Knowles the storyteller grew a little more animated.

“During the Reagan era,” he said, “the U.S. funneled big sums of foreign aid to the right-wing Salvadoran government as part of our ‘containment’ strategy against Soviet-allied socialist movements. Around the time Márquez would have been a teenager, there were ‘murder squads’ in operation-the government, which was more or less funded by us, would send out raping-pillaging units to eradicate rural settlements said to be harboring the leftist rebels, which in turn were said to be funded by the Soviets. There was more at work domestically than was understood initially, though-it seemed the ‘murder squads’ were focused more on the genocide of the native population than on eradication of the rebels.”

Laramie was familiar with most of this history. “So the way he tells it,” she said, “he survived an attack from one of the U.S.-financed murder squads?”

“You got it,” Knowles said. “Apparently he was the only one to make it out of his village.”

Laramie nodded. “So, if true,” she said, “Márquez’s story means he witnessed the wholesale slaughter of his entire village-family, friends, whatever-and blames America for the genocide from which he managed to escape.”

Rothgeb leaned in over the table again.

“Yep,” he said. “And a recent history of genocidal acts against native encampments is certainly not restricted, in the Americas, to El Salvador-we think there is a high likelihood he used his own experience to recruit similarly disenfranchised indigenous-culture survivors on a pan-American basis. He’d have quite a pool to pull from-even if he was operating solely on the basis of regional genocidal acts perpetrated by regimes kept afloat in part by U.S. foreign aid.”

Knowles made a “who knows” gesture with his palms and took the baton again.

“Did he discover the biological weapons lab in Guatemala? Did a scientist who worked there steal some engineered filo and bring it to Márquez? Any number of scenarios would make a great deal of sense on top of what we’ve already laid out. It would explain a lot of the variables here.”

“He’s your guy,” Rothgeb said.

Cole spoke up too.

“Hard to go any other way with it,” he said.

Laramie digested what her “cell” had just presented. Well-oiled machine, indeed-even being the foreign affairs junkie she was, Laramie was finding difficulty poking a single hole in their theory.

“I’ll need a minute or two to soak this up,” she said. “Also, we’ll need to get as much intel on him as possible. Can-”

She had been about to summon the man, but watched as her guide leaned into the doorway as though delivered by synaptic remote control.

“-we get everything CIA and its brethren have on him and his regime?” she asked.

“Already in process,” her guide said, and retreated behind the wall.

Laramie decided she ought to arrange to have the man accompany her everywhere she went.

Knowles said, “On the topic of the letters ‘ICR’ and the facility in Guatemala, Eddie and I had an idea.” Laramie kind of turned toward Rothgeb as Knowles spoke, thinking, Eddie? “In the course of doing some research for one of my books, I came across the story of a senior Defense Intelligence Agency attaché who was arrested and sentenced to two consecutive life sentences for treason. Only thing was, they didn’t nab him for being a double agent for China, or Russia, or whoever else specifically-instead, he was found to have been in business for himself, a kind of freelance provisioner of all manner of U.S. intelligence committee secrets.”

Laramie thought she was familiar with the case, though she didn’t remember the spy’s name offhand.

“Among what he was caught selling in the Pentagon-FBI sting that snared him,” Knowles said, “were certain lists. He generally sold his findings nonexclusively-sometimes selling copies of the same document to six or seven different countries-and the most damaging of the lists he sold revealed hundreds of undercover operatives’ true identities. The document I thought might apply to your ‘ICR’ question, though, was a handwritten list of secret Pentagon file names. Not the files themselves, but their titles and whereabouts.”

Rothgeb jumped in.

“Once Wally mentioned the case,” the professor said, “I remembered a prosecutor with the Justice Department I’d sat on a panel with, who told me he’d been a part of the investigative team assembled by the prosecution. With some assistance from our friend in the room next door-”-Rothgeb jerked a thumb toward her guide-“I was able to reach him around three this morning and get the necessary approvals to have a look at the document Wally’s talking about. Anyway, here it is. One page of it, at least.”

Rothgeb turned over the piece of paper he’d been keeping under an elbow on the table and pushed it over to Laramie.

She saw on the page-which appeared to have been faxed-a carefully handwritten, page-long list of what she presumed to be file names, running alphabetically from the last of the Hs through about twenty I listings. A sequence of dates followed most of the file names, with a final entry on each line denoting, from what Rothgeb was telling her, the file’s location in the Pentagon.

Nine lines down from the top of the page was the file name ICRS, PROJECT, which Laramie took to be the alphabetical listing for something called “Project ICRS.”

When Cooper’s baritone voice charged into the room through the speakerphone, everyone jumped before remembering he had been listening in.

“Reading aloud,” he said, voice distorted by the encryption, “would be helpful.”

Laramie explained what Rothgeb had just given her.

When Cooper didn’t say anything else, Rothgeb said, “‘ICRS’ could stand for just about anything, but we did some brainstorming, and if you consider the notion of R & D relating to the first airborne iteration of a filovirus-in other words, one with wings-it might not be a bad guess to translate ‘ICRS’ as ‘Icarus.’ I’m sure you’re familiar with the story of Icarus-and if this was a Pentagon-funded lab doing the research, the irony of our military flying too close to the sun for its own good is palpable. Either way, this document specifies the location of a file in the Pentagon-at least the location of the file at the time this attaché was giving away national security secrets-and it looks like a pretty tight match with our operative’s three-letter discovery near the lab in Guatemala.”

“Might take some juice to dig up the actual file,” Knowles said, “but so far, it does seem as though our squad has some serious cider at its disposal.”

Laramie looked up from the document.

“We done for now?” she said.

Knowles and Rothgeb said nothing for once-but each man swiveled his head to look over at Cole. Cole, meanwhile, sort of reanimated-Laramie thinking that was the only word for it as, with a slight movement of his jaw, the cop came alive from his place in the chair by the door and said, “We’ve identified six probable sleepers.”

Laramie stared.

“Jesus,” she said after a while. “When you guys bury the lead, you really bury it. You’ve been holding out on me since last night?”

“Yep,” Cole said.

“Good news, huh?” Knowles said.

“Great news-I think,” Laramie said. “You said ‘probable’-that you’ve ID’d six ‘probable’ sleepers. What do you mean by ‘probable’?”

“The six probables,” Cole said, “are six cases of identity theft. In each case, the assumed identity is that of a person who died young, approximately thirty years ago. In each case, the identity assumed by the sleeper has been in evidence-in other words, there’s been documentation of the current version of the identity, for about a decade, give or take. Same as with Achar.”

“We also have images of each of them,” Knowles said, apparently unable to contain his excitement, “in some cases stills, in some cases video, taken at a time that approximates or precedes the assumption of the new identity. Each of the images was captured while its subject was located right at or very near the straight-shot entry points refugees typically take when they’re able to make it here by boat from Cuba.”