A former TraveLodge gone private, the single-story motel had been given a fresh coat of paint, a sickly beige that drew a strange contrast with the trademark blue-and-white “sleepy bear” still standing vigil above the lobby entrance. The billboard beside the bear proclaimed the place the Flamingo Inn, though the old TraveLodge insignia could be seen peeking out from beneath the new name, which somebody had painted in pink with a sweeping cursive flourish. The bear, chipped and fading, still wore his blue pajamas and nightcap out front.
With the help of her guide, Laramie had procured two adjoining rooms as an office, opening the door between to connect them. In one of the rooms they moved all the furniture except one table against a wall, then added some folding seats and the armchair they’d discovered in a closet. Toss in a dry-erase board retrieved from LaBelle’s only office-supplies store, and they had themselves a poor man’s war room.
Wally Knowles wore a black linen suit, black loafers, and Ray-Bans. He sat on the bed with his legs crossed, his trademark black hat on the bed beside him. Dennis Cole, who’d chosen one of the folding chairs, came in jeans, a green polo shirt, and a seersucker blazer. Laramie’s guide sat just out of sight in the adjoining room doing something on a laptop. She knew he would soon be leaving to retrieve their third recruit of four from the airport-a tenured professor of political science at Northwestern University named Eddie Rothgeb.
Rothgeb was the professor with whom Laramie had worked on her two independent study projects-as well as a few other things maybe she shouldn’t have. Bringing him to the table wasn’t exactly a move that put her squarely in the comfort zone, but he was the best at what he did and his was an expertise she could use right now.
Laramie had also been given the green light to pay Cooper-recruit number four, as her guide had called him upon relaying the message from Ebbers, or whoever it was who made such decisions. There had been no questions asked and no negotiating: twenty million bucks, approved with little or no red tape, for a single man. She decided she’d have to ponder the meaning of that later, but one thing it meant was that somebody-CIA, NSA, DIA, FBI, DEA-whoever-was taking the antics of Benjamin Achar very seriously.
Meaning that the guests of my little convention here at the Flamingo Inn aren’t exactly gathered to suck down piña coladas by the pool.
Overnight, each had been given an abridged version of the terror book, inclusive of some of Laramie’s conclusions, which Knowles and Cole had read in the privacy of their respective rooms at the inn. Rothgeb, she mused, should be listening to his version right now.
Laramie stopped fiddling with the dry-erase marker she’d been holding.
“So,” she said.
Cole raised his eyebrows and dropped them. Laramie thought of the way she remembered Tom Selleck doing this on reruns of Magnum, P.I., except that she remembered Magnum being a lot better-looking than Cole.
“You might have wondered initially why you were summoned here,” Laramie said. “Or why you were asked to read the package of documents with no explanation or preamble. That was intentional. The document you read last night is this incident’s version of a ‘terror book,’ aka murder book, as it is usually known in domestic homicide cases. We didn’t explain it in advance because we wanted you to form your own impressions. To give weight where you chose to give weight, to consider circumstances the way you naturally would upon reading the document.”
She grabbed hold of the dry-erase marker again, popped off the top and tacked it back on again with her forefinger and thumb. She’d rehearsed parts of this speech but had ultimately decided to more or less go with the flow.
“You’ve each volunteered your services in defense of the country. You’ve been screened for suitability and liability and, for now at least, you’ve passed. Congratulations. You now work for me. I work for someone else. The man in the other room keeps an eye on all of us; he also gets us what we need. There will be another member of the team arriving here shortly.”
To the extent the $20 million fee would buy his time, Laramie had decided to use Cooper in the way you were supposed to use field operatives-secretly. She wasn’t yet sure how they’d be putting him to use, and until she’d figured that part out, she wasn’t planning on telling the other members of the team about his involvement.
“Operating alone, in whatever degree of secrecy one finds at the Flamingo Inn, here is what you will now be asked to do,” she said. “Despite the indirect references to the contrary in the terror book, we are operating under the assumption Benjamin Achar was not acting alone. We are assuming that five, or ten, or twenty or more fellow deep cover operatives are living within our borders under assumed identities, armed with an equivalent stash of Marburg-2 filovirus and the wherewithal to disperse it over a much wider zone than Achar succeeded in reaching.”
There came no expression from Knowles, whose sunglasses remained planted on the bridge of his nose, the man a poker player.
