by Steven James
Astrid had asked him to call and check in every hour, and this was not the time to displease her.
He punched in her number.
“Do you have the car?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“And the plates?”
“I’ll be leaving to get them in a few minutes.”
“Don’t wait too long.”
“All right.”
“We’ll talk soon.”
“Yes.”
The call ended, and he pulled up the video he’d taken of Mollie Fischer yesterday in the van and watched it in one corner of his screen while he scanned the email program in the other.
After reading the most recent emails, he googled the FBI Academy. It was amazing what you could find online, and last week he’d located a page on their official site that showed a map of the Academy grounds. Now, he confirmed that there were no changes, then printed the helpful little map that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had posted for all the world to see.
54
3:18 p.m.
After I’d grabbed a pair of latex gloves from the car, I led Tessa into the hotel.
She watched me slip the gloves into my pocket. “What are those for?”
“Examining stuff.”
“Wow. Never would have guessed.” Her sarcasm felt friendly and familiar, but under her words I could tell there was something deeply troubling her.
“Stick with me long enough and you’ll learn all kinds of cool things.”
She was quiet.
“You all right?” I said.
“Yeah.”
We stepped into the expansive atrium. “So you’ll be okay hanging out here for a few minutes?”
She nodded as she glanced at the hanging gardens, waterfall, and streams, and I realized I’d never brought her to this hotel before. She was obviously impressed.
“I just need to see if I can slide a few pieces of the puzzle together,” I said. “I won’t be long.”
She didn’t reply or complain, and I almost wished she would have argued with me; at least then I would have known she was feeling okay.
“So we’re cool? You’re sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah.”
As she took a seat, I suggested she might want to touch base with her friends in Denver, give Pandora or Jessie a call.
That seemed agreeable to her; she pulled out her computer and clicked to her video chat program.
I was turning toward the front desk when she said, “Do you think she’s dead?”
When I faced her again, I saw that her eyes were on a WXTN News cameraman filming a reporter who was interviewing Mr. Lees, the hotel manager. They stood at the other end of the atrium.
“Do you mean-”
“The congressman’s daughter.”
Careful, Pat.
“I don’t think we should jump to conclusions,” I said. “Stay here and wait for me, okay? Just give me maybe fifteen or twenty minutes. Then we’ll take off.” I thought for a second. “And I’ll get you home.”
She was repositioning herself so that her back was to the news crew. “Okay.”
I wanted to see if the former NSA analyst Marianne Keye-Wallace and her “facial, audio, video” recognition computer system would be able to help me find a connection between the would-be assassin at this hotel six years ago and the killers who brought Mollie Fischer here yesterday.
Leaving Tessa behind, I walked toward the hallway that led to the control center.
55
Ten minutes later
I was striking out.
Marianne had started out by telling me she didn’t have records from that far back. “When the hotel went through its renovations last year, we switched to a new computer system-by the way, are you okay? Weren’t you shot yesterday?”
I patted my left arm gently. “It’s just a scratch. So, you’re telling me the computer records didn’t transfer?”
“No, they transferred, it’s just that the management decided to only keep records for the last five years-and I’m not just talking about video footage. All the guest room records.” She shook her head. “I beat my head against the wall trying to convince them to archive everything, but they wouldn’t listen to me.”
Working with so many disparate agencies over the years, I knew all too well that arbitrary and ill-informed decisions happen all the time. Often we don’t even know why we ourselves do what we do, let alone understand the motivations of others-still another reason why probing for motives is so unreliable.
I explored a few other ideas with Marianne, seeing if either the congressman or former vice president had stayed at the hotel recently or if there’d been any other constitutional law conferences in the last few years related to the one that the vice president had been scheduled to speak at when Hadron Brady tried to kill him.
Nothing.
Okay, so where does that leave us?
“Lien-hua mentioned the maids,” I said. “Did she and Margaret talk to you about that?”
“Already looked into it. Housekeeping made up more than twenty rooms on the eighth floor between 2:00 and 4:00, not in any particular order, just as they received word from their superiors. As far as I know, EAD Wellington had agents look through all the rooms on the floor again-some were already occupied-nothing suspicious.”
“What about when the hotel was remodeled-could there be a dumb waiter? Some kind of panic room, something like that put in to room 809?”
“The renovations were mostly cosmetic.” She brought up a floor plan of the building prior to and after the renovations, overlaid them. Nothing of note.
I tried to think of what else I could do here and came up blank.
Maybe you should just get going, find out what’s bugging Tessa. See if Rodale and Fischer forwarded the files to you.
I flicked my eyes across the computer monitors one last time and saw that the cameraman and reporter had finished interviewing Mr. Lees and were packing up their things. He was standing just a few feet away from them. Watching them.
