He grinned at me.

"You're very strange," I said.

"I used to think that was a compliment," he said. And his pleasure vanished.

It was at that moment that I thought there might be a bit more to Brian. Yes, he was weird. Yes, he barely belonged to this world. But a part of him knew all too well that he was odd, and he suffered from it.

Discovering the tiny interstices of the complex banking network that no one else thought much about.

[...] The only difference was that Brian wanted to smuggle money itself, and he had no compunctions about it. On the contrary, he reveled in the very idea, turned it over and over in his mind, found in it an entire life philosophy. And there he sat on my sofa, drinking my tea, explaining, completely without apology, how he was going to "arbitrage" the United States legal code so that he could build himself a banking system that afforded complete privacy for wealth. A system that, incidentally, made the world safe for crooks, thieves, money launderers, and any average citizen who should just not feel like paying his taxes - a side effect of freedom, he said, the price of liberty, can't be helped.