“Did you have enough to make a call?”
“Well, our technicians don’t make calls. They measure, they tabulate, and they issue a finding. In this case, the finding was nothing.”
“So nothing is good?”
“Nothing means we can detect under various of our testings no indication of the presence of fractal discrepancies which would suggest photo manipulation techniques have been employed. Is it genuine? Well, that’s the kind of contextual decision you have to make. That’s about history, provenance, even trust. Not our department. What I’m telling you is that we will issue a bonded statement, and defend it in court if so required, that we discovered no meaningful evidence of photo manipulation in the photo you sent us. If that’s your definition of ‘authentic,’ then you have your ‘authenticity,’ Mr. Banjax.”
“Nobody doctored it?”
“You’ll never get me to say that. What you will get me to say is that at the level of detail of which our laboratory is capable-the best in the country in commercial use-there is no tangible evidence of fractal discrepancy.”
“To me, that would be authentic.”
And to the Times, that would be authentic too.
Suddenly the air was sweet and chilled, and oh so much fun to breathe.
I did it, he thought. I got him. I got Nick Memphis.
34
It was not a good day, but then there’d been few good days for Task Force Sniper since the suspension of Nick and the arrival of the Robot. The Robot had a name but no one ever said it; he was, it was alleged, human, just as they all were; he just never showed it. He was the director’s designated enforcer, who was sent to trouble spots in the Bureau with instructions to make the trouble go away and make all the people who were making the trouble go away as well. His means were generally not pleasant. Like his namesake, he accomplished this task with mechanistic grinding and trampling; it was said that he could walk through walls and that heat rays burst from his fists when necessary.
It wasn’t that the Robot was on the warpath. He was never not on the warpath, the warpath being the state of his life and career. It was that this particular day, he himself had gotten a prod in the butt from the director about the Task Force Sniper report, and since it fell to the team of Chandler and Fields to write it, and since Fields was a bum writer, it fell really to Chandler, and she felt everything grinding downward upon her.
“You can’t move any faster?” the Robot demanded.
“Sir, it’s writing. It’s more nuanced; you have to find the best ways of saying things; you have troubles and problems and you have to reconcile conflicting evidence on nearly every page. It’s not like something you can just do.”
“It’s not a novel. It doesn’t need a style. It’s not supposed to fly along. Nobody’s publishing it except a Xerox machine.”
“Yes sir, and I’m not Agatha Christie either, but it’s got to make sense, be smooth, hang together, and give its readers a clear view of the case and our conclusions. That takes time.”
“Is your support up to par?”
Of course it wasn’t. The problem was Ron Fields, a brilliant operator, a former SWAT hero with more than a few gunfight wins to his credit, an up-and-comer of the Nick school, decent and true and modest and funny, but… he seemed kind of dumb. He was certainly no writer. A giant in the professional world, as her coauthor he became a kind of erratic junior member, lazy and mysteriously absent, and his warrior’s reputation made it difficult for poor new girl Starling to cope.
On the other hand, she had a terrible crush on him, as she did on Nick, and she was never going to be one of those headquarters snitch bitches who rises on complaints of others’ ineptitude.
“Agent Fields is a fine collaborator, sir.”
“There are a lot of people in Washington who want this thing on their desks yesterday. I only tell you what you know, but I tell it in a loud voice in case you’ve forgotten it. If you need help, sing out. I’ll get you interns, secretaries, typists, the works. I’ll even hire John Grisham.”
“I’ve just got to get it right.”
“I know you liked Memphis. Everybody liked Memphis. But you can’t let any affection for him frost your efforts for me and your job on this assignment. I’ve heard it said that the task force agents are dawdling because they want to see Memphis cleared of these charges and are waiting to see if someone on the new suspect list takes the investigation in another direction. Tell me that’s not true.”
“Sir, I’m just working as hard as I can, that’s all.”
“Okay, okay, get back to it. Why are you wasting time on me?” And with that the Robot lurched onward, looking for another target to destroy, slightly frustrated because the girl had not crunched under as he’d thought she might.
And the other thing: he had her dead to rights. She had been stalling dreadfully, trying to keep from reaching the last page, and getting the sign-offs by the others. Because once the report-this report, with this conclusion-was issued, it became the narrative, the official version, even if she and most of the others weren’t quite sold on it. But it seemed everyone in Washington wanted this poor guy Carl Hitchcock hung out to dry and all the evidence accepted as planned. The only way to halt that narrative was to halt the report that encapsulated it; that was its primary marketing tool. So she was in the absurd position of subverting her own biggest professional break because she didn’t quite believe in what was being said. And because she felt something for Nick; he’d been decent to her and he always apologized when he called her Starling, even though everybody now did and would forever.
But there wasn’t much more she could do. Wiggle room was down to zero.
The narrative, as they wanted, was all but done. It was exactly what everybody said was called for, a professional indictment of Carl Hitchcock, all i’s dotted, all t’s crossed, each bit of damning evidence assembled in its place, properly weighted, admirably described, the chain of events transparently clear: how this old warrior had cracked and gone off to reclaim the kill record.
She kept waiting for the day when one of the field agents working the list of new possibles that Swagger had turned up would deliver the key piece of dope that would smash the Hitchcock thesis, but it never happened. One by one the possibles became impossible: out of the country, dead, accounted for during that week, almost all of them, if not killing, off teaching. Jesus, far from being macho gung ho gun boys, professional snipers were like rabbis during the Middle Ages, heading from talmudic center to talmudic center, there to instruct, argue, dispute, spread reputation, enforce the orthodox, denounce the apostates, form and reform cliques, network like young movie actors. Good lord, who would have thought it?
But now-
Oh great, the cell in her purse. That was her private number and only her boyfriend had it and her boyfriend was in Kuwait this week going through some Al Jazeera tapes that might have been plants or might be the real McCoy. Only one other person had the number.
“Swagger, what?” she said.
“Agent Starling, hello. Consider this an anonymous tip-”
“Where are you?”
“If I’m anonymous, I ain’t nowhere, am I? Here’s your tip. You go to the University of Chicago, Department of Education, where Jack Strong was a professor. You subpoena the hard drive on his computer; you open his e-mail. Be sure to do it nice and legal-like so it can go into evidence.”
“Swagger, what the hell-”
“Are you getting this, young lady? What you’ll find is an amply documented relationship between him and a fellow named TomC, who you will certainly be able to identify as Tom Constable-”
“Swagger, I warned you-”