Hang on.
The hotel might not have footage concerning the assassination attempt, but every news network in the country would have covered the story, and I was willing to bet that the producers at WXTN didn’t trash their footage after six years.
I jogged back to the atrium to catch the news team before they left the hotel.
56
The cameraman was a twentysomething guy with wild, black hair and thick sideburns who introduced himself simply as Nick, which seemed to be exactly the right name for him. Chelsea Traye, the investigative journalist, was graceful, movie-star beautiful, and moved as if every step she took set a trend. I recognized them both as being present at the press conference I’d given yesterday.
After I’d introduced myself I said, “What would it take for you to access your station’s video archives of the coverage following the assassination attempt on Vice President Fischer six years ago?”
They exchanged glances.
“You’re the agent who was shot,” Chelsea observed. “This is for the Mollie Fischer case, isn’t it?”
“It’s for an ongoing investigation.”
“I see.” She gave me a once-over, then asked Nick to give us a minute, and after a small pause, he set his camera on a nearby bench and stepped away.
“If we help you-” she began.
“No deals.” I cut her off. “If you won’t help me, I’ll find a station from another network that will-but that’ll just waste time and that’s not something either of us would want.” I could see that she was mentally trying to fill in the blanks from what I’d left unsaid, undoubtedly calculating costs versus benefits of helping me out.
After a moment she said, “Sure. We can get you the footage.”
“Through the web?”
She nodded. “If you have a fast enough connection-otherwise it would take forever. There might be hundreds of hours of unedited footage.”
I knew that Angela Knight in the
Bureau’s cybercrime division could do a metasearch on the computer she affectionately called Lacey, but if Marianne’s system was as advanced as she’d indicated to me yesterday, I could take care of this right now.
“Go get Nick,” I said. “And follow me.”
Tessa had ended her video chat with her friend Pandora and was people-watching, pretending to listen to her iPod. She gazed around the atrium at the skylight, the terraces, the rows of hundreds of doors the guests locked themselves behind every night.
As people passed through the revolving doors at the front entrance, she had a thought: Out of the cage, into the world.
Last winter, Patrick had taken her to Johannesburg, South Africa, while he taught a three-day seminar at the Council of the Africas Crime Analysts’ Symposium, and it had struck her that in one of the most violent cities in the world, the upper class and above live in walled-in subdivisions patrolled by armed guards, with their houses protected by electric fences, security systems, guard dogs, and barred windows and doors.
When Patrick asked what she thought of the city, she’d told him, “The free people live behind bars and the criminals are allowed to run free.”
And after a moment, he’d answered, “I guess that’s a pretty accurate description.”
So here you go again-people deadbolt themselves into their hotel rooms, their cells, while the killers from this week walk around the city. Free.
Cages and freedom.
A zoo by another name.
And that brought the primate center to mind again.
Belle and the mirror self-recognition test.
Even Patrick could tell how much it had troubled her.
The deal wasn’t so much the research they were doing; that all seemed humane enough, as far as any research on animals goes. What bothered her were the implications. After all, the researchers weren’t just studying the neurology of violence but also the neurology of self-awareness, of morality.
Sure, at school she’d learned about evolution-mostly still the outdated theories that we evolved from gorillas, chimpanzees, or other modern knuckle-walking quadrupeds instead of Ardipithecus ramidus, but whatever-whether or not any of that was the case, or if natural selection had any divine intervention, she’d never really considered that there was a continuum of consciousness between humans and other animals.
A continuum of morality.
It didn’t take a genius to put two and two together and realize that if, as Dr. Risel had said, all human traits and behavior can be found in rudimentary form in the animal kingdom, then the difference between humans and animals would be merely one of degree, not of kind.
And that was the idea that bothered her.
In essence, nothing except time and mutation would separate us from other animals. Behavior that we consider to be moral would have developed fundamentally out of natural selection as the most beneficial behavior for propagating the species. And if that were the case, morality would be simply functional-determined by the biological imperatives of reproduction and survival.
What is good for the species is good.
What is bad for the species is bad.
Morality would be utilitarian, nothing more.
She was staring at the front doors of this giant human cage sorting through her feelings toward all of this when she saw a man step into the hotel, pause, and look around.
The man was Paul Lansing.
Her father.
57
She quickly slid down in the chair and turned her head to the side so he wouldn’t see her.
What is he doing here!
He was following her. He had to be following her!
She unpocketed her cell to call Patrick, but before she could speed-dial him, she had a thought.
Paul thinks Patrick has an anger problem… that he’s violent. ..
If Paul was following her-which obviously he was -then he would definitely have seen Patrick enter the hotel with her. So he would know that her stepfather was close by…
What is Paul trying to do?
