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THEY FINISHED INTERVIEWING the night shift people by six in the morning and then went out to breakfast.
“Okay, let’s go through all these people,” said Nydia, once they’d placed their order. They were in a corner booth meant for six. The restaurant was so empty, the waitress didn’t blink an eye at the request for the big booth. Nydia pushed her tablet across to him. “These are the six people I want to start with. And I want to spend an hour each with them.”
“That’s a long interview.” Yesterday they had kept them short
“It’ll be nerve-racking for them. If they have something to hide, they’ll start to crack, often starting at about thirty minutes in.” When he raised a skeptical eyebrow at that, she said, “Really. There’s evidence from investigative science. Thirty minutes is the point where an interview begins to feel like a threat, and people do crack more often between thirty and sixty minutes than at any other time.”
“Really? Not after two or three hours?”
“Rarely. After sixty minutes there are diminishing returns, and you get more and more false confessions.” She drew her tablet back. “I want the one real confession, if it’s here to be had.”
“Do you want me to talk at all? Maybe you should just do it alone.”
“No. I’ll take the lead, but if they respond to the sympathy you’re so good at vibing out, then I need you to take over.”
“I vibe out sympathy?”
“Yeah, you do. And you speak it. And I think you really are sympathetic.”
“Not with this person. I think of Harper still struggling for her life, of the rest of my sick colleagues, and of the smart little girl I met back in Trenton who died and never had a chance at life. Add all the other people sick, and all those body bags being shoved into mass graves by bulldozers, and my sympathy flies out the window.”
“Then don’t think of those things. Think of someone who believes he is doing the right thing. The world is overpopulated, right? And here’s something that will fix that. Or maybe the ‘cure overpopulation’ motivation was never right. Maybe he thinks the United States has become a corrupt place, with the rich getting richer, or that drone attacks or whatever are wrong. Those bastards deserve to have it start with them. Maybe starting it here in the States will cut back on our world domination. Give someone else a chance to lead the world for a change. Someone better. Greed, selfishness, corruption: this is a blow against all of those. It’s the right thing. It’s the moral thing.” She sounded entirely sincere with the last two sentences.
“Wow. You could recruit terrorists.”
“You need to be able to flip to that mindset, okay? To feel the passion and the belief and the logic of his position.”
“I get it. And I promise to try.”
“If I want you to take over, I’ll do the finger thing again.” They’d worked this out a couple weeks back. If she folded her hands together in front of her chest, it was Glenn’s turn to ask questions.
“Now who are these six people? I don’t remember anything about anyone. Or rather, I can’t attach names to faces. Are any of them Turkish or from the former Hittite empire?”
“No. I looked for that, believe me, but no one in the lab is. This first guy, Burton Gist, is the sexual harassment guy from the personnel files. If the allegation is true, he’s anti-social in some sense. The anthrax guy was very weird with women, stalkerish. That’s always a warning sign in domestic terrorism cases.”
“Okay. What did that one look like?”
“Nondescript, I’m afraid. White guy. Twenty pounds overweight. Mousy brown hair. Kind of a big lower lip, so he looked like he was pouting all the time. Twice during the interview he twisted a ring—looked like a college ring, a fraternity ring, something like that.”
“You’re observant.”
“So are you. You’re just not used to using the skill in quite the same way. Do you remember which one he is?”
“I think so. The second name is a guy too, but the name looks Indian.” He lowered his voice and said only the first name, Ravindu. He didn’t want anyone to overhear him talking about some innocent guy and think the wrong thing. There had been a couple of Indian men on staff.
Nydia’s voice was quiet too, but it appeared no one was listening anyway. “That’s his last name, by the way. Roshan comes second but is the given name. Immigration records show his parents were Sri Lankan, not from India. He was short and thin and stared at the floor a lot.”
“Right. Him, I remember. What don’t you like about him?”
“The staring at the floor, for one thing. And there’s some weird sexual stuff in his internet searches.”
Glenn honestly didn’t want to know what, lest his opinion of it show on his face in the interview. “Okay, moving on. The third one is a woman. Jackie Griffin. I remember her. The belligerent one.”
“Yeah. Rail thin, thin lips, quick to offense.”
“Why her? You said it’d be a man.”
“She’s the kind of person who thinks she knows better than everyone else. So maybe she thinks so about this too. I doubt she’s our guy, but if she was male, I’d have picked her.”
He trusted Nydia’s sense about people, at least as much as her knowledge about the psychology of terrorism. “Fourth one, another man. Chase Dodd.”
“One of the absenteeism problems. And he flew to Philadelphia seven months ago.”
“Maybe he has relatives there.”
“He doesn’t, not that we found so far. And December is a strange time to visit Philadelphia on vacation, don’t you think? Though it was a late start to winter, and that week it wasn’t snowing or freezing there.”
“Did he buy the ticket beforehand?”
“Good question. He did, six weeks before. But that’s still within the timeframe that Jarri has been working on this.”
“Fifth guy, Marquis Polk. The only black man on staff, which I’m sure isn’t why you picked him.”
“It isn’t. He was arrested for assault at age twenty-one but never arraigned.”
“That’s it? Not much to go on. The last person is Griffin Miller? I think I might know who this one is. The inappropriate joking guy.”
“No, that was someone else. This one had nothing you’d pick out behaviorally. Short answers, to the point, normal eye contact. No shuffling or sweating or nervous gestures.”
“So what’s wrong with him?”
“Where he has donated money in the past. Endangered species funds and two organizations that support zero population growth. Last tax year, he didn’t. But in years past, Population Connection is one place he supported. One year, he spent four percent of his take-home pay on donations like this. That’s a crazy high amount.”
“Wow. Dangerous fellow.”
“Don’t be sarcastic. It’s the sort of thing we’re looking for. It was your idea to look for it, remember? Under different circumstances, you could admire him for that all you want. But it’s weird to spend that much money on charitable donations, and the population control interest puts him at number six. Or maybe number five. The more I think about it, I really don’t believe it’s the woman. She’s number six, and we should interview her last. If at all.”
“You know, I support zero population growth myself. Or rather, that’s not enough. We need negative population growth.”
“We’re sure getting it now.”
Glenn winced. “Yeah. We are.”
Nydia studied him for so long he grew uncomfortable. Finally, she said, “How many people like you, in your position, feel as you do? About population growth?”
“Almost all of us, I suspect. The emerging pandemics are because of out of control human populations. We’re putting ourselves into contact with animals we shouldn’t be. We’re outstripping our ability to grow enough food, so subsistence hunters are killing and eating animals they never had before. We’ve driven to extinction other animals that naturally control insects that harbor certain diseases. It’s like we’re—” asking for it, he was going to say, but stopped himself just in time. He did believe we were asking for it, but if he believed that, how was he different in philosophy from a population control terrorist?
Maybe not at all.
“Glenn?”
He held up a finger while he thought this through. What made him different was that he disapproved of irresponsible breeding by humans—who should know better—but he didn’t act on that. But yes, he felt disapproval when he saw a woman with five kids under ten in tow and wondered why her husband didn’t get a vasectomy. Of course he’d never say that aloud to a stranger—not even to a friend. He wanted more education on the matter, and an elimination of governmental incentives like tax deductions for minor dependents. That was radical enough he wouldn’t talk about that, either.
Yes, overpopulation was a problem. That was the difference. They might have a shared philosophy, or pieces of it, but philosophies could not be crimes. Glenn didn’t see it as his responsibility to fix overpopulation by murdering people.
This guy might.
Or he might have some completely different reason for wanting to destroy the vaccines.
