I shake my head. I’ve seen some guys playing with decks of cards. There’s even a small magic club at the D.C. office, but that’s it.

“None. Zero. I did some research. In the entire history of the FBI, we’ve never had an agent with that kind of knowledge. And now you’re sitting there asking yourself, ‘So what?’ I’ll tell you. My job here is efficiency. And that means putting the right man or woman on the job so it gets done quickly. I flagged your name so when the right opportunity came along, I could test this theory.”

“Is the director having a birthday party?”

It takes Ailes a moment to realize I’m making a joke. My humor, my real sense of humor, has that effect. Grandfather used to say, “The little witch is drier than the Sahara.”

Ailes shakes his head. “The director is having nightmares. We all are. We’re faced with something big. It doesn’t fit the paradigm. I think it’s time we try something different.” He reaches into a bag by his chair and pulls out a folder, then sets it in front of me. There’s only one word written on it, “Warlock.”

I heard the name a few days ago. Someone had managed to take our website offline and redirect the URL to another website. Not the same as actually hacking our internal computer system, but still a serious security lapse. The page that came up was a series of numbers and the name “Warlock.”

The hack was pretty big news and caused all kinds of panic and embarrassment. Other than that, I didn’t realize it was this much of an area of concern. For all I know, someone just used a bad password and it wasn’t some large-scale brute force hack. “I don’t understand. This is a computer crimes case. That’s not my area.”

Ailes nods his head. “It was a computer crime until two hours ago, when we unlocked the code.” There’s a pause. This code isn’t a joke. I can already tell from the tone that there is something more sinister in play.

“The numbers were encrypted GPS coordinates. We sent local police to the point on the map. We were expecting some kind of hacker stunt. None of us expected this. Hackers don’t do this kind of thing. But the code led us to a body. Now it’s a murder investigation.”

“I’m in forensic accounting. What does this have to do with me?”

“I could go into the complexity of the code and why the FBI should be throwing more resources into this, but that’s not your concern. I brought you here because of the body.”

“The body?”

“It’s an impossibility. A puzzle. A mystery we can’t solve,” he replies. “The kind of thing you’d need a magician to understand.”

I shake my head. I’m still not sure I get it.

Ailes continues, “The problem is, the person we’ve identified as the victim is supposed to have died almost two years ago. But the body is only hours old. You get my drift? A magical mystery at the moment. Complicated by the suspect’s intentions. He calls himself a warlock. Another word for a necromancer. Someone who can raise the dead. In twenty-four hours, the news is going to get ahold of this. Short of having him in custody, we need to figure out how he did it. We’re already dealing with the blowback of the hacking. To the public, he defeated the security of the most advanced law enforcement agency in the world. Granted, that was just a public Web server. But it doesn’t matter. He left us a code that told us where to find the victim before she was killed. He knew almost to the minute how long it would take us to break the code.”