Free Graveland: A Novel by Alan Glynn Page A

looks around.
    Regrouping.
    Okay, most parties with an interest in this—Homeland Security, the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, the NYPD, CNN, Fox, the WSJ, the Times, half the blogosphere—are just assuming that these perps are experienced professionals, possibly with a background in the military or in special ops. Little Ellen Dorsey, on the other hand, and based solely on a fucking hunch, has decided otherwise—that they’re newbies, isolated, and largely clueless.
    It’s not much of a competitive edge, and maybe she’s deluding herself, but it’s all she’s got.
    She pays and leaves.
    And there isn’t much of a window here, because if she’s right about this, it’s bound to become apparent to everyone pretty quickly—one more development is all it’ll take, and that could happen at any time.
    Walking back to her apartment, she decides that with the lack of any intel on the perps, the only other likely route into the story is through the vics. Why them? Who were they? What did they have in common? Did they ever meet, or cross paths professionally? And if so, does this tell us anything?
    She gets home, clears some space on her desk, and settles down to work.
    Over the course of the day she trawls through dozens of business websites, gathering and collating references to the two men. She reads profiles, magazine articles, blog posts, anything she can find. She prints out some of this stuff, pinning loose pages of it onto various corkboards around the apartment and laying others out on the floor. She moves quickly from one spot to another, highlighting passages with a red marker as she follows a line of thought, swirling and daubing red streaks on paper like a hopped-up Jackson Pollock. She spends a good deal of time on the phone and writing e-mails, putting out feelers, questions, requests for information.
    She doesn’t eat anything. She drinks a lot of coffee.
    But none of this really gets her anywhere. Because although it turns out that Jeff Gale and Bob Holland had quite a lot in common, there’s a predictability to it all, and a banality. They both served, for instance, on a couple of the same boards; they were both members of the same golf club for a while; and they both had former wives who went to the same high school. She finds gala charity events that they both attended and infers a certain degree of casual social contact between them, at lunches, openings, the occasional weekend in the Hamptons.
    But what she doesn’t find, or stumble upon, is any kind of sinister nexus between Northwood Leffingwell and Chambers Capital Management. She finds a nexus, alright, but it’s the bigger one—the one that links them all together, the banks, the hedge funds, the private equity shops. She knew this—of course she did, it’s axiomatic now—but it still comes as a shock to see it laid out like that in such unequivocal terms.
    And it’s no help really.
    Because it doesn’t tell her anything.
    By late evening she’s tired, addled from too much caffeine, her brain engorged with terabytes of useless information. In an attempt to reverse this, or at least to calm it—to calm what she considers her attention surplus disorder—she takes a long, hot, fragrant bath. Lying there, in the flickering candlelight, she listens for the weird sounds that her building occasionally tends to make, or that tend to ripple through it—bumps, thuds, muffled voices—and that for some reason she can only ever seem to hear at all clearly from here, from the bath.
    Not that she wants to particularly.
    But it has become a routine, a little ritual for unwinding, for emptying her brain after too many hours at the keyboard.
    Delete, delete, delete.
    Ten minutes in, however, and she’s thinking again, speculating, unable to help herself. If these guys aren’t jihadis—and she doesn’t for one second believe they are—then what are they? Who are they? The Tea Party? Occupy Wall Street?
    She shakes her head.
    The Tea Partiers