“I’ll anticipate some of your questions because we don’t have time for process particulars. We’ll work out of this motel for now. Food and laundry services will be provided. There are rules, but we’ll get into that later. You are now, but only temporarily, members of a miniscule, clandestine counterterror unit. That oversimplifies it, but it’s the closest and best explanation. We have support personnel who will perform back-room investigative work-research, fingerprint matching, forensics and other technical analysis, if needed. There is an operative available to us for investigative work, surveillance, or certain preemptive acts as needed. You could also look at it this way: you have just joined a counterterrorism video game already in progress-or board game, if that helps the translation for any of you as old-fashioned as me-except that it is real. Our combined role in the ‘game’ is simple: we use the clues, tools, and ingenuity available to us to identify and stop Benjamin Achar’s fellow sleepers and the individual or organization who sent them.”
Knowles cleared his throat and Laramie inclined her chin in his direction.
“The difference between the definition of ‘counterterror,’” he said, “and ‘antiterror’ centers around proactive measures designed to preemptively combat the terrorist threat-you’re proactive in ‘counterterror,’ reactive in ‘antiterror.’ I assume your choice of words reflects and considers this fact. Do we have a commando team in this tool kit of ours?”
Cole frowned and made a sighing sound.
Laramie said, “If you’re asking me whether part of our assignment is to kill the enemy, I’m not entirely clear on that. Our actions may lead to that, however, so if you have any problem-”
“No problem here,” Knowles interrupted.
Laramie nodded. When Knowles passed on following up with more questions, Laramie gestured with the dry-erase marker, first toward Knowles, then Cole.
“It is anticipated that you, Mr. Knowles, may function as the chief scenario builder, and that you, Detective Cole, would contribute primarily as an investigator. The third member of the team is a reasonably well-known diplomacy and foreign affairs professor who has consulted with the federal government from time to time. He will assist us in narrowing the list of likely nations, or people, who might have sent the sleepers here. Despite this general orientation, there are no titles, there exists no hierarchy besides my leadership, and there are no lines dividing your roles.”
She set the marker lengthwise on the table like a tower and took a sip from the latest in a long line of bad cups of coffee. For once, she didn’t feel much need for the caffeine. She swallowed the sip and replaced the coffee on the table beside the marker.
“Unless you convince me otherwise,” she said, “we will be operating under the theory that Benjamin Achar did not make a mistake in blowing himself up or dispersing the amount of pathogen he did. According to what his wife revealed to me-which you would not have seen in the terror book-Achar told her to be prepared to hide for ‘no less than seven days’ if anything happened while she was out of town with their son. He knew he was going to do what he did when he did it, and I believe he also knew how much filo serum it would take to do some damage but not cause a plague.”
“Used his flare gun,” Cole said gruffly.
Laramie couldn’t quite hear.
“Sorry?”
“He used his flare gun. Fired one into the sky for us to see. Saying, ‘Look what’s about to happen if you don’t do anything about it.’ So we can do something about the others. That’s the way I read it too.”
“Really,” Knowles said. His tone was laced with sarcasm-indicating very clearly he believed Cole was playing the role of teacher’s pet, adjusting his theory to get some extra credit. Laramie saw Cole steer a challenging look at the author. Thinking she was already being made to feel like a day care supervisor, Laramie addressed Cole.
“Then I suppose you’d also agree,” she said, “that if the whole explosion was a flare gun, he probably left some firecrackers lying around too. Or bread crumbs. Depending on the analogy.”
“Yes,” Cole said, holding his evil eye with Knowles.
“Second question,” Knowles said. Loudly.
“Second answer,” Laramie said. “Maybe.”
Knowles almost appeared to Laramie to have smirked, but if he had, the movement of the straight line that was his mouth vanished as quickly as it had come.
“How much do you know about the lies in the media?” he said.
Laramie waited, considering her answer.
“Not much,” she said. “Why do you ask.”
“I don’t have a lot of faith in your average reporter,” the author said, “but maybe you can help me here. I study the news like religion, and I can tell you with assurance that there has not been one single leak of the facts as they’ve been shown to us in the ‘terror book.’ I find this an unlikely if not impossible set of circumstances. Except, that is, if the so-called crisis you’ve dropped us into is nothing more than an exercise.”
Laramie almost smiled at the very serious Wally Knowles.
“I’ll agree, it does seem unlikely,” she said. “My introduction to this incident came six days ago in almost exactly the same way you’re getting this intro now. Is it an exercise? Same question I asked. Answer: it could be. I don’t know. I no longer think so, but you’ll have to judge for yourself.”
