The interrogation goes on for another hour. For the first time, Ellie Landau lets Rachel open up.

Rachel declares, haltingly at first and then with greater vigor, that she has been tracking Instancer for the past twenty-one months. Twice she got within a day of him—once in Dusseldorf, once in São Paulo.

Instancer broke no laws. He committed no crimes. Rachel says she couldn’t figure out, at first, what his intentions were or why he was in these specific places.

Then she realized: he was establishing the whereabouts and studying the daily routines of individuals on her Righteous Men list.

He was casing them.

Rachel went to the men and warned them.

She told them their lives were in danger.

She identified herself, explained everything, pleaded with the men to realize their peril.

The men dismissed her. They rejected her. They turned her in to the police.

RACHEL

The cops ran their checks on me. Every ounce of shit came up. I was detained four times and deported twice.

Rachel raises her eyes again to the ceiling cam.

RACHEL

Look it up, Dewey. Ankara, October ’32. Marseille, April ’33 . . .

She rattles off four more, in Africa, Asia, and South America. She turns to Manning.

RACHEL

By the way, Detective, there aren’t nine murders. There are twenty-seven. Eighteen before your first Russian victim.

I run the arrests Rachel claims. They’re all true. I relay this to Manning. As I’m monitoring all this from my desk, asking myself do I believe Rachel’s story, I’m simultaneously skimming her Ph.D. dissertation.

It’s fascinating:

Gematrial and Eschatological Implications of the Legend of the Tzadikim Nistarim

The piece is 387 double-spaced pages. Eschatology is the study of the End Times. I never knew this. Gematria, as Dr. Ben-David had explained earlier, is Hebrew numerology.

The tzadikim nistarim are by definition “hidden.”

Their identities are known only to God.

How, then, Manning is asking Rachel in the interrogation room, did a twenty-seven-year-old, only-recently-ordained female rabbi figure it out, when generations of scholars had all failed?

According to Rachel’s paper, there are twenty-six different gematrial systems, developed over centuries by Talmudists and learned masters in Judaic esoterica working in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Aramaic, and Assyro-Babylonian-Greek, by which a single word (or part of a word), a passage of scripture, or an individual’s name can be broken down to reveal its occult meaning or, perhaps more important, a clue to some broader ethical, religious, or political issue. Here is one such formula from Rachel’s paper:

F(x) = (10floor((x-1) ÷ 9)) x ((x-1) rem 9 + 1)

I google this. It’s for real. I’m reading Rachel’s dissertation with one eye and keeping tabs on Manning’s interrogation of her with the other.

RACHEL

(to Manning)

I have tools that the ancient rabbis didn’t.