Hang on.
The hotel might not have footage concerning the assassination attempt, but every news network in the country would have covered the story, and I was willing to bet that the producers at WXTN didn’t trash their footage after six years.
I jogged back to the atrium to catch the news team before they left the hotel.
56
The cameraman was a twentysomething guy with wild, black hair and thick sideburns who introduced himself simply as Nick, which seemed to be exactly the right name for him. Chelsea Traye, the investigative journalist, was graceful, movie-star beautiful, and moved as if every step she took set a trend. I recognized them both as being present at the press conference I’d given yesterday.
After I’d introduced myself I said, “What would it take for you to access your station’s video archives of the coverage following the assassination attempt on Vice President Fischer six years ago?”
They exchanged glances.
“You’re the agent who was shot,” Chelsea observed. “This is for the Mollie Fischer case, isn’t it?”
“It’s for an ongoing investigation.”
“I see.” She gave me a once-over, then asked Nick to give us a minute, and after a small pause, he set his camera on a nearby bench and stepped away.
“If we help you-” she began.
“No deals.” I cut her off. “If you won’t help me, I’ll find a station from another network that will-but that’ll just waste time and that’s not something either of us would want.” I could see that she was mentally trying to fill in the blanks from what I’d left unsaid, undoubtedly calculating costs versus benefits of helping me out.
After a moment she said, “Sure. We can get you the footage.”
“Through the web?”
She nodded. “If you have a fast enough connection-otherwise it would take forever. There might be hundreds of hours of unedited footage.”
I knew that Angela Knight in the Bureau’s cybercrime division could do a metasearch on the computer she affectionately called Lacey, but if Marianne’s system was as advanced as she’d indicated to me yesterday, I could take care of this right now.
“Go get Nick,” I said. “And follow me.”
Tessa had ended her video chat with her friend Pandora and was people-watching, pretending to listen to her iPod. She gazed around the atrium at the skylight, the terraces, the rows of hundreds of doors the guests locked themselves behind every night.
As people passed through the revolving doors at the front entrance, she had a thought: Out of the cage, into the world.
Last winter, Patrick had taken her to Johannesburg, South Africa, while he taught a three-day seminar at the Council of the Africas Crime Analysts’ Symposium, and it had struck her that in one of the most violent cities in the world, the upper class and above live in walled-in subdivisions patrolled by armed guards, with their houses protected by electric fences, security systems, guard dogs, and barred windows and doors.
When Patrick asked what she thought of the city, she’d told him, “The free people live behind bars and the criminals are allowed to run free.”
And after a moment, he’d answered, “I guess that’s a pretty accurate description.”
So here you go again-people deadbolt themselves into their hotel rooms, their cells, while the killers from this week walk around the city. Free.
Cages and freedom.
A zoo by another name.
And that brought the primate center to mind again.
Belle and the mirror self-recognition test.
Even Patrick could tell how much it had troubled her.
The deal wasn’t so much the research they were doing; that all seemed humane enough, as far as any research on animals goes. What bothered her were the implications. After all, the researchers weren’t just studying the neurology of violence but also the neurology of self-awareness, of morality.
Sure, at school she’d learned about evolution-mostly still the outdated theories that we evolved from gorillas, chimpanzees, or other modern knuckle-walking quadrupeds instead of Ardipithecus ramidus, but whatever-whether or not any of that was the case, or if natural selection had any divine intervention, she’d never really considered that there was a continuum of consciousness between humans and other animals.
A continuum of morality.
It didn’t take a genius to put two and two together and realize that if, as Dr. Risel had said, all human traits and behavior can be found in rudimentary form in the animal kingdom, then the difference between humans and animals would be merely one of degree, not of kind.
And that was the idea that bothered her.
In essence, nothing except time and mutation would separate us from other animals. Behavior that we consider to be moral would have developed fundamentally out of natural selection as the most beneficial behavior for propagating the species. And if that were the case, morality would be simply functional-determined by the biological imperatives of reproduction and survival.
What is good for the species is good.
What is bad for the species is bad.
Morality would be utilitarian, nothing more.
She was staring at the front doors of this giant human cage sorting through her feelings toward all of this when she saw a man step into the hotel, pause, and look around.
The man was Paul Lansing.
Her father.
57
She quickly slid down in the chair and turned her head to the side so he wouldn’t see her.
What is he doing here!
He was following her. He had to be following her!
She unpocketed her cell to call Patrick, but before she could speed-dial him, she had a thought.
Paul thinks Patrick has an anger problem… that he’s violent. ..
If Paul was following her-which obviously he was -then he would definitely have seen Patrick enter the hotel with her. So he would know that her stepfather was close by…
What is Paul trying to do?
There was no way to know for sure, but she didn’t trust him, and considering the custody suit, she couldn’t shake the thought that he was here to somehow ruin her chances of staying with Patrick.
She looked around for a sneak-off route, but as she did, Paul somehow picked out her face from all the others in the crowded lobby and started toward her.
No, no, no!
She put the phone away, grabbed her purse, and was picking up her laptop so she could leave, but as she did, she thought of a way to turn the tables on Paul, especially if he was trying to set up Patrick-if that was his little plan after all.
She left her laptop open.
Tapped at the keys.
Chelsea Traye had covered the shooting six years ago, and it hadn’t taken her long to help Marianne find the right raw footage. Now she was sitting on one side of me, Marianne on the other. Nick stood behind her, taking in the room, obviously impressed.
Marianne was downloading the network’s archived video footage, sending it through her system’s audio recognition program, flagging references to the words “Mollie Fischer,” “Lincoln Towers,” “Gunderson,” “primate,” “metacognition” and a dozen other keywords I’d given her.
“This program tags spoken words,” Marianne explained to us, “then grabs twenty seconds of audio on both sides of them so you can listen to the phrase in context.”
The files and video clips were piling up by the second. I was astonished by the amount of material the station had, and I realized most law enforcement agencies don’t even have the capability for this depth and breadth of research.
I certainly wouldn’t have time to listen to all of this audio right now. “Can you transcribe the audio files into text files?” I noticed Nick holding his cell in his right hand, tapping at the keys with the other. “You need to put that away in here,” I said. “Or you’ll have to leave.”