“Where you based?” she said, thinking, Nice opener, Laramie.

Mary set the can on the table.

“Quantico.”

“You live nearby, or you commute an hour like the rest of us?”

The profiler nodded. “Manassas-around forty minutes.”

“It’s a little longer for me.” At least it was, Laramie thought.

“I’m hooked on it. Can’t stand being on these road trips.”

Laramie turned a little sideways, waiting for Mary to clarify.

“Audio books,” the profiler said, grinning a calm, pleasant, clean smile. “I’m a junkie. Mostly nonfiction.”

In the brief flash of smile, Laramie saw that Mary had maybe the whitest rack of teeth on the planet, a walking toothpaste commercial. It made her slightly self-conscious, Laramie fighting the urge to reach for her teeth and see if she’d missed anything with her toothbrush.

“Haven’t tried them,” Laramie said. “I pretty much just do the NPR thing.”

“Probably have a hundred CDs of books in my trunk-find me after and I’ll send you some when we’re out of this and back in the groove.”

Laramie stretched her arms then pushed her hands under her thighs.

“Do you find it odd he didn’t own a truck?” she said.

“Pickup truck, you mean?”

“Yes.”

Mary thought for a moment.

“I see what you’re saying,” she said.

“You live in suburban Virginia like I do,” Laramie said, “you see SUVs everywhere. But a low-income Central Florida housing development?”

“Normal guy living there, you’re right-he’d be more likely to own a truck.”

“You said yesterday his disguise was too pat,” Laramie said, “and in reading your report, I agree. It just occurred to me as I was reading your profile that you could add ‘no pickup truck’ to the list.”

Mary nodded and took a swig of Diet Coke.

Laramie said, “You think there’s any chance Achar was an American?”

Mary said, “Pulled a Timothy McVeigh under a fabricated identity?”

“Yes.”

“It’s possible. The profile I put together has mostly to do with his not being real. His disguise was a good one but, as we agree, too good in some ways, maybe missing a piece or two. But as to where he’s from-if you read my full report, you’ve seen I took a couple guesses, with my favorite being the one I mentioned yesterday-frankly, out of sheer racial profiling, or at least profiling based on his likely ancestry. Central or South American heritage, at least partially. Of course he certainly could have been from here, but he’d have been putting on a disguise that hid his background either way.”

Mary paused, thinking for a moment, during which time she tilted her head to the side a notch. “And I’m not sure somebody living here would skip the pickup truck part of the disguise,” she said.

Laramie nodded. “Tell me about the woman at UPS,” she said.

“The dispatcher, yes,” Mary said. “We’ve been over this, but it isn’t taking us anywhere. As you know, I only included in my report the one statement from one of Achar’s fellow drivers. I interviewed them all, and this was the only mention of her, the only comment on the two of them seen together. Based on the driver’s remark, I think it’s safe to say Achar and the dispatcher, whose name is Lori Hopkins, were friendly. I remember exactly what he told me: ‘The way they joked, you could tell they had a little something going.’ He didn’t elaborate, said it more or less the same way in a second interview, but he seemed to have, well, written off his own suspicion by then. This is pretty normal-you look back on a victim or suspect’s life after he’s dead, you check all the phone records and the e-mail accounts the way we did here, and you’ll usually know beyond a reasonable doubt he was sleeping with somebody, presuming he was. In fact, you’ll usually find a lot more evidence of flirting between coworkers, affair or no, than we found between Hopkins and Achar. Amazing what people say and do when they think nobody sees what they’re doing. But we found absolutely nothing between them. No e-mails, no corroborating suspicions, no flirtatious conversations on the tapes of the dispatch communications, which UPS holds for a few weeks at a time. Nothing-zilch.”

“A deep-cover sleeper would probably be good at hiding an affair,” Laramie said.

“True. One of our agents checked her out, grilled her pretty hard, as you probably read in the transcripts. I’m assuming you have most or all of the interviews. But more important, affair or no, there doesn’t appear to be any evidence of foreign contact-between her and some outside foreign national, or possible representative of such. Still, it’s interesting you asked me about this. The comment from the driver bothered me, and still does.”

“In what way?”

“It could be they spent some time on the radio, or in the dispatch center, joking around, tossing out the occasional innuendo, and none of it got recorded. Only this one driver noticed anything at all. But the way the guy put it…it just sounded as though Achar and Hopkins knew each other better than the rest of the evidence suggests. A familiarity that went beyond the water cooler. I don’t feel we should clear her just yet.”

“All right, then,” Laramie said. “I’m public enemy number one. I’ve got ten sleepers planted around the U.S., ready to disperse filo serum on my command. I teach them the ways of all things American-except we follow the SUV sales statistics instead of heeding the blue-collar credo of owning your own pickup truck.” Laramie scratched a shoulder and went on. “Doing my planning from my cave in Pakistan or wherever it is I’m from, I see at least two moments of vulnerability in each of my sleepers’ useful life spans. The first is the moment he or she takes delivery of the ‘pathogen,’ or the ‘filo.’ The longer they own it, the more vulnerable they’ll be, so I’ll probably get it to them late in the game. Second is the Manchurian Candidate moment. You see the movie?”

“The original,” Mary said, “not the remake.”

“What I mean is the playing cards-the signal. Getting the message through: Time to blow yourself up.”

“Understood.”

“Here’s my question,” Laramie said, “and I ask you because you’ve studied Achar the person, rather than the ‘perp,’ or the fragments of his body, more and better than anyone on the task force. At least by my read. As public enemy number one I’m trying to get this delivery to Benjamin Achar. Once I succeed, I’m then trying to send him the signal. How do you think I should do it?”

Mary looked at her for a second then shrugged.

“We’ve talked about that,” she said. “At the request of-well, I took a pretty hard look at his routine and marked some places where he could take delivery of goods, or messages, without detection.” Laramie hadn’t seen this breakdown in any of the binders, but let this go, thinking it would have been naive to expect that everything had been included in the version of the terror book they’d provided her. “Suffice to say,” Mary said, “there are few professions better suited to receive such packages or messages than a UPS driver. Achar could have received thousands of deliveries and hundreds of activation messages every week, more or less undetected. But you asked the question in a slightly different way, I think.”

“Yes.”

Laramie was getting to like Mary the profiler.

“I’d have somebody tell him something in person, with nothing in print, no e-mail, no record. Or maybe even set the date a few years in advance. Tell him to move forward on September 12 of such and such year unless he gets a signal to the contrary. In any case, I don’t think I would use a person the sleeper is known to spend any time with.”

“What do you mean?”

“Be better,” Mary said, “to send somebody he’s never seen before, has never been seen talking to at the water cooler, who might deliver a simple verbal code, or a business card of a certain color-whatever. Anyway, there’s less chance for detection if it’s a randomly appearing person.”