And that suited Knowles just fine.
As “the black guy on the lake,” Knowles, by choice, had a lot of time to himself. He spoke to no one but his editor, but nonetheless spent most of his time assembling computer systems, database subscriptions, satellite and high-speed cable connections, and virtually any other gadget which, for most, normally assisted the process of communication. For Knowles this collection of toys and access served a different purpose: it allowed him to keep clear of everybody and anybody while still remaining abreast of everything. Knowles, for example, was the first individual not affiliated with a university to possess an Internet-2 connection, initially an exclusive, multiple-university-controlled next-generation high-speed Internet. Armed with the roster of research services and corporate intranets to which he belonged or had access, the novelist liked to think he could find out anything, or locate anybody, faster than any other civilian.
When his wife was killed, Knowles engaged in two main actions. First, suffering from a four-month case of writer’s block, he utilized his equipment to bury himself in research and news. He learned everything there was to learn about those who had wrought their fury on his ex-wife, those who had failed to protect her, and the government’s plans for retaliation. His blood pressure skyrocketing, fury his constant companion, Knowles sequestered himself in a single room in his lake house. Movies ran repeatedly in his mind’s eye-films depicting his ex-wife arriving in her office at eight-thirty as usual, going about her usual morning, maybe having a look out the window of her office with the kind of view of the city you only found from the 103rd floor of One World Trade Center. The films always ended in the same way, of course-white paper, floating everywhere. Gray clouds billowing to earth, roiling outward, then up again. Toward the end of the four months in that one room, Knowles devised the plot of the novel that would become his breakthrough hit, but above all, he realized he still did carry a torch for the woman who’d been his wife.
The other action Knowles took, he shared with a man named Dennis Cole.
Cole was a homicide detective for the NYPD, 23rd Precinct. Cole had once liked to keep his day to a little under eight hours, maximum, so he could spend as much time as possible with his new wife. Cole’s junior partner was hungry enough to pick up the slack without saying anything. It wasn’t long, though, before his partner didn’t have to pick up any slack at all-Cole started staying late, coming in nights when there wasn’t any work to do, finding just about any reason to avoid the fact that Cynthia Cole was staying out one hell of a lot later than her duties as a bond trader required. After two long years of made-up expensive dinners, gala events, and-though Cole chose not to face this-a great deal of fucking that did not include her husband, Mrs. Cole demanded a “trial separation.”
Unlike Knowles, who initially hadn’t minded particularly when his wife left him, Cole pined away for Cynthia like nobody’s business. It was after her separation from him that he started in on the bottle-though this was just the beginning. The fact that Cole was pining away for his wife meant, among other things, that when she failed to call in or make it home from work on that second Tuesday in September-that when she failed to show despite Cole’s descent into the hell that was downtown on that day, and when she failed to emerge, in full or part, following Cole’s statuesque, indefatigable presence irrepressibly visible over the course of three full weeks in the triage unit a block from ground zero-it meant that Cole had been able to convince himself that it might still have worked out.
If, that was, the 767 with its topped-off fuel tanks hadn’t pulled the plug on her supposed desire to reclaim his embrace.
Literally right after the funeral in Stamford, Cole got back to work-a morose ride on Metro North into Grand Central and he was back at it. Picking up the pieces from the three unsolved murder cases he and his partner had been served before twenty-eight hundred murders happened all at once a few blocks down the street. He broke all three cases with a vengeance, becoming one of the most deadly effective homicide investigators on the force. In the year that followed, he cracked his cases at the rate of one hundred percent-sixteen for sixteen.
After hours was another story.
When he wasn’t on the job, Cole, a five-foot-eleven-inch, two-hundred-and-ten-pound former athlete of a man, behaved more or less like a bulimic teenager. Starting sometime approximating 5:01 P.M. each day, Cole drank, ate, and then-between the hours of three-thirty and five A.M.-purged. He drank so much at night, so consistently, that his aching liver demanded a postmidnight caloric intake sufficient to nourish an elephant. This, in turn, led to an early morning ritual, of which he partook with savage consistency: just prior to four, he would stumble down the hall in his one-bedroom shithole walkup in Queens, usually rising from odd, ever-new places in the apartment where he’d passed out the night before. Sometimes falling and denting various bones on the hard surfaces in the bathroom that was his destination-sometimes smacking a knee on the floor or a shin on the edge of the tub-every morning, he roamed in there and loudly vomited his guts out.
It always seemed his traumatized body had failed to digest even an ounce of the food and beverages he’d consumed hours before, all that food and drink just hanging around his belly waiting to be ejected. And eject it he did. Painfully.
His stomach expanded over time, becoming first soft, then thick, then monstrous, until the weakened muscles around his ribs became little more than a source of stabbing pain as he repeatedly blotched his guts into the 1930s-era American Standard nobody had seen fit to replace because the fucking thing kept working just fine.
It was in approximately the same manner, at approximately the same time, that Cole and Knowles expressed their common rage in an uncommon way. During the same week in early January-four months to the day on which they’d lost their ex-wives-each man composed his own letter to the Central Intelligence Agency.
Knowles’s note was more eloquent, but the point in each was the same: Knowles and Cole each expressed, in approximately one and one-half pages of handwritten text, a desire to serve his country. Each told the story of his murdered wife, of his desire to retaliate. Each confessed a suspicion he was too old, that it was too late for him to volunteer as a soldier, at least in the strictest sense. Thus, each man said, the logical choice of service was either the intelligence or, more specifically, antiterror ranks of the federal government.
In the years that followed 9/11, Cole and Knowles were not alone, and CIA was not the only recipient of such offers. Both CIA and FBI recruiting personnel, obsessed as they were on developing HUMINT assets fluent in Arab languages and cultures, tended to simply keep such letters on file, occasionally offering the names of the volunteers to other inquiring agencies.
Following repeated interviews, deep background checks, and some in-person monitoring of day-to-day routines, it was precisely because of each man’s rage, and the letters that rage spawned, that Dennis Cole and Wally Knowles came to be included in the pool of names from which Julie Laramie had been instructed to assemble her “counter-cell cell.”