“Clyde, thanks a lot for calling in to Washington today,” said the voice of Marcus Berry, sounding hollow and distant. Clyde pressed the phone against his ear a little harder. He was standing in the Hy-Vee grocery store in north Nishnabotna, right next to the little snack bar where all the oldsters gathered each morning for the ninety-nine-cent breakfast special. They had interrupted their socializing and political discourse when Clyde had pulled up in his unit, come in from the cold in his deputy-sheriff uniform, ordered a cup of coffee, planted himself by the phone, and, at six-thirty A.M. on the dot, punched in the collect call to Washington.
Now they were getting back into it, and Clyde was having a difficult time hearing the person or persons on the other end of the line. He pushed the stainless-steel button on the front of the phone that made it louder—a popular feature here. Now he could hear chairs creaking and papers shuffling at the other end of the line.
“Sorry to put you on the box,” Berry said.
“Box?”
“Got you on a speakerphone.”
Clyde said, “I’ve heard of those.”
“Is this a good time for you? Or—”
“Good as any,” Clyde said. “Just got done working the night shift. So I’m well rested.”
“Okay, well, just wanted to go over some things with you,” Berry said, shuffling papers and not even noticing that Clyde had made a joke. Clyde was crestfallen and a little bit irritated. But he could hear dim chortling way in the background, and a muffled voice interrupting Berry and pointing something out to him.
“Oh, sorry, that one went right by me!” Berry said. “Yes, well, hopefully we can find you some work that’s not so relaxing. By the way, I passed your application on through the proper channels, so you may be hearing from the regional office soon.”
“Appreciate it,” Clyde said. So the purpose of this call was not to discuss his job application, but his report. That was a surprise.
“You dug up some really interesting stuff here, Clyde,” Berry said. He spoke slowly, with long pauses, shuffling the papers again and again. “Your ID of Abdul al-Turki is the talk of the counterintelligence division. Quite a victory. Congratulations.”
“Well, thanks,” Clyde said. “It was the cauliflower ears that did it. Uh, I don’t know much about immigration law—that’s why I came to you guys. Can we arrest this guy?”
“Pardon?” Berry said after a long pause.
“We can prove he’s Iraqi. But he’s here on a Jordanian passport, under a different name. So can we arrest him for an immigration violation?”
Berry seemed stunned and uncertain. The muffled voice in the background surfaced again for a short exchange. “That’s a good question, Clyde,” Berry said, sounding like a teacher complimenting a second-grader. “I can’t say I know that much about immigration law.”
That seemed to close the issue as far as Berry was concerned.
“Been doing some extracurricular work,” Clyde said. “The people who live across the street from these three fellas are the brother and sister-in-law of some friends of my sister’s neighbor. So I got their permission to sit in their spare room and keep an eye on the house for a day.” Clyde left out the fact that he’d had Maggie with him the whole time. “Got the license plates of their two vehicles—the ones with the tinted windows—and ran the plates. One of them is registered to one of the local Iraqi graduate students who has been here for a couple of years. The Escort was bought from a used-car lot in Davenport in late July. The salesman there says customer paid cash. Windows were not tinted at that time—the tinting appears to be an aftermarket product applied recently. We may be able to get them on a minor violation there—there are limits on how dark the windows are allowed to be.”
Another muffled conference in Washington. “Excuse me, Clyde, I’m not sure if we understand the part about the windows,” Berry said. “You are accusing these guys of running a biological-weapons production facility, correct?”
“Not accusing. Suspecting,” Clyde said.
“So why would you want to hassle them about their windows being too dark?”
Clyde was startled that Berry needed to ask this question. “If you can stop them for a minor, legitimate violation, you may have probable cause to search the vehicle and uncover evidence of larger crimes—say, a weapons violation, or something.”
“And then what?” Berry said, playing dumb.
“Well, then you can arrest them for the weapons violation, maybe get them kicked out of the country.”
“Ah, I see,” Berry said, apparently finding this a novel and interesting thought. He mulled it over for a minute. “But what do we learn from something like that?”
“Pardon?” said Clyde, shoving his finger into his free ear and leaning so far forward that his forehead pressed against the cold steel of the pay phone.
“What do we learn? We already know they’re traveling under fake IDs. And we can be damn certain they’ve got weapons, probably unlicensed. If we arrest them for those things and kick them out of the country, we don’t learn anything new.”
Clyde was at a loss for words. He had never heard police work characterized as an educational process before. But maybe the FBI was different. He decided to try another tack. “What about the FCC?” he said.
“You mean, as in Federal Communications Commission?”
“Yeah.”
“What about them?”