Lake Marie, New Hampshire
I’m standing so close to the disgraced professor that I can smell his clothes and his sweat, and I don’t care. I say, “Explain it again. Slowly. With details I can understand. Please, professor.”
And I think, If you’re crazy or bullshitting me in any way, there’s a shovel in the corner and a dirt basement floor behind me.
“Certainly,” he says. “It’s a study that I came up with a few years back, with assistance from a couple of my more intelligent grad students. It used to be that forensic investigators were just looking at the blood pattern, what’s now known as spatter. You can examine a pattern at a crime scene, and most times, you can deduce where the victim was standing, or sitting, or if he or she resisted, and how the body was later transported. It’s all there, if you know how to read the spatter.”
He taps the side of his forehead, smiles. His teeth are yellow.
The professor says, “I took it to another level, by introducing the concept of fluid dynamics. When a fluid like blood is expelled, it makes a world of difference if the blood is fresh or stored. They act like two completely different sets of fluids. The consistency, the levels of oxygenation—all that comes into play. You can then determine if the blood spatter was part of the actual crime or an afterthought, to set up a crime scene that has a false message. I wrote two papers on this for the journal Forensic Science International that received very positive responses from my colleagues.”
He taps again, this time on the screen. “This is not fresh blood. In fact, if I had a better version of this video recording, I could make a strong case that it’s not even human blood.”
The little flare of hope inside of me is growing hard and fast, threatening to overtake my common sense and skepticism.
“But the earlier part of the video,” I say. “The…the sword and the beheading. Couldn’t that be real?”
He shakes his head, sits back on the stool, crosses his arms. “For what purpose? A real beheading followed by a fake blood spurt? What would be the point? Besides, before I was forced to leave the university, there were already studies under way because of the concern over what’s known as deepfake videos. Taking a real video recording of President Barnes, for example, and changing her business suit into latex and feathers, like a Las Vegas showgirl, to make it look like she was taking part in some naughty Vegas revue. Anyone with experience in filmmaking or special effects could probably come up with a way to take a real video of your daughter and then splice in a beheading scene.”
Agent Stahl starts to say something, and I snap, “No, not now! Everybody just shut up, just don’t say a word.”
I close my eyes.
Trying hard to remember.
When I was president, each minute, half hour, and hour was scheduled down to the second, every day, even the weekends. With meetings, briefings, and reports. Being asked to make decisions and judgments in areas from the economy to human rights to diplomacy to domestic issues and politics. A week into my presidency, not long after the funeral of my predecessor, I had a childhood memory. I remembered reading a paperback novel—with its cover torn off—that had been one of the few possessions of my father’s that came back from the oil rig after his death.
The book, called The Multiple Man, was published in 1976, and it took place sometime in an imagined future when the world was so deadly and complex that the elected president had six secretly cloned brothers, each one an expert in one field. Working together, each was able to bring his own special expertise to their collective administration during a very challenging era.
It seemed fantastic and off-the-wall at the time, but later, in trying to remember all the details from that constant treadmill of meetings and briefings when I was in the Oval Office, it all made intriguing sense: some science fiction future, on the page or on the screen—
I open my eyes.
“Faraj Al-Asheed,” I say. “Asim’s younger cousin. I received a number of intelligence briefings on him as well, during the run-up to that raid. Before he joined jihad with Asim, he was in Paris. Attending film school. With an emphasis on fantasy, science fiction, and special effects.”
I reach for the keyboard, pull my hand away.
I have this desperate desire not to spoil anything.
Trying to keep the growing excitement out of my voice, I say, “Professor, please: run back the video to the beginning.”
“Certainly,” he says. He gets off the stool, plays with the keyboard. The video speeds up in reverse—Fake, fake, fake! I want to scream out; My daughter’s death was faked!—and then he plays it from the beginning.
The same stern-looking Asim Al-Asheed is now there again, and from the computer’s speakers comes his voice. After the initial greetings, he goes on.
“I apologize that this is not a…what you call a live feed but a recording, from several hours ago, after we departed the home of Mr. Macomber in your White Mountains, and here we are, in these mountains still.”
“There!” I say. “Run it back to the very beginning, before he appears.”
Seconds later, the video starts up again, and I say, “Freeze it. Right there.”
The professor is on my left, and Agent Stahl is on my right.
I gently trace the screen before me, which shows a rock wall and an adjoining ledge.
With a soft voice I say, “He says this is being recorded in the White Mountains. But look at that rock formation. In every hike I’ve done here with Sam or Mel, there’s always vegetation, from lichen to grasses to scrub brush, among the rock formations. None of that is here. Can we be sure he filmed this here, in New Hampshire? Or someplace else?”
Agent Stahl says, “Mr. President…that’s a hell of a good point.”
I strike the screen with some force, making it vibrate. “We’re going to find that out, right now.”
And I think of last night, being on the dock out there in the darkness, and vowing, Asim, I’m coming for you.
Now, can I dare believe one more thing?
Mel, I’m coming for you, too.