Public Enemy

36

Laramie was in her second hour of sleep following forty-eight without when an obnoxiously loud and persistent knocking dredged her from her pool of slumber.

“I hear you.”

She got her legs around and found the floor, retrieved a pair of jeans, and pulled them on beneath the oversize Lakers T-shirt she always wore to bed-another detail it seemed Ebbers had instructed his minions to heed. A look through her peephole revealed Wally Knowles, looking as chipper as she’d seen him, the man even showing the presence of mind to put on his hat before coming down to see her. She checked her watch-3:43 A.M.-then unlatched the chain and opened the door.

“I think we may have found our boy,” Knowles said.

Laramie perked up. He must have meant they’d got a hit on their custom computer setup-that it had yielded a photograph of Benny Achar taken before he’d adopted his new identity.

When Laramie asked Knowles if that was what he meant, the author jerked his head sideways and disappeared from the door frame, headed back in the direction of his room.

“Better to show,” he said, “than tell.”

They’d imported some serious computer equipment during the past few days, which Knowles had set up on his own in his room. Even to Laramie-who preferred to leave anything with computers to the tech guy who serviced their workstations in Langley-the setup was impressive. A pair of gunmetal gray Power Macintosh towers anchored a system featuring two huge flat-panel monitors, a laser printer, and a box with a strip of green and yellow lights down its front that Laramie figured for the cable modem. As she came in behind Knowles, Laramie saw that Cole was on the phone, using-as instructed-the room’s land line instead of his cell phone. On one of the monitors she could see a grainy, smudged image of a life raft overflowing with people. The boat looked to be out on the ocean, but was about to make landfall-some of the people on the boat were reaching for a dock Laramie could just barely make out on the right-hand side of the picture.

Cole continued with his phone call, offering Laramie a lazy salute with his off hand as Knowles took the seat in front of the monitor and motioned for Laramie to join him for a look. He worked the mouse and the image rewound. Laramie noticed it happened digitally, in that way where pixels and squares could be seen as the image shifted backward in time.

“We got lucky,” Knowles explained, “considering such a measly portion of the actual available pool of images from the past twenty years has been digitized and stored in the consortium’s archives. Most of what has been digitized comes from broadcast and print media, however, which turned out to be useful.”

The image started playing, the raft-almost a small barge, she thought-rolling in the waves. There wasn’t any audio, but Laramie could see a buffeting of the surface of the water, as though from a helicopter-the source of the camera shooting the video, she assumed. The men crammed aboard the boat appeared very animated, most of them gesturing toward the right side of the image, where Laramie knew the dock would soon appear on-screen.

“This is a boat full of Cuban refugees,” Knowles said as the video played, “shot by a local news chopper as the vessel docked somewhere south of Miami.”

The call letters of the local station appeared above the word NewsFile in the lower-left corner of the screen.

“It’s file footage from the local station, dated December 1994. We’ll play the whole clip for you, but this is the part that matters, when the videographer zooms in. I believe U.S. policy was the same then as now-‘wet feet, dry feet.’ If a Cuban refugee makes land here, he’s eligible for asylum. If he’s picked up en route before he makes it in, the Coast Guard has to send him back. These guys made it-by the end of the clip they all climb onto the dock and out of frame. There.”

Knowles pointed to the monitor as the image zoomed in, and six or seven of the men’s faces could be seen more distinctly. In another second or two, a brightened circle of the kind Laramie had seen on police-chase reality shows spotlighted one of the men, and the video image froze.

Even with the granularity of the station’s old footage, Laramie had no problem recognizing the face.

“That’s him,” she said.

Knowles nodded. “Search engine scored the hit about two hours ago. I had an alarm rigged for when the system found a match. Woke up, checked it out, and got Cole in here the minute I saw what you just watched.”

Laramie heard Cole wrapping up his phone call-something about “Thanks, I owe you one”-then he hung up and came over.

“If it’s December of ninety-four,” she said, “that’s only a month or two before Achar showed up in the first Florida docs.”

“Yep.” Knowles eased back in his seat, looking somewhat overwhelmed with self-satisfaction.

“He was Cuban, then,” she said. Then she thought about this some more. “Or at least he came here from there.”