“I always do,” he said.
Cole pulled his glare away from Knowles.
“How about you?” Laramie said to Cole. “Any questions? Doubts? Challenges?”
“None,” the cop said.
“If he has none,” Knowles said, “I’m happy to move things along. There is no evidence-paper, photo, or image-of Achar’s existence before January 1995?”
She gave his question, and her answer, some thought.
“No,” she said, “none we’ve got.”
“Idea, then,” he said. “We’ll need five or ten photographs of Achar to do what I’m thinking-ideally, spaced out over the past ten years, so we get shots taken of him at various ages. We’d also need a computer with high-speed access, and permission from whoever has kept the lies intact to hook into my home system.”
Laramie waited to see whether her guide would appear in the doorway between rooms and acknowledge Knowles’s requests. He didn’t.
“An image search?” she said.
“Correct. Two companies and a series of universities have been compiling a national image database along with an accompanying search technology. The database includes video. I’m in possession of the beta version of the search engine, but searches can only be conducted by computers with Internet-2 access, which I have, but only at home. The only images that will show up are those that have been archived into the national database, of course. But ours is the age of the camera, and that was true eleven years ago too.”
“Meaning he could have been photographed, or videotaped, by somebody, somewhere, in his prior identity,” Laramie said.
“Yes. The search engine is rudimentary and it’s been claimed that three percent of the world’s images have been digitally archived to date. My guess? It’s actually far under one percent. But worth a search anyway.”
“Assuming,” Laramie said, “all this is true-not an exercise.”
“Yes. Assuming that. But either way, it’s a good idea.”
One the task force hadn’t thought of, Laramie thought. At least not that they revealed to me.
“One thing people do to you when you’re a cop,” Cole said from his chair, “especially when you’re working a homicide, is lie.”
Laramie, day care instructor that she was, rotated her attention to the cop.
“Mostly people do it at first,” he went on, “then give in after a while. Eventually, they all want to confess-in one way or another.”
He seemed to leave it at that, Laramie getting the idea he didn’t intend to go on.
Knowles spoke, brimming with sarcasm again.
“And?”
Cole shrugged.
“I think it happens because everybody’s carrying secrets around,” he said, “and in their everyday lives they’ve grown used to keeping them stashed, like cash under the mattress. In a murder investigation, we’re basically turning lives upside down and shaking, so we can see what falls out. At first, people try to hold on to their secrets at all costs. I’m talking the stupid ones-totally unrelated to the murder most of the time. Like how many times a guy who’s married says he’s talked to a girl he likes. But once you call their bluff and break through the first layer, they tend to get suddenly comfortable, and start confessing everything they’ve ever lied about. Like they’d paid for the interview by the hour. Like all along they had to get it out.”
Laramie waited for more, but Cole appeared to have completed his train of thought. Knowles-strangely, Laramie thought-began nodding with some enthusiasm.
“You’re saying Achar didn’t appear to reveal who he was, but that maybe he did,” he said. “To somebody.”
Cole nodded without looking over at Knowles.
“Guy’s whole life was a lie. He had to want to tell at least some of it to somebody. Even if he didn’t plan to leave any bread crumbs besides the so-called suicide mistake, chances are he left some anyway. And if we’re right about the flare-gun theory, he probably tried more than one way to tell us about what he was up to. I’d like to get my eyes on all the videotape you have on him too, get a look at the man in life-but where I’ll be able to do my best work is to conduct, or re-conduct, all relevant interviews myself.”
Laramie said, “You mean anybody interviewed by the task force?”
“Yes. Everybody. Nothing against the FBI, CIA, the rest of the task force, or you, but when I can, I prefer to do my own work. I might be able to learn what he was trying to tell us if I talk to the people he told-I’ll have a better chance at it anyway as compared to reading transcripts.”
“I’ll see if we can get you started today.”
Laramie stood, and on the dry-erase board wrote two lines in its upper-left corner: Internet-2 image search and Re-interview all.
“I’ve got a few other thoughts,” Cole said, “in case you want to hear them.”
“You’ve got a lot of thoughts,” Knowles said.
Cole didn’t acknowledge the author’s comment. Laramie had a fleeting thought that the day care dynamic was only going to get worse once Rothgeb showed up. Considering the much sharper turn for the worse things would undoubtedly take were she to plug Cooper into the equation, she quietly thanked herself for keeping their “operative” compartmentalized.
