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Chapter 45
GARY ALFORD, IRS
The sidewalks of Manhattan reminded New Yorkers that summer wasn’t in sight just yet. Halffrozen,
dirty dollops of sludge lined the city streets as wind whipped garbage down the
avenues like frigid tumbleweeds. On a mid-February morning in 2013, in front of 290 Broadway, just
off Duane Street, a line of men and women waited pensively to pass through a security checkpoint
into a massive beige tower. While the mere sight of the building was intimidating enough, the name
that hung on the gold placard on its east wall could—regardless of the temperature outside—send
shivers down anyone’s spine: INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE.
This was one of those rare government buildings in which someone who uses a calculator for a
living can wield more power than a person who carries a gun.
One of those calculator-carrying men was Gary Alford, who arrived for work at that beige tower
like clockwork each day. A large and forbidding man with wide shoulders and a square jaw, when
Gary stood still, he was completely motionless, like an anvil that had fallen to the floor and couldn’t
be moved. He was African American, and his dark complexion often seemed even darker against the
white of his shirt, which he always wore to work, along with a crisp suit and tie.
While Gary looked like a normal IRS employee in his business attire, he was far from ordinary
and had a number of eccentricities that made him stand out from all his coworkers.
One of the strangest of these idiosyncrasies was the bizarre fact that he read everything—literally
everything—three times. It didn’t matter what it was; if it had text on its pages, Gary would read it
once, then again, and then once more. When he received an e-mail, he would read it three times
before replying. He would read news articles three times. Books; text messages; research papers;
someone’s tax forms. He did this, he told people, to ensure that he remembered more information than
those around him. When he was younger, he had heard that the brain retains only a small percentage of
words when you read, so he reasoned that if he started consuming every snippet of text at least three
times, he would remember more.
Sure, it was repetitive, but most of the things Gary did were.
Each of his mornings was a replica of the one before. Gary would commute exactly the same
route to work, arriving at the IRS offices at exactly the same time and walking the same worn path
through the same marble lobby.