“Yep,” Knowles said again.

Cole had come over to stand silently above them.

“Castro’s last-ditch effort to take down the capitalist pigs up north,” Laramie said, “seems an unlikely version of this conspiracy at best. No way he cares enough anymore. Or has the resources.”

“We’re in agreement on that,” Knowles said. “But the guy may still have been Cuban.”

Laramie said, “Maybe. But somebody could have dumped the raft in the water, or put the people on it, to make it seem that way.”

Knowles nodded. “Could have,” he said. “Of course that’s not the only clue this image gives us.”

Laramie had the idea they’d been through all of this before he’d come to get her, and decided she was irritated they hadn’t called her over immediately. Though maybe they’d wanted to do some follow-up first-have some “show rather than tell” ready for her by the time she came down the hall.

“The other people on the boat,” she said, her brain starting to click.

“Right.”

“If we search in the other direction,” she said, “working from the faces on the boat, then maybe we find some other sleepers.”

Cole nodded.

“Already under way,” he said. “Been dipping into some of the data banks your friend the guide knows how to get into. Once we got some hits on the faces-meaning matches with photos in the federal or local databases Wally and I plugged into the search engine-we were able to determine that two of Achar’s pals aboard the boat were busted for armed robbery-manslaughter charges were part of it too-and sent to prison in Dade County in 1997. Two others have been in and out of jail for smaller crimes, possession and so on, for most of the eleven years since they came over. We’re shooting for some other angles, but so far it looks like nobody else on the boat can be shown to have stolen the identity of somebody who died. At least not yet. It’s a maze-we need to find each man’s Social Security number from a starting point of his image on that tape, then check whether the Social registers as one belonging to somebody who’s already dead. Like we talked about, almost none of this kind of thing is kept electronically, but we’re starting that way just in case-it’s faster than our other search method if it works.”

Laramie looked at the image on the monitor and counted-twenty-two men on the boat.

“We’re checking for other boats from the same time period too?”

“Yep,” Knowles said. “And the search engine’s still working on the other faces from this boat. Assuming the search comes up dry, all this really means is that our pal, public enemy number one, doesn’t appear to have shipped all of his sleepers over on one boat, all at once. Assuming there’s more than one.”

Laramie nodded. “Suppose it was too much to expect for ten of them to be caught on tape, all on the same boat.”

Knowles looked at Cole, who nodded his affirmation of something.

“It’s late,” Knowles said, “but we’re up. We were thinking we’d give you the other updates now, get back to sleep, then get back on it around nine or ten A.M.”

Laramie had planned to do a roundtable at eight, to include Rothgeb, and maybe even Cooper by phone. Now she might just have something for Cooper to do. There might be some investigative work to be done in Cuba-work up a notion with Eddie Rothgeb on what sort of “Americanization facility” he should be looking for, then send Cooper on his way.

Maybe I could even go with him.

She immediately became infuriated with herself for thinking this final thought, and nodded quickly at Knowles in a vain attempt to expel it from her brain.

“Go ahead with your update,” she said.

Cole retreated to his seat by the phone and started in.

“Been interviewing, interrogating, and otherwise hassling every name that popped up in the terror book,” he said. “Plus a few more that didn’t. If you care, I think my tally is up to fifty-two interviews so far, and I’ve set another fourteen for today. Besides the fact that most of these conversations are basically putting me to sleep, I’m on to something-some kind of pattern, I think-I’m just not sure what. There are some consistent, and unique, pieces of his weekly routine-two events per week, I believe-which may have served as the ‘bread crumbs’ we’ve been speculating he may have left. I’m just not positive my theory makes sense yet.”

Laramie considered this for a moment but couldn’t grasp how it would work.

“You’re saying he might have left messages in those places?” she said. “In the bar where he hung out with his buddies on Thursday nights, or-”

“Yes and no,” Cole said. “Probably not literally. And not that obviously. But what I was thinking is, it might be in the numbers of the get-togethers.”

Knowles said, “Fourth day of the week at seven, for instance.”

