by Andrew Mayne
Decades ago, several of its floors were filled with refrigerator-sized computers compiling data on license plates, hair dyes and carpet fibers entered by hand from physical files. Now it’s a ghost town of hallways with burned-out fluorescent lights and missing ceiling tiles. The custodian has more computing power in his pocket than this whole building once held.
The Ailes group is tucked away on a floor that used to hold thousands of binders indexing things like tennis shoe prints with year of manufacture, how many were sold in each size and in what regions. The FBI has always thrived on this kind of data. A 1983 Puma running shoe can help you narrow a list of thousands down to just one or two people.
Almost all this information is now digitized. The section of indexed tire prints once took up an entire floor. Today you can fit it into an e-mail attachment. In the academy, our professors would regale us with stories about spending weeks hunting through catalogs of fibers to find out the make and model of the trunk where a victim had been stashed. It was a different kind of detective work, one where you could still touch all the evidence.
When I enter, I notice the linoleum floor still has deep gouges from where the massive walls of cabinets once stood holding all those physical bits of information. Half-repaired light fixtures dangle from the tennis court–sized room. At the far end sit six desks pushed up against one another, bullpen-style. Three heads lean over computer screens. Two young men and a woman. All of them are dressed in proper FBI ties or polo shirts. None of them look like the barefooted hippies I’d been led to imagine or the red-robed cardinals I’d feared.
This isn’t as sinister as I was expecting. This looks like a bunch of college kids trying to get out a school newspaper.
A young woman, maybe a year or two younger than me, looks up from her computer screen. With short auburn hair and big cheekbones, she has that Nebraska farmer look but an athletic build. She clicks a window closed before I can get a proper glance. What I see looks like a profile of an agent.
“I’m looking for Dr. Ailes?”
She points to the conference room. “He’s over there right now.” She turns back to her computer before I have a chance to reply.
I thank her anyway and walk over to the door. I’d been expecting an office, but I realize his desk was probably at one of the terminals back in the bullpen, alongside his geeks.
Ailes’s voice calls out from the cracked door. “Have a seat, Agent Blackwood, and close the door behind you.”
I’VE BEEN SITTING here for several minutes at a table filled with file folders, watching my inquisitor finish something on his computer. This is either a test of my patience or he’s genuinely overwhelmed.
Ailes holds up a finger, telling me he’ll be another moment. Even seated, I can tell he’s tall. Although graying at the temples, he doesn’t look like an academic. I remember something about him serving in the Navy before getting his PhD. He still has a lot of that bearing. Okay, maybe he doesn’t look like a bishop. He could be a Moorish knight.
My eyes drift around the files on the table. They all have numbers for identifiers. I can see the edge of a magazine poking out of one. Something looks familiar . . .
I know the magazine instantly from just a few centimeters of the cover.
I feel my heart sink.
“Why did you go over Agent Miller’s head on the Hashimi case?”
“Pardon me?” I pull my attention away from the magazine.
Ailes looks up from his screen and sets his reading glasses down. “Miller. Why’d you go over his head?” He gives me the intimidating stare I’d seen across the Quantico campus.
I’d feared repercussions on this. We were trying to pin down a ring of credit card thieves. Three of them worked in the same restaurant chain. I had been tasked with going through miles of credit card receipts to look for other possible accomplices by cross-referencing other fraud cases. The kind of humdrum police work you’ll never see on television.
I reply in a flat tone, “I found fourteen suspicious charges and flagged them. Miller ignored them.”
“So you went over his head?” Ailes raises an eyebrow.
I’ve never been very good at being political. “I think of it as around him. We were on a time crunch.”
“But he’s your supervisor. The FBI put him in charge of the case so he could decide what was important and what was not. Do you think you’re smarter than him?” Ailes emphasizes the word “smarter.”
I shake my head. “He’s got a dozen open cases to supervise. I think if he’d had time to read my memo and look at the data, he would have reached the same conclusion. Nothing more.”
“Why did you suspect Hashimi was the Greenville Killer?”
I don’t know what to say. When I went through a list of flagged charges, I noticed some odd purchases. Rope, bleach and a few other items that would seem innocuous in other situations but not on a credit card fraud case. I got curious and placed them in locations where the Greenville Killer had murdered three people. Part of the reason I went over Miller’s head was it was only a suspicion. I never told anyone. It was a total potential wild-goose hunt. If I’d told my boss I thought one of these low-level credit card thieves was also a potential FBI most-wanted killer, I would have been laughed out of his office and maybe a job.
Hashimi just smelled wrong. Sometimes you can’t put that on paper. We’d never have gotten a search warrant based on the Greenville case. There was plenty of cause with the credit card fraud case. The problem was the bureau could take a year before knocking in his door and following that lead.
I had to nudge things a little . . .
It was simple enough. Miller was sending a group of cases to his supervisor to be expedited. Hashimi wasn’t on that list. All it took was a hastily written note that looked a lot like Miller’s handwriting, but no actual signature (so I couldn’t be accused of outright forgery), taped to the file. How it ended up on a desk in the supervisor’s locked office is beside the point. The supervisor’s secretary only saw Miller go in and out . . .
