"He hung up. So I forgot about it till the next morning."
"And that's when you got these?" Higgins said pointing at the stack of computer printouts in front of Mason. "How were they delivered?"
"By messenger. No receipt, nothing. Just my name and the pa- per's." Mason showed Higgins the envelop in which the files came.
"Then you read them?"
"Well not all of them, but enough." Scott glanced at his editor.
"That's when I let Doug know what I had."
"And what did he say?" Higgins was keeping furious notes to back up the tape recording.
"'Holy shit', as I remember." Everyone laughed. Ice breakers, good for the soul, thought Mason. People are too uptight. Higgins indicated that Scott should continue.
"Then he said 'we gotta go slow on this one,' then he whistled and Holy Shat some more." Once the giggles died down, Mason got serious. "I borrowed a bean counter from the basement, told him I'd put his name in the paper if anything came of it, and I picked his brain. Ran through the numbers on the printouts, and ran through them again. I really worked that poor guy, but that's the price of fame. By the next morning we knew that there were two sets of books on First State." Mason turned a couple pages in his files.
"It appears," Scott said remembering that he was selling the importance of the story to legal and the publisher, "that a substantial portion of the bank's assets are located in numbered bank accounts all over the world." Scott said with finality.
Higgins interrupted here. "So what's wrong with that?" he chal- lenged.