“Right. I’ll have more today after I wrap up the circuit of interviews, but if I’m right-if he’s trying to give us a couple sets of numbers as the clue-then this guy was very, very good. For example, I’ve found no evident ‘confessions’ like we talked about before, and that’s pretty rare. Almost contrary to human nature if you’re talking ten years of undercover work. Even cops love to give themselves away to anybody who’s smart enough to figure it out. I’ll give you an example: I met a guy once who’d done some undercover work, and the name they gave him in his cover job on the docks was ‘Bobby Covert.’”

“As in covert operations?” Laramie said.

“One and the same.”

“You’re telling me nobody figured it out?”

“Nope-the guy busted a whole tier of New Jersey organized crime chiefs while working undercover at a trucking company under that name the whole time.”

“You said there were two pieces of his routine,” Laramie said, her mind a few lines back.

“Yeah,” Cole said. “That’s what I’m thinking. But I’m not positive.”

“Involving numbers?”

“I think it’s twice per week that he set regular appointments he never broke, but I haven’t boiled down the consistent, well-I guess you’d say least common denominators of the get-togethers. You know, which pieces, such as time of day, that might give us a code from the weekly arrangements he made.”

Laramie said, “But maybe the meeting times, if that’s what you’re talking about, are giving us numbers?”

“Not sure. There’s a hundred possibilities, from address to time to day and date, and so on. But he had two weekly things going-outside of obligatory work stuff, ordinary kid stuff, and dates with his wife. If you look only at the day of the week and the time, there’s a few ways to get either two or three numbers for each get-together. What are you getting at?”

“Two numbers, each in two or three sets,” Laramie said, “could mean he’s giving us GPS coordinates. Latitude and longitude in, what-‘degrees, minutes, seconds,’ right? Three sets. The third set, the seconds, sometimes being left out.”

Cole sat up a little straighter in his chair. For a moment, Laramie thought she was able to catch a glimpse of the lean, athletic cop Cole might once have been.

“Christ,” he said. “Here’s the thing-I wanted to flesh this out before going over it with you. Reason being, it’s insane at best to consider two weekly outings with friends a pattern, and a pattern expressing a code on top of it-”

“Go on,” Laramie said.

“Well, outside of work, his wife, and any practice, games, or class appointments with his kid, it’s looking like Achar kept two, and only two, regular appointments each week. One on Monday, when he would take his break at quarter after four and get two coffees from the Circle Diner. He’d bring the coffees back to the UPS facility and hand one off to the dispatcher, the girl named Lois-”

“When did you find that out?” Laramie said, amazed he’d found this when even Mary the profiler had not.

“Spent quite a while with her.” Cole offered a smirk and left it at that. “I don’t think they had anything going either, by the way, and I’d also discount the theory of her being some sort of control. But she confirmed to me that on Mondays, and Mondays only, he would radio in his break, and when he did, meaning each Monday, he’d always come back from the break with a coffee for her on his way back out to the job. Extra cream, one sugar.”

“Okay,” Laramie said.

“Second consistency was Tuesday night, for pool and darts at a tavern called Latona with seven of his buddies from work.”

“Seven, specifically?” Laramie said.

“Yep, interviewed them all, talked to Janine Achar for confirmation. Dispatcher not among the ‘buddies from work,’ in case you wondered. Anyway, he and the fellas met at five-thirty at the Latona every Tuesday after work.”

Laramie remembered seeing something about this in the terror book.

“Anyway, the reason I wanted to flesh this out on my own,” Cole said, “besides it maybe being nothing, is the huge list of numbers or factors that could plug into a code. There’s day of the week, the date, the time, the address of each of the events-coffee shop, pub, et cetera-plus, it could be the names of the places or the streets are figured into the code, if there is one. Maybe even the number of people involved at each event. But it’s interesting when you raise the GPS issue. If GPS coordinates have three sets of-”

“Either two or three sets of one-or two-digit numbers,” Laramie said, “more or less. Depending on how specific the reading is. If it’s just the latitude and longitude in ‘degrees’ and ‘minutes,’ for instance, and not down to street specificity, then it’s two sets for lat, two sets for long. If it’s more pinpointed, ‘seconds’ are provided too.”

“We work from there then,” Knowles said.

