Free Graveland: A Novel by Alan Glynn

anytime soon.
    Unless it’s in a box.
    “Okay, Jimmy,” he says, looking out from the overly ornate interior of the elevator cab. “Good night.”
    “Yeah, Craig, old sport,” Vaughan says, but quietly, a sudden and unexpected glint in his eye. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

 
    5
    A T THE COUNTER IN HER LOCAL DINER, sipping coffee, waiting on a bagel and cream cheese, Ellen flicks through her notebook, the most recent few pages of it. But there’s nothing there. It’s all doodles and arrows and mini-mindmaps and word lists—hieroglyphic shit in her own handwriting that soon even she’ll be unable to decipher. This is what happens when you lose the thread of a story, or can’t find the shape of one in the first place.
    She puts the notebook down and stirs her coffee. There’s no reason to, it’s black and unsweetened, but she does it anyway.
    One of the little diner-y things people do.
    Like shaking the packet of sugar before you open it, or chewing on a toothpick.
    She glances up and down the counter.
    Skinny guy in a business suit perched on his stool at one end, burly construction worker spilling off his at the other.
    Where’s Norman Rockwell when you need him?
    The bagel arrives, and she starts into it, eyeing the notebook, unwilling to let this go. Since expounding her theory yesterday to Max Daitch, Ellen has made little or no progress. Probably because it wasn’t much of a theory to start with. What was it she said? Different perps, no connection, same perps, bunch of clowns?
    Something like that?
    Or that specifically.
    The counter guy is passing, and she holds out her cup for a refill.
    The official line hasn’t changed in the last twenty-four hours either. Maybe there’s hard evidence somewhere that she’s unaware of—or maybe it’s a carefully engineered consensus, or maybe it’s just intellectual laziness, she doesn’t know—but the continuing and remarkably consistent media assumption seems to be that a group of domestic terrorists, as yet unidentified, was responsible for the two killings. Within those parameters, there is a modicum of theorizing, and the usual lingo is deployed—jihad, radical, global … battlefield … threat level. Repeated reference is now also being made to that earlier report about intel analysts picking up noises in Yemen relating to possible targeting of Wall Street executives.
    But what strikes Ellen most is that there hasn’t been a single mention anywhere, at least not that she can see, of the differing methods used in the two shootings, and of how weird that is, and of what it implies—
    Quick sip of coffee.
    —namely, that the shootings may well have been separate and unconnected, which would also mean they were random and coincidental, thus rendering all of that speculative Homeland Security–speak in the papers and online pretty much irrelevant. The alternative scenario is that the shootings were indeed connected, at least circumstantially. For the moment, the how and why remain unknown, but what the differing methods would seem to imply is that maybe there was no method, or very little method, and that the perps were simply amateurs.
    As far as Ellen is concerned, if it’s the first, there’s no story here worth pursuing. It’d just be two routine homicides. But if it’s the second—
    She takes her last mouthful of bagel.
    —there is.
    So she’s going with the second.
    With the amateurs, the clowns.
    The lone wolves, the stray dogs.
    Because if that’s what these guys are, amateurs, and not a highly organized terrorist cell—not pre-installed units, not strings of code in some elaborate phase of video gameplay—then there’s no reason why she or any other moderately intelligent person shouldn’t be able to get inside their heads, work out what they’re up to, second-guess them even.
    She twirls the coffee spoon between her fingers for a moment.
    Is that being overly ambitious? Perhaps. Wouldn’t be the first time, though.
    She