Read Online The Rescue Artist by Edward Dolnick - Free Book Online Page A

commanding officers, trusted Ellis as one of their own.
    A veteran of countless briefings, Ellis is clear and well-organized. He speaks in numbered points, as if reading from an outline, and he likes to sort out logistical tangles. Ellis explained The Scream plan. The Getty gulped hard but heard him out.
    In Hill’s view, it was all a fine joke. “They were a bit tight-arsed at first,” Ellis reported. “They made clear that they wouldn’t do this for just anybody. They didn’t want the Des Moines, Iowa, sheriff’s department ringing them up to say, ‘Can you give us a hand here?’ But in the end they cooperated brilliantly.”
    Ellis had brought a photo of Charley Hill to California with him, along with Charley’s birth date and other background information. If the Getty was going to lend its cover to this operation, Hill would need a new identity.
    In short order, Charley Hill had vanished, and one Christopher Charles Roberts had arisen to take his place. * Most of the trappings were routine. Hill was provided with an American Express card in Roberts’s name, a Getty Museum employee ID with his photo, and, for flashing at the appropriate moments, business cards and personalized stationery. A second layer of preparation was more defensive in nature. The Getty’s internal records—notably the payroll files for the past several years—had to be doctored in case anyone began snooping into Christopher Roberts’s bona fides.
    The risk wasn’t so much that a suspicious crook might phone the Getty and learn anything useful. Even in ordinary circumstances, most institutions clam up when strangers ask questions about their employees. “But criminals will always check out the people they’re dealing with,” says Ellis, “and you have to be prepared for them to pay somebody within the institution to get them the information they want.”
    That possibility raised another danger. What if someone on the crooks’ payroll began looking for Getty employees who knew Roberts? How to explain that no one did? To ward off such trouble down the road, the Getty concocted in-house records that listed Roberts as a roving scout permanently assigned to Europe, and working directly (and exclusively) for the director.
    Unless you were in the very top tier of management at the Getty, Hill saw delightedly, you couldn’t counter the argument that he was anything other than a proper employee. It was that good. Hill gave his new credentials an enthusiastic thumbs-up. “Everything looks perfectly pukka … kosher.”
    The translation of English slang into American was almost instantaneous, unusual only in that Hill spoke both idioms aloud. Usually Hill shifted on the fly, seamlessly denouncing some hapless twit as an “asshole” or an “arsehole” depending on whether his listeners were Americans or Brits. (Bilingual cursing was especially demanding, since so often it came in the heat of the moment. Hill’s time in the Army, when he had worked on sounding “like a redneck from Fayetteville, North Carolina,” had given him good practice.)
    Hill is bilingual only in American English and British English, but within those narrow confines he is masterful. (On rare occasions he will venture as far afield as Canada. For an undercover job in the Czech Republic, Hill spent hours practicing broad vowel sounds so that he would sound authentically Canadian. Almost certainly this detail would be lost on the mobsters he was dealing with, but it reflected craftsmanship and professional pride, akin to a carpenter’s taking pains to align all the slots in his screwheads in parallel.)
    Hill chose the name “Christopher Charles Roberts” as a mnemonic—the r sounds served as a reminder to himself to enunciate r’s whenever he came to them, as Americans do, rather than to swallow them English-style. The use of his own name as a middle name was a precaution; with some fast talking, Hill might be able to wriggle out of trouble if by bad fortune