There was no way to know for sure, but she didn’t trust him, and considering the custody suit, she couldn’t shake the thought that he was here to somehow ruin her chances of staying with Patrick.
She looked around for a sneak-off route, but as she did, Paul somehow picked out her face from all the others in the crowded lobby and started toward her.
No, no, no!
She put the phone away, grabbed her purse, and was picking up her laptop so she could leave, but as she did, she thought of a way to turn the tables on Paul, especially if he was trying to set up Patrick-if that was his little plan after all.
She left her laptop open.
Tapped at the keys.
Chelsea Traye had covered the shooting six years ago, and it hadn’t taken her long to help Marianne find the right raw footage. Now she was sitting on one side of me, Marianne on the other. Nick stood behind her, taking in the room, obviously impressed.
Marianne was downloading the network’s archived video footage, sending it through her system’s audio recognition program, flagging references to the words “Mollie Fischer,” “Lincoln Towers,” “Gunderson,” “primate,” “metacognition” and a dozen other keywords I’d given her.
“This program tags spoken words,” Marianne explained to us, “then grabs twenty seconds of audio on both sides of them so you can listen to the phrase in context.”
The files and video clips were piling up by the second. I was astonished by the amount of material the station had, and I realized most law enforcement agencies don’t even have the capability for this depth and breadth of research.
I certainly wouldn’t have time to listen to all of this audio right now. “Can you transcribe the audio files into text files?” I noticed Nick holding his cell in his right hand, tapping at the keys with the other. “You need to put that away in here,” I said. “Or you’ll have to leave.”
He looked embarrassed. “Sorry.”
He pocketed the phone, and Marianne said to me, “Sure, I can get you text files.”
She let her fingers loose on the keyboard, and a string of text messages appeared on the screen before me, hyperlinked to place markers in the video footage. And I began scrolling through the hundreds of snippets of text, looking for anything that might relate to Mollie Fischer’s abduction.
58
“Paul,” Tessa said as he approached her. “What are you doing here?” She tried to keep her voice even.
“I came to apologize.”
“Really.”
“Yes.”
“How did you know where I was?”
“One of my lawyers knows Mr. Lees, the manager. He mentioned that the FBI had showed up again and-”
“You’re almost as bad a liar as…” She hesitated. “Some people I know.”
He eyed her. “Would you believe I followed you here from your house?”
She shook her head. “Patrick would have noticed. He would have seen your car.”
Paul spoke softly. “Very few people would have.”
She stared at him questioningly. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.”
“Well, all right, you came to apologize. So apologize.”
“There are some things we need to talk about. Can I have a seat?”
“That’s not an apology.”
“I’m sorry that I was a little overbearing at the museum.”
“A little?”
“Please?” He gestured toward the chair.
She slid her purse and still-open laptop from the chair beside her to the end table and looked away as a way of acquiescing. He sat down, then she eyed him. “I already know what you’re here to talk about-the custody thing.”
“Patrick told you.”
“Of course he told me. I’m his daughter.”
She’d chosen the word daughter on purpose and waited for Paul to dare correct her, but he just accepted it and said, “I want what’s
best for you.”
“Then leave me alone. Leave us both alone. You were never a part of my life before, and we all got by just fine. I don’t like how you took advantage of my mom and I don’t like how you questioned me about Patrick. And I don’t want you around me. End of story.”
“I hear what you’re saying, but remember the letter? The one I sent to your mother when she was planning to abort you? I wanted to be a part of your life. From the very start.”
She hated to admit it, but that much was true, the letter had been unequivocal.
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“You barely even knew Mom. You told me you didn’t love her. Why did you want to be a part of my life?”
“Because I’m your father.” His voice was soft, sincere.
She was quiet.
“Look,” he said. “I came here to clear the air, to tell you what I did before I went to live in Wyoming.”
“I thought you came here to apologize.”
“Both.”
“I already know what you did. You worked for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department.”
“Not quite.”
“Oh, so that was a lie too.”
“I worked for the government.”
“Yeah? So?”
He waited as if he were expecting her to catch on.
Of course she knew that the phrase “I work for the government” was often used as a thinly veiled way to avoid admitting that you worked for the FBI or the DEA or CIA. Or maybe the ATF. You didn’t have to be a Washington insider to know that.
“What?” she said. “Are you telling me you were a spy or something? Oh, or maybe an assassin? A special forces black ops guy?” Then she leaned close and whispered, with faux admiration, “Are you the real G.I. Joe?”
He didn’t argue with her. And his silence seemed to be a way of making his case.
Enough of this.
“Either tell me what you came here to tell me or get lost.”
“I worked for the Secret Service, Tessa.”