Cole had begun nodding.

“Two or three numbers would make sense as the simplest pattern you can generate from his appointments,” he said, “because you can come up with numbers solely from the days and times-or maybe the days and times and number of people involved. So, for instance: Monday-first day of the week; four-fifteen P.M. is the time; two people in the get-together, including him. Pick the numbers as you see fit. Tuesday’s day two, at five-thirty-and either seven or eight participants-depending on whether you count Achar in the number again.”

Knowles moved the mouse and the dual monitors came back to life, long since having gone to sleep. Laramie watched as he Googled a GPS translation site, asked for a repeat on the first shot at numbers Cole had just taken, then entered one combination of degrees, minutes, and seconds for both latitude and longitude based on what Cole had stated. Laramie noticed Knowles mouthed the numbers to help himself remember them.

“Here’s what we might get,” Knowles said, “using the factors you suggest and in the order you mentioned them.”

He hit the Enter key. A fairly slow-loading map came up in a box, a red crosshair graphic centered on the map-over the middle of the Indian Ocean.

“Store that just in case,” Laramie said, “but I don’t see any relevance in an Indian Ocean location. Try again.”

Knowles found a pad and began taking notes while he entered numbers on the computer. “I’ll keep track of all the combinations,” he said.

Another location popped up on the map, this time off the coast of Greenland. Knowles kept at it with various combinations, eliminating one after another, as a variety of unlikely locations for anything related to Americanization training or sleeper agents popped up in the crosshairs on the map.

“Doesn’t matter,” Knowles said. “Trial and error. Let’s reverse it.”

Cole said, “You mean, people first, then day of week, then time?”

“Right.”

Cole laid that version out for him: two, one, four-one-five; eight, two, five-three.

Laramie thought of something as another few open-ocean locations resulted from what Knowles entered.

“Simplify it,” she said. “Eliminate the seconds. If we’re going with this order, the seconds would be the minutes past the hour of the meeting time.”

Knowles punched in 21-4 for latitude, 82-5 for longitude.

Cole mumbled something about trying the addresses, and was in the process of rising to retrieve his notes, when the crosshairs centered on a section of the Caribbean just south of the western portion of Cuba.

None of them said anything for a moment.

Cole said, “That where they dumped him on the boat, maybe?”

“Sunday,” Laramie said. “Not Monday.”

Cole looked at her.

“Sunday’s the first day of the week,” she said. “First day of the work week is Monday, but-I took French in my training program, that’s what made me think of it-you’re learning French, you know what they teach you early on? That the French count Monday as the first day of the week. Lundi, mardi, mercredi… But we count Sunday as the first day of the week on our calendars. And if he was being formally Americanized, that’s what they would teach him early on. That’s the way he would assume we would think of the days of the week, because that’s what he’d have been taught.”

Knowles already had the boxes filled in: 22-4, 83-5. He hit Enter again.

Resolving itself in the same, slow fashion, the red crosshairs centered over the Cuban landmass this time-a hundred miles from the southwestern tip of the island.

“I’ll be damned,” Cole said.

“Map kind of speaks for itself,” Knowles said.

Laramie looked at the map, and its red crosshair graphic.

“San Cristóbal,” she said, naming the city adjoining the red crosshair graphic. She offered Cole a whack on the shoulder. “Nice work, Detective.”

“You ain’t kidding,” Knowles said. “Also, we might want to go back in and add the ‘seconds’ based on the number of minutes past four and five P.M. that he held his meetings. Could be he narrowed it down even better than this.”

Something occurred to Laramie about the location of the crosshair, but she decided she could confirm her suspicion later. She’d take a look at what she figured to lie in the crosshairs-just as soon as she got a hold of the operative they’d paid twenty million bucks to place in their tool kit.

She thought of something else that had been working its way around her head during their discussion.

“Now we know the role Lois the dispatcher played,” she said.

Knowles and Cole looked at her, not grasping it yet.

“By my guess,” she said, “he made friends with her because she was the one who could ensure he keep his schedule-week in, week out.”

Knowles considered the notion, then nodded.

“You may be right,” he said.

Laramie stood.

“I think it’s about time I gave our operative a call,” she said.