When they got the search warrant on Hashimi’s house they found IDs and documents tying him to the murders. Miller got the credit for the catch. I was just happy they got him.
No one has ever asked me this before. Ailes is the first one to realize I suspected Hashimi of being the killer in the Greenville case. When they busted him, I kept my mouth shut and congratulated Miller when he got his commendation.
Ailes is waiting for me to respond. I say nothing.
“I see . . .” he replies.
What does he see? That I went around my supervisor? Miller never told anyone I’d gone around him. He never mentioned it to me either. He knows that file came from somewhere. He suspects who, but doesn’t want to admit it.
Ailes drops the matter. “Why do you think you are here, Agent Blackwood?”
I don’t understand the question. “The dispatcher asked me to meet you here.”
He looks at my hoodie and jeans. “Didn’t expect to get called in on a Saturday?”
“No, sir. I did not,” I reply.
“Any idea why you’re here?”
I think about the magazine. The only obvious physical piece of evidence in the entire building. It’s embarrassing, but it’s not the kind of thing to cause this much fuss. Is it? Maybe the Miller thing blew up. “I’m not sure I know.”
His eyes squint for a moment, then he remembers his glasses. The glasses seem like a prop he uses to stretch moments of time and make me keep talking. He can tell I’m not giving anything up. “What have you heard about what goes on here?”
“Just the rumors. That you and your number crunchers are mining through personnel files to find leaks.”
Ailes nods his head. “That’s a minor thing. More of an assist we’re doing for internal affairs.” He points toward the bullpen visible through the window. “Most of what we do here is quite boring. Even more so than the kind of forensic accounting you’ve been doing. Jennifer out there is finding way
s to reduce the number of boxes on an expense report by half. Terribly dull. But exciting at the same time. If she can find a way to save twenty percent of the time each agent spends filling out forms, then that’s the equivalent of adding eight hundred agents into the field by freeing up their time from bureaucratic bullshit.”
Ailes sets his glasses down and rubs his eyes. “We did a study that showed if you calculated the amount of time some supervisors spend going over incidentals like phone calls and fuel expenses, it’d be cheaper to keep all the cars running nonstop and never hang up a long-distance call. Inefficiency is the creeping death of bureaucracy and accountability. It’s what brought the Roman Empire down. While they were filing reports, the barbarians were storming the gates. You can bet at least one senator demanded a census of the number of invaders before he decided whether or not to support repelling them.”
I say nothing. It’s a topic we’re all familiar with. When you join the FBI, you think your days are going to be spent going after bad guys. The reality is that you find more and more of your time being eaten up by paperwork and procedures and hierarchy, and it only gets worse. It’s how the Greenville Killer could have slipped away from us. If I hadn’t subverted the chain of command in my own way, he’d still be out there murdering people.
The bureaucracy keeps getting thicker. Every few months another form comes along because some manager somewhere decided that if we all just spend an extra ten minutes filling it out, everything will be better, ignoring the hundred other geniuses who had the same thought about some other form.
Ailes waves his hands in the air. “My goal here is efficiency. Helping you do your job faster. One of the ways we can do that is by making sure the right person is in the right job. Decide who belongs where. You don’t seem to care much for lines of authority. Are you better than the FBI?”
“No.” The word blurts out of my mouth.
“Yet you went around Miller. You could have told him your suspicions.”
“He . . . he wouldn’t have believed me.”
“How do you know? Did you try?”
I shake my head. Miller is a well-intentioned accountant. He has no street experience. He wouldn’t believe a serial killer was hiding in a spreadsheet for a credit card case.
I only saw because I grew up learning how to do suspicious things while looking innocent. I know how to create deceptions in front of people prepared not to be fooled. It’s in my blood. Hashimi was using a stolen credit card to purchase things that he didn’t want to appear on his own credit card statement. If you’re a professional thief like him, you’ll buy iPads, TVs, prepaid gas cards; things that have a high resale value. Not rope, bleach and cutting tools. Hashimi was hiding these purchases on the stolen cards because he was more afraid of someone suspecting he was a serial killer than a credit card thief.
“Did you try?” repeats Ailes.
“No. I didn’t.” I was new in the division. Miller had little patience for me.
“Don’t you like it here? Are you sure you’re really FBI material?”
So this is what it comes down to. I’m being asked if I’m happy in the FBI.
I’ve asked myself that question a lot lately.
It’s the kind of routine I always longed for after growing up in the back of a tour bus, sleeping in airports; the FBI has a kind of stability I always craved. I wanted to help people. I just didn’t know it would be so hard.
People have been waiting for me to slip up, for my past to catch up with me. “We’re show people,” Grandfather used to say. Show people, with our own values, our own way of doing things. Gypsies who work in the open. People like us don’t belong in places like this. We belong to the fringe. Some of us, even people close to me, belong on the other side—in those files we search through . . .
My eyes drift toward the magazine. I get the feeling I’m about to be set up for a fall. I pull the folder out of the stack and flip it open to show the magazine cover.
