He found himself looking into the weakly lit interior of the concrete vault.
At the rear stood a line of mainframes, their tape reels still. On either side stood the smaller WORM array server systems.
But there was no gold. Not a single ingot.
Big Dick Brull whirled on Harold Smith. "Where's the damn gold I was told about?" he roared.
Smith met Brull's glare with a frosty one of his own and said nothing.
Brull turned on his agents. They flinched. "Where's the gold you jerks promised me? I was promised gold. Stacks of bullion. Where's the damn gold?"
Agent Phelps mustered up an answer. "We don't know, Mr. Brull. It was here less than an hour ago."
"You promised me a mountain of motherfucking gold."
"That's what we found. It was stacked to the ceiling. There must have been a ton of gold."
"Two tons," another agent chimed in helpfully.
"You don't move a ton of fucking gold with a fucking forklift," Brull howled. "You move it with a crane and a crew of men and a truck to load it on. A big truck. Who took my fucking gold?"
"Obviously there is no gold," said Harold W Smith calmly.
Fists clenched, Big Dick Brull strode up to Harold Smith and tried to tower over him. He came up in his tiptoes, stretched his neck out of his starched shirt collar, and the veins in his face and throat bulged big and blue while the whites of his eyes seemed to detonate with bursting blood vessels. He looked like a boil about to pop under pressure.
"Don't lie to me, you smug tight-ass!" he screamed.
"As you can plainly see, there was no gold in this vault."
"Say that again, I dare you."
"I said," insisted Harold Smith in a brittle but restrained tone of voice, "there is no gold in this vault. Not today, not yesterday, not ever. Folcroft is a private hospital. And I deeply resent the implication that it is a center for illegal activity."
The IRS agents watched with stunned expressions as Harold Smith stood his ground. A glint of admiration came into their eyes. They had never seen anyone stand up to their boss and hold his own. Most people were reduced to a heap of quivering jelly under the hard radiation of Big Dick Brull's personality.
"You're a damn liar." Not taking his eyes off Smith's stiff face, Brull spoke out of the side of his mouth. "How much gold would you say?"
"Easily a couple million dollars," Phelps said.
"Fine. Excellent. Assuming two million, stored here for a minimum of five years, no taxes reported or paid on it, we have 1.4 million dollars in taxes due, including interest and penalties."
"Your math is off," said Smith. "It would be 1.3 million."
"Then you admit to the gold?"
"No. And you have to produce gold in order to levy taxes on it."
"I'll have sworn depositions from these fine, upstanding IRS agents that they saw the gold."
"They also saw a giant butterfly dismember three DEA agents," Smith retorted.
"We won't mention that part," Brull said quickly.
"But I will be sure to bring it up in tax court," said Smith.
Big Dick Brull's ankles began to tremble with the strain of holding his bantam body off the concrete. He heightened the fury of his glare to its maximum intensity. Harold Smith met it with a cool confidence that would have chilled a polar bear to the bone.
It was a standoff, pure and simple. Gradually Big Dick Brull lowered himself back to his normal height.
"Explain these computers."
"Folcroft used to be a sociological research center. The computers are left over from those days."
"Bullshit! Those are IDC mainframes. You don't mothball expensive equipment like that! You use it or you sell it."
"You have your answer."
"No, I don't have my fucking answer. I don't have anything near an answer. You're dirty, Smith. This place is dirty." Brull shook a blunt finger into Smith's unflinching face. "I don't know what kind of dirt, but I'm going to find it, sweep it up and make you eat it. That's a promise."
"Good luck," said Smith without emotion.
"You know what I can do to you?"
"You have already done it," Smith said bitterly. "You barged in to my place of work, disrupted my staff, threatened some, fired others and you are preparing to deinstitutionalize patients you know nothing about."
"Folcroft belongs to the service. And your ass belongs to the service. Until we get to the bottom of this, you're confined to this building under administrative detention."
"I don't believe you have the legal authority to do that."
"I have the power to toss your scrawny ass in the federal pen at Danbury if you dare set foot off these grounds."
"Then I remain under house arrest?"
"You're goddamn right. You're going to run this place under my direct supervision. Let's see how long it takes for Folcroft's true nature to reveal itself."
"I accept your challenge," said Harold W Smith thinly.
As they marched him up the stairs, they heard a distant drumming.
Doom doom doom doom...
"What's that?" Big Dick Brull demanded.
"We don't know," said Agent Phelps. "But we've been hearing it off and on since we took over."