Will Staeger - Public Enemy

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.