Public Enemy

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 another 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.”

Laramie spun the Styrofoam cup of coffee slowly between her hands, wondering idly how it was everybody seemed to know she wasn’t doing this for CIA.

“Well,” she said, “instead of tracking down any such specialist, the people you’re referring to decided to recruit…me. Though maybe they called me additionally, and they’re working with some other specialists separately. You never know.”

“No,” he said, “you don’t, do you?” He ate the broken-off piece of doughnut, which wasn’t much of a mouthful. “But your Benjamin Achar was similar to the Soviet sleepers, at least in the way they were rumored to have been positioned. Assuming he wasn’t some American ex-con running from a shadowy past and looking to emulate Timothy McVeigh, you’ll need to consider that he was trained in all things American. Mannerisms, accent, job skills, and so forth.”

“But not the inclination to buy a pickup truck,” Laramie said.

Rothgeb blinked but otherwise ignored her comment. “Point being, there would have to be a facility, or facilities, where Achar was trained. And unless they only had this one agent, it’d be logical for the trainers to need to cycle instructors through, and to put more than one student together for the training sessions.”

“An Americanization campus,” she said, and took a swallow of the bitter, undiluted coffee. “There was a novel written about that, wasn’t there?”

Rothgeb nodded. “Nelson DeMille. Maybe a check of satellite intel on terrorist encampments could yield a clue as to its whereabouts, presuming it exists in some visible place.”

“I think I’ve examined enough SATINT for ten lifetimes, but that isn’t a bad idea,” she said. “Wherever it is they trained is likely to have been abandoned long ago, though, isn’t it?”

“Because he’s been here for ten years? Still,” he said.

“Yeah. Still.”

She took another sip.

“How have you been,” she said, and thought, Now is when he clams up.

Rothgeb shrugged. It was an uncomfortable gesture for him to make, in that it was imprecise. Everything else, the man did with precision. The shrug came, she suspected, because he needed something to do while avoiding the question, without being too obvious about it.

“Just fine, I suppose,” he said. Coming dangerously close to the last of his diversions, he broke off another piece of doughnut, ate it, took a leisurely sip from his coffee, then said, “It’s our weak spot, you know.”

Laramie looked at him. “Sleepers, you mean.”

“Yes.”

“I would tend to agree we’re vulnerable,” she said, “but what do you mean?”

He ate his next-to-last bite.

“We still haven’t learned to adapt. The big bureaucratic machine engineered to battle the Soviets needed to redirect itself and focus on someone else, somebody specific. So once some new group hit the radar, the machinery targeted it: al-Qaeda. Palestinians. Internally, certain Arab-Americans or Arab immigrants, as you say. We mobilize the big, slow machinery, get set up to fight people who look like that, or come from there, and hope the power steering works.”

Laramie nodded absently.

“You think about the business of spying, though,” he said, “and it’s all about immersion. So here we are mobilizing to attack, while the smarter enemy is busy immersing themselves in our culture. Assimilating.”

Laramie watched his eyes and his mouth as he spoke. She remembered soaking up his words, and watching him say them, while she was immersed in her new life in Evansville. Now, listening to him rant on like the self-absorbed academic he was, Laramie wondered whether she’d made the right move in bringing him here. Maybe that was the real reason she’d stopped by the Krispy Kreme before bringing Rothgeb to the Flamingo Inn: maybe she wanted to make sure it wasn’t too stupid an idea. Adding a pompous blowhard to the mix might spur stimulating debate in their “war room,” but she had her doubts he would help them pinpoint strategies and action plans. Which is precisely what it was going to take-if there were anything at all to be done.

Too late now, Laramie. You brought him here, your guide retrieved him from the airport-you going to send him home already?

Besides-he’s already hit on something.

“You still read spy novels as much as you used to?” she said.

Rothgeb smiled neatly, the motion more compact and precise than the unwieldy shrug in which he’d earlier engaged.

“Aren’t as many good ones as there used to be,” he said. “But I still partake of the occasional best-seller.”

Laramie slipped the plastic lid back on her half-drunk cup of coffee.

“Then let’s head over to the Flamingo Inn,” she said. “You’re in for a treat.”