Conspiracy

152

The first ten thousand or so letters were a little interesting, but even with the computer doing 99.9 percent of the work, Gallo found the comparisons beyond boring. He had to me-chanically queue each batched correspondence file with the e-mailed threats so the computer could compare them. An hour into the project and he was falling over the keyboard, half-asleep. He tried drinking a Coke, standing rather than sitting, kneeling rather than standing, punching things in with his left hand rather than his right. But it was still dread-fully dull and routine.

His work was made harder by the fact that the files that the FBI had created during its investigation of the threat occasionally contained mistakes, like adding correspondence and in several cases memos from the senator’s office, which threw off the analysis. Gallo had to inspect each file and strip that material out. Fortunately, he quickly learned that the files that were most likely to be “polluted” were large ones, and he zeroed in on those, stripping out the correspondence and memos, then resaving the file and running it through the tool.

He had just found a particularly large file, complete with several letters and three staff memos, when an instant message blipped on his computer screen from Angela DiGiacomo asking if he wanted to have dinner.

Well, yeah!

Whoa.

But how did he feel about a woman taking the initiative?

Like he should’ve said something himself weeks ago.

He shot back a message, asking when she wanted to go.

Waiting for her reply and seriously distracted, he managed to delete the wrong material from the file before inserting it into the tool.

The funny thing was, the tool came back with an 87 percent match — the best hit of the night, by far.

“Same person! ” yelped Johnny Bib.

And it really was a yelp. Rubens thought Johnny looked as if he was in physical pain, his hands twisting together.

“Read the memos!” said Johnny. “Note: uses colon.

E-mail threat: uses colon. Likes to use the word ‘now.’ No serial comma. Perfect spelling.”

“Well, that could be spell-check,” said Gallo.

Rubens studied the documents and the report from the textual analysis tool, which purported to have discovered the author of the death threats among McSweeney’s staff. While in general Rubens was a big believer in technology, he had his doubts about this tool — there were too many vicissitudes involved in writing even something as simple as an e-mail note or memo.

He turned to Gallo. “What do you think, Mr. Gallo?”

“Looks like it’s a match,” said Gallo. “But the guy is on the senator’s staff.”

Rubens turned toward the front of the Art Room. “Ms.

Telach, where is Mr. Karr at the moment?”

“He’s at the house where Senator McSweeney was shot, talking to the Secret Service people.”

“Tell him to locate James Fahey. Tell him to watch him carefully.”

“Fahey is with his boss,” said Telach. “At the hospital.”

“Charlie Dean’s on his way there with the President,” said Rockman. “They’re just pulling up.”