“Have at it,” she said to Cole.
“Birth certificate thefts,” he said. “I’d start in Mobile, where Achar got his, then maybe expand outward. Didn’t see anything about the task force looking into it, though I can’t believe they wouldn’t have.”
“Not sure,” Laramie said, then, climbing the learning curve on Detective Cole, figured she ought to finish the thought Cole was likely to leave hanging. “So you’re saying we check and see whether more than one birth certificate was stolen from the place where he grabbed his?”
“Yeah. And other places. Problem is, when the kind of birth record he used is taken, sometimes there isn’t any record of it being there in the first place.”
“We should go the other way and look at the deaths,” Knowles said.
Cole rotated his head to take in Knowles, considered what he’d said, then nodded.
Laramie wasn’t grasping it yet.
“Little help?” she said.
“What-”
“It-”
They’d both started speaking at the same time, then stopped. Laramie almost flinched in anticipation of the argument she figured would ensue.
“Go ahead,” Cole said.
Knowles nodded. Laramie raised her eyebrows.
“It doesn’t do any good for our kind of guy, a sleeper,” Knowles said, “if he’s stolen the identity of somebody who’s alive. The way it’s done-at least the way I understand it-is you swipe the birth certificate, or just use the Social Security number, of a dead person.”
Catching up, Laramie said, “Nobody’s around to argue that you don’t exist.”
“Yeah.” Cole took the baton. “The most effective way to do it is by stealing the Social of somebody who died young. Would just make the most sense either way for it to be somebody born twenty-five or thirty years ago.”
“So there isn’t anybody still, what, actively grieving for him?”
“Well, yeah, that too, but what I’m talking about is the records. Last couple of decades, most jurisdictions have been keeping an electronic copy of birth certificates and death records in the same system. Before that, you could be born and die in the same town and the only record of either event was buried in separate files in different buildings. Plus you’re getting the age right on the Social Security number. But maybe the most important thing is, if we’re talking an early death-such as the real Benjamin Achar’s death from SIDS-there isn’t any significant record of life that’ll register with the federal government based on the Social. In many cases, Socials weren’t issued to children until they were six, eight, ten years old. Not until recently.”
Laramie considered this.
“So if you’re Achar, or his employers,” she said, “you steal a birth certificate from some town hall, making sure the person whose certificate you’re stealing died young. Preferably before the electronic-records era. And then, what, you apply for a new Social Security card using the birth certificate?”
“That’s right,” Knowles said. “Or get a new one. Say you lost yours-or they never gave you a number to begin with. And what we’re saying is we could find some Socials to check up on, doing it the same way Achar might have chosen his-by digging out names of people who died young in the same time period as the real Benjamin Achar, and checking to see whether their Socials have, after a long gap, eventually popped up on recent credit reports or tax returns.”
Laramie reached back and wrote Birth certificate thefts-dead-Mobile/other as their third note on the board, but was already thinking through some of the problems presented by this investigative strategy before she finished writing the words.
“Lot of dead people to check on,” she said, “in a lot of places. Plus we’ll need to find the deaths how? From town halls?”
“Libraries would be better,” Cole said. “In old newspaper files stored on microfiche.”
“Whole thing adds up to one hell of a thought, Detective,” Knowles said.
Laramie almost laughed out loud at these guys. She said, “Might test the resources of the support personnel we’ve got at our disposal, but it certainly is an interesting idea.”
Laramie noticed the salmon-colored hat first. She then realized what it was-her guide was standing in the doorway between the rooms.
“Headed for the airport,” he said, then thrust a thumb over his shoulder. “I set up some coffee and bagels in twelve. Door’s open.”
“What,” Laramie said, “no doughnuts? We’ve got an officer of the law here this morning.”
Cole swiveled his head to observe her guide-interested, Laramie thought, in the answer, and thereby confirming the truest of all stereotypes.
“No worries,” her guide said with a half-assed grin. “They’re even Krispy Kremes.”
Cole turned back around.
“I assume you heard the last part of our conversation,” Laramie said. “Can you accommodate that too?”
“We’ll get some investigators on it starting now,” he said.
Knowles stood and put his hat on.
“As chief scenario builder,” he said, “I’d say it’s a good time to get some chow.”
“Hear, hear,” Cole said.
The homicide cop rose and followed the author out of the room.
Laramie succeeded in waiting for both of them to leave the room before snorting out a laugh that wouldn’t stop for a while.