“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.”