“Am I here because of this?”
3
AILES NODS AT THE MAGAZINE. It’s me on the cover at nineteen. I’m wearing a red sequined tuxedo jacket with my cleavage on display and what could debatably be called a thong, although I was wearing flesh-colored tights under the fishnets.
Magician Magazine. At the time I was proud to be the youngest female magician to ever grace the cover of a major magic magazine. Even if the cover suggested the kind of thing that comes to your mailbox in a brown wrapper.
After Grandfather taught me that first trick, I pushed to learn more and be in the show more. Neither he nor Father would let me onstage until I could perform flawlessly. Better than them.
I produced playing cards from my hands until the skin cracked and bled. I didn’t go on dates. I didn’t have friends. I had magic.
I needed to prove that I could be just as good as them. When I was fifteen I booked myself as a featured act at the national magic convention. I won that audience over. Grandfather still took time.
“You’re just a novelty,” he’d tell me.
“Magic is a novelty act,” I’d remind him.
He would puff away at his cigar and just stop arguing. I wasn’t going to be a pushover like his sons. I was in awe of my grandfather, but I knew he was just a man. My father didn’t have his technical skills and mind, and my uncle lacked his charisma, but people told me I had both. People except for my grandfather.
The year I got the cover of the magazine, the International Magic Alliance also named me magician of the year. Younger than my father or grandfather. They treated it like a joke. They didn’t want to admit that I’d done it mostly on my own.
My famous last name helped. It’s probably why my father got it a decade earlier. But it didn’t help me keep practicing on the concrete loading dock in freezing rain while I waited for them to finish their after-show drinks at the bar across the street. It didn’t help me get up at 4 a.m. to practice so I could have enough time to catch the city bus to Venice Beach Middle School—where I’d had to register myself.
My family’s name opened doors. Practice is what kept them open. I learned the game. I was a girl in a man’s world. I knew my looks were an asset. I played that card.
The sexy vamp on that cover is nothing like me as a person then or now, but it was a role I had to embrace. “Come for the tits, stay for the skills.” I heard Grandfather say that once when he didn’t think I was listening. Or maybe he was speaking loudly enough so I would hear. With him, it was hard to tell.
In the world of show business, the magazine cover is a point of pride, not a scandal. In the puritanical world of the FBI, where you’re expected to spend six days serving J. Edgar Hoover and the seventh in a church pew, it would look not much better than a sex tape. You become “that kind of a girl.” The wink, the pout; I stole the pose from a men’s magazine. I knew as much about sex then as I did the far side of the moon.
I lift the magazine and show the cover to Ailes. “Do you mean, should I be doing this, instead of working in the FBI? I disclosed everything when I signed up. The agency knows my background.”
“An interesting family history,” says Ailes. “Not something you need to be ashamed of.”
Shame. There’s the word. Is that how I feel? I don’t know. I really don’t know. I tried to hide it. But only because I wanted to fit in. Maybe that’s the definition of shame? I toss the magazine down on the table. “Then why is this here? Why am I here?”
Ailes looks at me for a moment, then a light goes on behind his eyes. “I see. You have my apology, Agent Blackwood. Let me start over.”
I’m confused. There’s almost a kindly look on his face. He turns the magazine facedown, telling me the photo is not the point of the conversation. Then what is?
He points to his laptop. “We go through those questionnaires that you fill out and we look at other data points. Your name came up and I was curious as to why. I did some digging in our archives and found the magazine and made the connection. I forget some
times the holier-than-thou bent of some of your peers. I’m not here to embarrass you.”
I flip the magazine over so my younger self is visible. “I’m not embarrassed.” My eyes look at the sequins and skin. “Not that embarrassed. It’s my past. Just my past. Cheerleaders dress like that now.”
“But you weren’t a cheerleader.”
“I wasn’t much of a team player.” The words flow before I realize what I just said.
Ailes ignores it. “I don’t care about photos, Blackwood. I was interested in what I read. You were a magician. A professional magician. And from what I’ve found out, not just a pretty face who used the family name long enough to pay her way through college working cruise ships and casinos. You performed and you invented magic. In all the FBI, do you know how many agents have that level of experience?”
I shake my head. I’ve seen some guys playing with decks of cards. There’s even a small magic club at the D.C. office, but that’s it.
“None. Zero. I did some research. In the entire history of the FBI, we’ve never had an agent with that kind of knowledge. And now you’re sitting there asking yourself, ‘So what?’ I’ll tell you. My job here is efficiency. And that means putting the right man or woman on the job so it gets done quickly. I flagged your name so when the right opportunity came along, I could test this theory.”
“Is the director having a birthday party?”
It takes Ailes a moment to realize I’m making a joke. My humor, my real sense of humor, has that effect. Grandfather used to say, “The little witch is drier than the Sahara.”
Ailes shakes his head. “The director is having nightmares. We all are. We’re faced with something big. It doesn’t fit the paradigm. I think it’s time we try something different.” He reaches into a bag by his chair and pulls out a folder, then sets it in front of me. There’s only one word written on it, “Warlock.”
