I am a heretic, if God is in the details.

The information on the wire about Ace's academy class could fill volumes. Months of beta to study, even if I used probability and sort and file routines, and didn't do it all by hand. Ace himself had a long and complicated history, filled with a hundred or more red flags. Villains of the international black market beta trade scene he hadn't known he'd liaised with, and involuntary participation in plots so complicated even the countries involved had lost track of where they stood. He'd carried illegal documents. He'd committed a dozen different kinds of international felony fraud. Not intentionally, of course. Just by virtue of unwitting participation in something whose larger picture and ramifications he'd missed.

It is true that IS are guaranteed by license to be legally inscrutable. And any of these things, brought to trial, would be judged outside his knowledge, and therefore complicity.

This new situation wasn't so different, except that he was, at some level, aware. He'd known or guessed enough to bring me into it.

Known, perhaps, that this was serious, and while he might be directly involved, it all could also spin far--and disastrously--out of his control.

The details were troublesome. The details were, as they often are, overwhelming. Locations, associations, incidents, statistics. Record and plot, chart and sort: in the end, it all becomes unwieldy, cumbersome, and it isn't a case of not having patience.

I have a great deal of patience.

Still, I find I accomplish more by listening for silence rather than noise. What is not said, rather than what is said. Omission as self-representation.

I am all about omission, myself.

There is always far less silence to keep track of, and it is usually telling. A week missing, in the detailed history of a life. Failure to offer information, by either the subject or others about him. Reticence. Pause.

These moments, these spaces, form their own patterns, ones over time you come to notice and recognize. Like a picture far clearer in negative than it had been in proof.

So the slight reclusive tendencies of the Mormon youth, Ross, failed to trouble me.

The near misses of Miss Chang with her cousin's synthetic drug empire, likewise of no real concern.

I passed over Oskar's messy and still incomplete divorce, and Mr. Marchionni's brief three days in jail over a DUI and failure to appear.

Most of these things the agency had likewise ignored, in the course of processing backgrounds. Some things they hadn't known, still more details that I paid good money to uncover. In the end, of no more importance. Trespass, receipt of stolen property. Bueller Hagemeier had grossly underreported his recreational drug use and sales.

None of this of real significance at all.

In a motel room in a remote corner of Prince George County, I came to the end of my beta research, and had only a few lines of remark typed on the screen in front of me.

One: Harlan had been recalled as an instructor to this class, and it was unclear to everyone around him-including Harlan himself-by whom.

Two: One recruit, Thom Mackraz, was the oldest after Ace, and so unremarkable and typical a candidate that it was easy to pass over him. No one reviewing his applications had had much to say about Mackraz, his background, his qualifications or anything about him at all.

Three: Of the twenty two recruits in Ace's academy class, not a single one of them turned up connected to him by even as much as a level two removal. For all his work in and around protective services, his prior association with the agency and the tendency agents have to be similarly raised and educated, it was difficult to connect him with any of them.

This, more than anything, bore scrutiny and consideration.


Distance, like silence, is very often deliberate.

I know this from personal experience as well. 

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