The first time through, she just listened.
During the second playback, she edited out all other speakers except for Meredith and made time-annotated notes.
She was the team’s RS: Social — deciphering human behavior was her specialty — and she wanted as many data points as possible. So, for the third playback, she fetched AJ and asked him to listen. She wanted to watch his expressions, compare his untrained visceral reactions to her own conclusions, without having his judgments influenced by hers.
“Are you ready?”
“Yes,” he said.
She pressed “play” and watched AJ in silence. She had not told him why she wanted him to wear headphones, and he had not asked. As he listened, she took notes on a clean sheet of paper. If he twitched, nodded, sighed, changed his facial expression, or even blinked, she would jot down the time from the playback counter. When the recording finished, she retrieved the notes from her previous listening session and laid them next to the notes she had just taken. She scanned the time stamps for matches. She had made nineteen entries on her sheet, and seven on his. Between the two sheets, she identified two times that matched to the second.
“Interesting,” he commented as he watched her work.
She nodded and cued up the first matching time.
“Shall we listen to the two matching sections together?”
“Absolutely.”
“Okay, here is the first one we both reacted to.”
“For the past ten years, Vyrogen and its subsidiaries have been working on developing vaccines and treatments for the diseases that can be used as biological weapons. We are also searching for treatments for other global killers such as malaria, AIDS, ALS, etcetera. You name it; we want to find a way to treat it.”
“When you were listening to this, you scratched your neck repeatedly with your index finger below your right ear,” she said, looking at her notes. “What bothered you about this segment?”
“I’m not really sure. Why does it matter that I scratched my neck?”
“Neck scratching is a common reaction by a listener indicating anxiety or disagreement to what a speaker is saying.”
“I didn’t know that.”
She lifted her notes for him to see. “When I listened to this segment, the following thought came to mind.”
TREATMENT ≠ CURE
“Interesting,” he mumbled.
“I thought so, too. Why would Meredith say ‘you name it, we want to find a way to treat it’ and not ‘you name it, we want to find a way to cure it’?”
He nodded. “If we take her words literally, then she doesn’t want to find cures. She wants to find treatments.”
She smiled. “Exactly. Now replace the word ‘find’ with the word ‘supply’. She doesn’t want to supply cures; she wants to supply treatments. It seems like nuance, but it’s actually paradigmatic.”
“Go on.”
“We should ask ourselves the following question: Is Big Pharma, like Vyrogen, in the business of selling cures or selling treatments? Consider this: if you cure a patient of disease, you make a sale, but ultimately you lose your customer. But when you treat a patient, you have an ongoing revenue stream. Keeping their customers for life, that’s the strategic business model that benefits Vyrogen most. Why do you think drug companies like to label every ailment a disease or syndrome? Is acid reflux really a disease? What about obesity? Drug companies want us to think so. That way they can sell us a little purple pill that we have to take every day for the rest of our lives.”
“That’s cynical.”
She sighed. “That’s reality.”
“What about BioShield? How does that fit into this equation?”
“I’m not sure yet, but the web is growing more and more tangled, isn’t it?”
“I’d say so. I guess it’s our job to untangle it.”
“We wouldn’t be paid like sultans if it were otherwise,” she replied. “Let’s move on to the next match.”
She entered the time of the second match and pressed PLAY to hear the clip.
“To our surprise, Foster became ill during the trial period. Testing revealed that he was infected with a mutated strain of H1N1—but a different strain from the one we were targeting with the vaccine. This warranted placing him in quarantine and contacting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”
“What did she say here that’s suspicious?” AJ asked.
“It’s not what she said, but what she did when she was saying it. Let me play the clip back again on mute.”
AJ watched intently as Albane played the video. “I don’t notice anything unusual.”
“Watch again in two times fast forward.”
“Oh! It looks like she’s swatting at her nose. She did it twice, in rapid succession.”
“You didn’t notice it before at normal time lapse because our mind is accustomed to screening out familiar gestures as mundane. Changing the speed of the video opens the mind to a new perception.”
“What does it mean? The gesture, that is?”
“Nose touching is one of the most informative tells for lying.”
“Maybe she just has a cold or allergies. I have allergies and my nose and eyes bother me all the time,” AJ said. “I’m always rubbing my eyes and wiping my nose.”
“It’s a question of context, of course. The cornerstone of reading body language is first understanding the context in which the subject is interacting. In this case, Meredith is speaking publicly, and she is the center of attention. I can say with confidence that the tell is legitimate, not allergy related.”
“Why is nose touching a tell for lying?”
“It’s a well-documented and — studied phenomenon. Research has found that when a person is lying, a chemical called catecholamine is released in the body, causing tissue inside the nose to swell. The increased blood pressure inflates the nose. This in turn causes the nerve endings in the end of nose to tingle, resulting in an unmistakable itch. Without professional training to suppress the behavior, a liar will invariably rub his or her nose to alleviate the sensation.”
“You’re kidding. Sounds like Pinocchio.”
“It’s actually referred to as the Pinocchio Effect.”
“What is she lying about?”
“The tell isn’t that specific. It only tells me Meredith is lying, but not what piece of information she’s lying about.”
“We know for certain that Foster was infected with a mutated version H1N1, or they wouldn’t have put him in quarantine,” AJ said.
“Not necessarily. You are failing into the trap of assuming that everything the client tells us is true. In my experience, we should question all assumptions. Nothing is fact until we corroborate the information ourselves.”
“How can we ever move forward if we have to fact-check every aspect of the case?”
“Sometimes it’s better to jog in place, than to sprint down the wrong path and be forced to double back.”
AJ hesitated. “Chiarek Norse? We’re not seriously going to…”
“What you are alluding to is something we refer to in the Tank as sampling the client,” she said.
AJ nodded, no further explanation was necessary. “Isn’t that a bit, uh,—”
“Risky.”
“I was going to say illegal, but yeah, I guess risky sums it up.”
“Sampling the client is sometimes a necessary part of our job. Once you’re in this business long enough, you come to realize that our clients are not always entirely forthcoming with us,” she explained. “Sometimes we need to take a peek inside the purse of the lady of the house, while she’s in the other room. The decision to sample the client is not a decision that you or I have the authority to make.”