Hal was walking around in his conservative suit, white shirt andoversized Santa hat. People sipped wine and punch, snapped digital pictures and clustered, talking about politics and sports and shopping and impending vacations.
Also, a lot of comments about interest rates, the Fed, and the euro.
With bankers you couldn’t get away from shop talk. Ever.
“We heard there’s a surprise, Carol,” one of the members called.
“What?” came another voice.
“Be patient,” she said, laughing. “If I told you it wouldn’t be a surprise, now would it?”
When the party seemed to be spinning along on its own, she walked to the stage and tested the PA system once again. Yes, it was working fine.
Thank goodness.
The “surprise” depended on it. She’d arranged for the chorus from one of her grandson’s high schools to go up on stage and present a holiday concert, traditional and modern Christmas and Hanukkah songs. She glanced at her watch. The kids would arrive at about 3:45. She’d heard the youngsters before and they were very good.
Carol laughed to herself, recalling the entertainment at last year’s party. Herb Ross, a VP at First People’s Trust, who’d injected close to a quart of the “special” punch, had climbed on the table to sing—and even worse (or better, for later water cooler stories) to act out—the entire Twelve Days of Christmas himself, the leaping lords being the high point.
# # #
Kathryn Dance spent a precious ten minutes texting and talking to a number of people in the field and here at headquarters.
It seemed that outside the surreality of the interrogation room, the investigation hadn’t moved well at all. Monterey’s Forensic Services Unit was still analyzing trace connected with the Taurus and the suspects’ pocket litter and Abbott Calderman said they might not have any answers for another ten or fifteen minutes.
Lord, she thought.
Michael O’Neil, when last heard from, had been pursuing the third conspirator in the abandoned army base. A police chopper had lost him in a cloud of dust and sand. She’d had a brief conversation with FBI agent Steve Nichols in a nearby mobile command post, who’d said, “This Paulson isn’t saying anything. Not a word. Just stares at me. I’d like to waterboard him.”
“We don’t do that,” Dance had reminded.
“I’m just daydreaming,” Nichols had muttered and hung up.
Now, returning to the interrogation room with Wayne Keplar, Dance looked at the clock on the wall.
3:10.
“Hey,” said Wayne Keplar, eyeing it briefly, then turning his gaze to Dance. “You’re not mad at me, are you?”
Dance sat across the table from him. It was clear she wasn’t going to power a confession out of him, so she didn’t bother with the tradecraft of kinesic interviewing. She said, “I’m sure it’s no surprise that, before, I tried to analyze your body language and was hoping to come up with a way to pressure you into telling me what you and Gabe and your other associate had planned.”
“Didn’t know that about the body language. But makes sense.”
“Now I want to do something else, and I’m going to tell you exactly what that is. No tricks.”
“Shoot. I’m game.”
Dance had decided that traditional analysis and interrogation wouldn’t work with someone like Wayne Keplar. His lack of affect, his fanatic’s belief in the righteousness of his cause made kinesics useless. Content-based analysis wouldn’t do much good either; this is body language’s poor cousin, seeking to learn whether a suspect is telling the truth by considering if what he says makes sense. But Keplar was too much in control to let slip anything that she might parse for clues about deception and truth.
So she was doing something radical.
Dance now said, “I want to prove to you that your beliefs—what’s motivating you and your group to perform this attack—they’re wrong.”
He lifted an eyebrow. Intrigued.
This was a ludicrous idea for an interrogator. One should never argue substance with a suspect. If a man is accused of killing his wife, your job is to determine the facts and, if it appears that he did indeed commit murder, get a confession or at least gather enough information to help investigators secure his conviction.
There’s no point in discussing the right or wrong of what he did, much less the broader philosophical questions of taking lives in general or violence against women, say.
But that was exactly what she was going to do now.
Poking the inside of his cheek with his tongue once more, thoughtful, Keplar said, “Do you even know what our beliefs are?”
“I read the Brothers of Liberty website. I—”
“You like the graphics? Cost a pretty penny.”
A glance at the wall. 3:14.
Dance continued. “You advocate smaller government, virtually no taxes, decentralized banking, no large corporations, reduced military, religion in public schools. And that you have the right to violent civil disobedience. Along with some racial and ethnic theories that went out of fashion in the 1860s.”
“Well, ‘bout that last one—truth is, we just throw that in to get checks from rednecks and border control nuts. Lot of us don’t really feel that way. But, Ms. Firecracker, you done your homework, sounds like. We’ve got more positions than you can shake a stick at but those’ll do for a start… So, argue away. This’s gonna be as much fun as Twenty Questions. But just remember, maybe I’ll talk
“I’ll stay open-minded, if you will.”
“Deal.”
She thought back to what she’d read on the group’s website. “You talk about the righteousness of the individual. Agree up to a point, but we can’t survive as individuals alone. We need government. And the more people we have, with more economic and social activity, the more we need a strong central government to make sure we’re safe to go about our lives.”
“That’s sad, Kathryn.”
“Sad?”
“Sure. I have more faith in humankind than you do, sounds like. We’re pretty capable of taking care of ourselves. Let me ask you: You go to the doctor from time to time, right?”
“Yes.”
“But not very often, right? Pretty rare, hmm? More often with the kids, I’ll bet.Sure, you have kids. I can tell.”
She let this go with no reaction.
3:17.
“But what does the doctor do? Short of broken bone to set, the doctor tells you pretty much to do what your instinct told you. Take some aspirin, go to bed, drink plenty of fluids, eat fiber, go to sleep. Let the body take care of itself. And 99 percent of the time, those ideas work.” His eyes lit up. “That’s what government should do: Leave us alone 99 percent of the time.”
“And what about the other 1 percent?” Dance asked.
“I’ll give you that we need, let’s see, highways, airports, national defense… Ah, but what’s that last word? ‘Defense.’ You know, they used to call it the ‘War Department.’ Well, then some public relations fellas got involved and ‘War’ wouldn’t do anymore, so they changed it. But that’s a lie. See, it’s not just defense. We go poking our noses into places that we have no business being.”
“The government regulates corporations that would exploit people.”
He scoffed. “The government helps ‘em do it. How many congressmen go to Washington poor and come back rich? Most of them.”
