The hotel was a mid-level one, built in the forties, right in the middle of downtown. The lobby was pleasant but dark. The furniture was newish, modern, and without character. He gave his name and was told he was expected. He got into the elevator—paneled, but not with good wood—and rode up to the fifth floor. Walker Canfield was waiting for him when the elevator doors opened on five.
“Mr. Demarkian,” Canfield said. “I got a call—I mean, the director—shit.”
“Where’s your room?”
Walker Canfield gestured vaguely down the hall. He no longer looked nervous, which was how he’d looked when Gregor first saw him. He no longer looked scared, either, which was how he’d looked by the time Gregor had been through talking to him on that first meeting. He looked dead.
“Let’s go,” Gregor said. “There’s no point conducting this conversation in a hotel hallway. Even if it is empty.”
Walker Canfield turned on his heel and walked halfway down the long hallway to the left of the elevators, looking like a sleepwalker. Gregor followed him to the door of room 525. Canfield got out one of those plastic card keys and shoved it quickly in and out of the slot. The door buzzed. Canfield pushed it open and gestured Gregor inside. Gregor went. It was not a hotel room with character.
“So,” Gregor said. “Is this where you’ve been since you got to Philadelphia, you and your partner?”
“Steve Bridge,” Canfield said. “They think he’s dead. I think he’s dead. Or maybe I don’t. I don’t know. What would they have done with him? You can’t just make a body disappear. It’s got to be someplace. Even burning it doesn’t get rid of it entirely. Hell, even putting it through a wood chipper doesn’t get rid of it entirely. Do you remember that case, out in Newtown, Connecticut? What a thing.”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “I remember it. Let’s try to stay on subject, shall we? What I’m trying to figure out is how exactly the FBI got interested in America on Alert. You don’t monitor all these groups, do you? There are hundreds of them, as far as I can tell.”
“Well, there are hundreds of Web sites, anyway,” Canfield said. “I don’t really know if there are hundreds of groups. It’s more like—when I was a kid, I used to be a big science fiction fan. It’s like that. You’ve got lots of people, some groups, but mostly individuals. They all know each other and keep up with each other and go to each other’s stuff and buy each other’s books. There are stars and groupies—the stars are the writers and the lecturers, the groupies are the people who follow them. It’s like this whole alternative little world. They’ve got their own publishing companies—really small ones, you know, run out of post office boxes and people’s basements, but you can do that these days. With desktop publishing, it’s easy to make a book that looks like a real one. If you know what I mean. And if you didn’t know what you had and you didn’t know anything about the movement, you’d think you were seeing real scholarly work done by a professor somewhere. It’s only when you start looking into the references in the footnotes that you realize they all only quote each other, or they quote outside sources out of context. It’s like an alternative universe.”
“All right. But that still doesn’t answer my question. What got the Bureau interested in America on Alert, rather than in one of the others?”
“They were buying guns.”
“Yes,” Gregor said patiently. “But how did you know they were buying guns? Unless you are monitoring all the groups out there, which has got to be expensive as hell and mostly useless, since most of these people are no more going to kill anybody than they’re going to lay eggs. Something must have tipped the Bureau off to the gun buying.”
“Oh,” Canfield said. “Yeah. I know that. There was a tip.”
“An anonymous tip?”
“Yeah. I mean, we have those all the time. You have to listen to them. You have to check them out. You can’t—”
“Yes, I know,” Gregor said, “I’m not criticizing you. When did you get this tip?”
“Five, six months ago—no, wait. I can tell you exactly. July third. It’s my niece’s birthday. It stuck in my head when I saw the file.”
“Exactly what did this tip consist of?”
Walker Canfield looked blank. “I don’t know what you mean.”
It was, Gregor thought, like trying to get molasses out of a squirt gun. “What did the tip consist of? Did somebody call in and say, ‘you’d better take a look at America on Alert’? Did they say ‘Michael Harridan bought six guns under six different names at six different gun shows last month.’ What?”