36

Laramie was in her second hour of sleep following forty-eight without when an obnoxiously loud and persistent knocking dredged her from her pool of slumber.

“I hear you.”

She got her legs around and found the floor, retrieved a pair of jeans, and pulled them on beneath the oversize Lakers T-shirt she always wore to bed-another detail it seemed Ebbers had instructed his minions to heed. A look through her peephole revealed Wally Knowles, looking as chipper as she’d seen him, the man even showing the presence of mind to put on his hat before coming down to see her. She checked her watch-3:43 A.M.-then unlatched the chain and opened the door.

“I think we may have found our boy,” Knowles said.

Laramie perked up. He must have meant they’d got a hit on their custom computer setup-that it had yielded a photograph of Benny Achar taken before he’d adopted his new identity.

When Laramie asked Knowles if that was what he meant, the author jerked his head sideways and disappeared from the door frame, headed back in the direction of his room.

“Better to show,” he said, “than tell.”

They’d imported some serious computer equipment during the past few days, which Knowles had set up on his own in his room. Even to Laramie-who preferred to leave anything with computers to the tech guy who serviced their workstations in Langley-the setup was impressive. A pair of gunmetal gray Power Macintosh towers anchored a system featuring two huge flat-panel monitors, a laser printer, and a box with a strip of green and yellow lights down its front that Laramie figured for the cable modem. As she came in behind Knowles, Laramie saw that Cole was on the phone, using-as instructed-the room’s land line instead of his cell phone. On one of the monitors she could see a grainy, smudged image of a life raft overflowing with people. The boat looked to be out on the ocean, but was about to make landfall-some of the people on the boat were reaching for a dock Laramie could just barely make out on the right-hand side of the picture.

Cole continued with his phone call, offering Laramie a lazy salute with his off hand as Knowles took the seat in front of the monitor and motioned for Laramie to join him for a look. He worked the mouse and the image rewound. Laramie noticed it happened digitally, in that way where pixels and squares could be seen as the image shifted backward in time.

“We got lucky,” Knowles explained, “considering such a measly portion of the actual available pool of images from the past twenty years has been digitized and stored in the consortium’s archives. Most of what has been digitized comes from broadcast and print media, however, which turned out to be useful.”

The image started playing, the raft-almost a small barge, she thought-rolling in the waves. There wasn’t any audio, but Laramie could see a buffeting of the surface of the water, as though from a helicopter-the source of the camera shooting the video, she assumed. The men crammed aboard the boat appeared very animated, most of them gesturing toward the right side of the image, where Laramie knew the dock would soon appear on-screen.

“This is a boat full of Cuban refugees,” Knowles said as the video played, “shot by a local news chopper as the vessel docked somewhere south of Miami.”

The call letters of the local station appeared above the word NewsFile in the lower-left corner of the screen.

“It’s file footage from the local station, dated December 1994. We’ll play the whole clip for you, but this is the part that matters, when the videographer zooms in. I believe U.S. policy was the same then as now-‘wet feet, dry feet.’ If a Cuban refugee makes land here, he’s eligible for asylum. If he’s picked up en route before he makes it in, the Coast Guard has to send him back. These guys made it-by the end of the clip they all climb onto the dock and out of frame. There.”

Knowles pointed to the monitor as the image zoomed in, and six or seven of the men’s faces could be seen more distinctly. In another second or two, a brightened circle of the kind Laramie had seen on police-chase reality shows spotlighted one of the men, and the video image froze.

Even with the granularity of the station’s old footage, Laramie had no problem recognizing the face.

“That’s him,” she said.

Knowles nodded. “Search engine scored the hit about two hours ago. I had an alarm rigged for when the system found a match. Woke up, checked it out, and got Cole in here the minute I saw what you just watched.”

Laramie heard Cole wrapping up his phone call-something about “Thanks, I owe you one”-then he hung up and came over.

“If it’s December of ninety-four,” she said, “that’s only a month or two before Achar showed up in the first Florida docs.”

“Yep.” Knowles eased back in his seat, looking somewhat overwhelmed with self-satisfaction.

“He was Cuban, then,” she said. Then she thought about this some more. “Or at least he came here from there.”

“Yep,” Knowles said again.

Cole had come over to stand silently above them.

“Castro’s last-ditch effort to take down the capitalist pigs up north,” Laramie said, “seems an unlikely version of this conspiracy at best. No way he cares enough anymore. Or has the resources.”

“We’re in agreement on that,” Knowles said. “But the guy may still have been Cuban.”

Laramie said, “Maybe. But somebody could have dumped the raft in the water, or put the people on it, to make it seem that way.”

Knowles nodded. “Could have,” he said. “Of course that’s not the only clue this image gives us.”

Laramie had the idea they’d been through all of this before he’d come to get her, and decided she was irritated they hadn’t called her over immediately. Though maybe they’d wanted to do some follow-up first-have some “show rather than tell” ready for her by the time she came down the hall.

“The other people on the boat,” she said, her brain starting to click.

“Right.”

“If we search in the other direction,” she said, “working from the faces on the boat, then maybe we find some other sleepers.”

Cole nodded.

“Already under way,” he said. “Been dipping into some of the data banks your friend the guide knows how to get into. Once we got some hits on the faces-meaning matches with photos in the federal or local databases Wally and I plugged into the search engine-we were able to determine that two of Achar’s pals aboard the boat were busted for armed robbery-manslaughter charges were part of it too-and sent to prison in Dade County in 1997. Two others have been in and out of jail for smaller crimes, possession and so on, for most of the eleven years since they came over. We’re shooting for some other angles, but so far it looks like nobody else on the boat can be shown to have stolen the identity of somebody who died. At least not yet. It’s a maze-we need to find each man’s Social Security number from a starting point of his image on that tape, then check whether the Social registers as one belonging to somebody who’s already dead. Like we talked about, almost none of this kind of thing is kept electronically, but we’re starting that way just in case-it’s faster than our other search method if it works.”

Laramie looked at the image on the monitor and counted-twenty-two men on the boat.

“We’re checking for other boats from the same time period too?”

“Yep,” Knowles said. “And the search engine’s still working on the other faces from this boat. Assuming the search comes up dry, all this really means is that our pal, public enemy number one, doesn’t appear to have shipped all of his sleepers over on one boat, all at once. Assuming there’s more than one.”

Laramie nodded. “Suppose it was too much to expect for ten of them to be caught on tape, all on the same boat.”