Public Enemy Read online

  Cole frowned and made a sighing sound.

  Laramie said, “If you’re asking me whether part of our assignment is to kill the enemy, I’m not entirely clear on that. Our actions may lead to that, however, so if you have any problem-”

  “No problem here,” Knowles interrupted.

  Laramie nodded. When Knowles passed on following up with more questions, Laramie gestured with the dry-erase marker, first toward Knowles, then Cole.

  “It is anticipated that you, Mr. Knowles, may function as the chief scenario builder, and that you, Detective Cole, would contribute primarily as an investigator. The third member of the team is a reasonably well-known diplomacy and foreign affairs professor who has consulted with the federal government from time to time. He will assist us in narrowing the list of likely nations, or people, who might have sent the sleepers here. Despite this general orientation, there are no titles, there exists no hierarchy besides my leadership, and there are no lines dividing your roles.”

  She set the marker lengthwise on the table like a tower and took a sip from the latest in a long line of bad cups of coffee. For once, she didn’t feel much need for the caffeine. She swallowed the sip and replaced the coffee on the table beside the marker.

  “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 y
ou 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.”

  “Not sure,” Laramie said, then, climbing the learning curve on Detective Cole, figured she ought to finish the thought Cole was likely to leave hanging. “So you’re saying we check and see whether more than one birth certificate was stolen from the place where he grabbed his?”

  “Yeah. And other places. Problem is, when the kind of birth record he used is taken, sometimes there isn’t any record of it being there in the first place.”

  “We should go the other way and look at the deaths,” Knowles said.

  Cole rotated his head to take in Knowles, considered what he’d said, then nodded.

  Laramie wasn’t grasping it yet.

  “Little help?” she said.

  “What-”

  “It-”

  They’d both started speaking at the same time, then stopped. Laramie almost flinched in anticipation of the argument she figured would ensue.

  “Go ahead,” Cole said.

  Knowles nodded. Laramie raised her eyebrows.

  “It doesn’t do any good for our kind of guy, a sleeper,” Knowles said, “if he’s stolen the identity of somebody who’s alive. The way it’s done-at least the way I understand it-is you swipe the birth certificate, or just use the Social Security number, of a dead person.”

  Catching up, Laramie said, “Nobody’s around to argue that you don’t exist.”

  “Yeah.” Cole took the baton. “The most effective way to do it is by stealing the Social of somebody who died young. Would just make the most sense either way for it to be somebody born twenty-five or thirty years ago.”

  “So there isn’t anybody still, what, actively grieving for him?”

  “Well, yeah, that too, but what I’m talking about is the records. Last couple of decades, most jurisdictions have been keeping an electronic copy of birth certificates and death records in the same system. Before that, you could be born and die in the same town and the only record of either event was buried in separate files in different buildings. Plus you’re getting the age right on the Social Security number. But maybe the most important thing is, if we’re talking an early death-such as the real Benjamin Achar’s death from SIDS-there isn’t any significant record of life that’ll register with the federal government based on the Social. In many cases, Socials weren’t issued to children until they were six, eight, ten years old. Not until recently.”

  Laramie considered this.

  “So if you’re Achar, or his employers,” she said, “you steal a birth certificate from some town hall, making sure the person whose certificate you’re stealing died young. Preferably before the electronic-records era. And then, what, you apply for a new Social Security card using the birth certificate?”

  “That’s right,” Knowles said. “Or get a new one. Say you lost yours-or they never gave you a number to begin with. And what we’re saying is we could find some Socials to check up on, doing it the same way Achar might have chosen his-by digging out names of people who died young in the same time period as the real Benjamin Achar, and checking to see whether their Socials have, after a long gap, eventually popped up on recent credit reports or tax returns.”

  Laramie reached back and wrote Birth certificate thefts-dead-Mobile/other as their third note on the board, but was already thinking through some of the problems presented by this investigative strategy before she finished writing the words.

  “Lot of dead people to check on,” she said, “in a lot of places. Plus we’ll need to find the deaths how? From town halls?”

  “Libraries would be better,” Cole said. “In old newspaper files stored on microfiche.”

  “Whole thing adds up to one hell of a thought, Detective,” Knowles said.

  Laramie almost laughed out loud at these guys. She said, “Might test the resources of the support personnel we’ve got at our disposal, but it certainly is an interesting idea.”

