Daniel Blake - City of Sins

1. Whether the person appears to be in a position to provide information concerning violations of law that are within the scope of authorized FBI investigative activity.

He had to presume that Cindy was in such a position, else she wouldn’t have come to him in the first place. As Varden’s PA, she must be privy to vast swathes of information, much of it private and sensitive. Tick that.

2. Whether the individual is willing to voluntarily furnish information to the FBI.

She’d approached him, hadn’t she? Not the other way round. Another tick.

3. Whether the individual appears to be directed by others to obtain information from the FBI.

Unlikely. If Varden wanted to find out something from the FBI, all he had to do was ask Phelps. In any case, Patrese had been a cop, if not an agent, long enough to recognize the moment in an investigation when a suspect, snitch, witness, whoever, started asking questions rather than answering them.

4. Whether there is anything in the individual’s background that would make him/her unfit for use as an informant.

Patrese didn’t know the first thing about Cindy, of course; not even her surname. Something Polish, it had sounded like when Phelps had introduced them, but he couldn’t have repeated it, let alone spelled it.

He Googled ‘Varden’, found the company website, and dialed the main switchboard. Best not to announce his interest too clearly, he thought.

‘Good morning, Varden Industries.’

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘I’m calling from FedEx. We have a package for someone in Mr Varden’s office, but I’m afraid the surname’s illegible. It’s a Cindy someone.’

‘That’ll be Mr Varden’s PA, sir. Cindy Rojciewicz.’

‘Spell that for me, please.’

‘Certainly, sir. R-O-J-C-I-E-W-I-C-Z.’

‘Thank you. The courier will be round later.’

Patrese hung up, logged into the National Instant Criminal Background Check database, and entered Cindy’s name.

No matches.

Then he Googled her.

Turned out her father was a congressman. Roger Rojciewicz, Republican, and therefore known in Washington as 3R. He represented Louisiana’s first congressional district, which comprised land both north and south of Lake Pontchartrain, including most of New Orleans’ western suburbs and a small portion of the city proper. And he seemed quite the bigshot: chairman of the Congressional Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, and a member both of the Homeland Security Subcommittee and the Committee of Appropriations too.

No surprise how Cindy had got her job with Varden, then.

About her personally, Patrese found much less. She was pictured on a high school reunion website, and she’d written condolences on a tribute board to a teenager who’d committed suicide. Every other appearance she made on the web was Varden-related, and pretty anodyne at that: job applications, media inquiries.

He wondered if he’d have been so keen to find out more about her without an official excuse, and realized that he already knew the answer.

5. Whether the nature of the matter under investigation and the importance of the information being furnished to the FBI outweigh the seriousness of any past or contemporaneous criminal activity of which the informant may be suspected.

See above, Patrese guessed.

6. Whether the motives of the informant in volunteering to assist the FBI appear to be reasonable and proper.

This was key. Informants tend to be motivated by one or more of MICE: money, ideology, compromise, ego. Cindy’s behavior the previous day had suggested ideology more than anything else. She’d used the words ‘terrible’ and ‘tainted’, as though whatever she wanted to tell him was some great moral wrong which needed righting.

But there could be – in Patrese’s experience, there usually was – more to it than that. Informants never had just one reason for snitching, and the reasons they did have were rarely static, waxing and waning in importance as an investigation progressed.

Points seven through ten were all things Patrese would find out only once the investigation had begun: whether they could get the information in a better way; whether the informant was reliable and trustworthy; whether the informant was willing to conform to FBI guidelines; and whether the FBI would be able to adequately monitor the informant’s activities.

Point eleven concerned legalities of privileged communications, lawful association and freedom of speech. One for the lawyers to argue over. All billable, of course.

12. Whether the use of the informant could compromise an investigation or subsequent prosecution that may require the government to move for a dismissal of the case.

Patrese thought for a moment. He wasn’t aware of any current investigation which this could compromise, but that meant nothing. He was still the new kid here, and if he knew anything, it was that what he didn’t know far outweighed what he did.

Perhaps he should ask Phelps about this.

Perhaps he should talk to Phelps anyway.

Cindy had told Patrese not to tell anyone, hadn’t she?

Actually, he remembered, she hadn’t. She’d said: ‘Tell one of them, you tell the whole lot,’ but that wasn’t the same thing, not at all.

And she must have known that, if she involved Patrese, she’d be involving Phelps too, sooner or later. She’d hardly expect Patrese to run something like this without the knowledge of his own boss; and if she did, she was clearly deranged, and therefore by definition not worth bothering with.

Patrese dialed Phelps’ extension.

‘Hi, Franco.’

‘Hey, Sondra.’ Sondra, Phelps’ secretary, was the longest-serving employee in the entire New Orleans field office. Phelps was the tenth Special Agent-in-Charge for whom she’d worked. She liked to joke that she was the Crescent City’s own version of the Queen of England; her prime ministers might come and go, but she was always there, though admittedly a little older and grayer each time around.

‘Is the gran queso there?’ Patrese asked.

‘Franco, I keep telling you, you’re in a French city now. Grande fromage. And no, he’s not around. He’s out of town today.’

‘How about tomorrow?’

‘Tomorrow he’s here, in the city, but not here, in the office. Conference down at the Convention Center. You wanna call him, you want me to put you in the diary for Thursday, or is it anything I can help with?’

Patrese toyed for a moment with the idea of telling her about Cindy. Sondra might not have been an agent, but she’d probably give better advice than the rest of them put together.

But Cindy was Varden’s PA, and when it came to Varden, Patrese already knew, treading carefully was the order of the day. He didn’t want to involve Sondra with something that wasn’t her problem; nor did he want to ring Phelps and get a snatched few minutes on the phone. He wanted to ask Phelps his advice face-to-face, talk through the options with him one by one.

But he couldn’t do that before he’d seen Cindy.

The hell with it, Patrese thought. He’d keep the rendezvous, commit himself to nothing, and brief Phelps when it was done. If Phelps chewed him out, so be it.

‘Thursday morning’s fine,’ Patrese said.

‘Great. He’s got fifteen minutes at ten. That do?’

‘That does nicely. Thanks.’

Patrese hung up and stared out of the window. The view was hardly National Geographic: the parking lot out the front of the building, and the traffic rumbling along Leon C. Simon. He needed another couple of pay grades to get one of the higher floors looking out the back over Lake Pontchartrain.

He turned his attention back to the manual.

The single biggest mistake an agent can make in his relationship with the confidential informant is to become romantically involved.