  Laramie noticed the salmon-colored hat first. She then realized what it was-her guide was standing in the doorway between the rooms.

  “Headed for the airport,” he said, then thrust a thumb over his shoulder. “I set up some coffee and bagels in twelve. Door’s open.”

  “What,” Laramie said, “no doughnuts? We’ve got an officer of the law here this morning.”

  Cole swiveled his head to observe her guide-interested, Laramie thought, in the answer, and thereby confirming the truest of all stereotypes.

  “No worries,” her guide said with a half-assed grin. “They’re even Krispy Kremes.”

  Cole turned back around.

  “I assume you heard the last part of our conversation,” Laramie said. “Can you accommodate that too?”

  “We’ll get some investigators on it starting now,” he said.

  Knowles stood and put his hat on.

  “As chief scenario builder,” he said, “I’d say it’s a good time to get some chow.”

  “Hear, hear,” Cole said.

  The homicide cop rose and followed the author out of the room.

  Laramie succeeded in waiting for both of them to leave the room before snorting out a laugh that wouldn’t stop for a while.

  30

  One of the more influential people Laramie encountered at Northwestern University-in ways both good and bad-was the sandy-haired, ageless professor of political science with the round, wire-rimmed glasses and piercing blue eyes whose name was Eddie Rothgeb. Before you got to know him, he was Professor Rothgeb, or maybe, if you were feeling loose, Ed. Only a few people came to call him Eddie-among them Laramie, Rothgeb’s wife, Heather, and the professor’s two sons. Laramie often excused certain things that had happened between her and Professor Eddie by labeling herself as too young and too stupid to know better.

  Once Laramie and her guide retrieved Rothgeb from the airport, her guide-at Laramie’s request-deposited her and Rothgeb at the Krispy Kreme. She asked her guide to wait outside while she spoke with Rothgeb alone.

  He looked the same. He always did. He even dressed the same-exactly the same, as though the jeans, V-neck sweater, blazer, and Converse All-Stars were a uniform the university required him to wear. Even his neatly trimmed beard, she decided, was exactly the same length as it had been the last time she’d seen him.

  Rothgeb selected an original glazed, which he began consuming in small pieces, breaking them off while he sipped from a decaf mocha. Laramie thinking, Me and the rotating band of coffee-shop sissies, sampling oversweetened coffee concoctions from north to south. He sat before her at one of the restaurant’s Formica tables while Laramie worked through a
nother cup of full test, having decided, on hearing Rothgeb’s order, to forgo the milk and sweetener.

  Somebody’s gotta be a man about this coffee thing.

  “So,” she said, laying out her usual opening. “I’ll begin this with a question.”

  Rothgeb broke a piece from his doughnut and chewed it with some moistening help from his mocha.

  “All right,” he said.

  “How do you catch a sleeper?” Laramie said. “And I mean a real one-not some recent Arab immigrant with a heavy accent and a card-carrying membership in a radical mosque, but one who’s long since embedded himself. A deep-cover operative, awaiting orders, displaying no apparent affiliation with the people from whom he awaits orders, having long ago established a fully legitimate fake identity. How do you catch him-how do you even find him?”

  Laramie’s guide had arranged-she didn’t ask how-for Rothgeb to listen to a one-play-only MP3 file on a portable device during his flight from Chicago. The content of Rothgeb’s file included Laramie’s findings and theories at the tail end of the recording.

  The professor tilted his neatly trimmed head to the side, pondering the question.

  “You know,” he said, “twenty years ago, this was considered a rampant problem.” He drew out the word rampant as though it were a curse that he relished using. “I’ve heard it speculated that hundreds, if not thousands, of Soviet sleepers are still here, having stayed on, as Americans, after the collapse of the USSR. Stayed asleep-or awakened, I don’t know how you’d put it.”

  He broke off another piece of doughnut but did not lift the piece to his mouth nor say anything else-an academic, lost in a sea of his own complex thoughts. Laramie, growing weary of the verbal fencing it took to get these guys to share what they were thinking, said, “And?”

  “Well, we’ve never been good at stopping this. I’d love to recommend some sleeper-busting specialist I’ve met along the way, but either such experts retired along with the sleepers or I just don’t know the right people. Maybe whoever it is you’re working for now could track somebody down.”