My Uncle Darius has that kind of look. Purely analytical, like he’s counting verbs as you talk and noticing how many times you blink.

Out of sight, but not out of mind to those of us wondering what he does there, Dr. Ailes’s unit is in a nearly abandoned facility at the west end of a sprawling compound of government-gray structures. The whole building feels like a secret court hidden away in the bowels of the Vatican. Only we’re in Quantico, Virginia, and the building is a relic of a bygone age in law enforcement. Brown plastic signs on doors for divisions that no longer exist line the forgotten corridors.

Decades ago, several of its floors were filled with refrigerator-sized computers compiling data on license plates, hair dyes and carpet fibers entered by hand from physical files. Now it’s a ghost town of hallways with burned-out fluorescent lights and missing ceiling tiles. The custodian has more computing power in his pocket than this whole building once held.

The Ailes group is tucked away on a floor that used to hold thousands of binders indexing things like tennis shoe prints with year of manufacture, how many were sold in each size and in what regions. The FBI has always thrived on this kind of data. A 1983 Puma running shoe can help you narrow a list of thousands down to just one or two people.

Almost all this information is now digitized. The section of indexed tire prints once took up an entire floor. Today you can fit it into an e-mail attachment. In the academy, our professors would regale us with stories about spending weeks hunting through catalogs of fibers to find out the make and model of the trunk where a victim had been stashed. It was a different kind of detective work, one where you could still touch all the evidence.

When I enter, I notice the linoleum floor still has deep gouges from where the massive walls of cabinets once stood holding all those physical bits of information. Half-repaired light fixtures dangle from the tennis court–sized room. At the far end sit six desks pushed up against one another, bullpen-style. Three heads lean over computer screens. Two young men and a woman. All of them are dressed in proper FBI ties or polo shirts. None of them look like the barefooted hippies I’d been led to imagine or the red-robed cardinals I’d feared.

This isn’t as sinister as I was expecting. This looks like a bunch of college kids trying to get out a school newspaper.

A young woman, maybe a year or two younger than me, looks up from her computer screen. With short auburn hair and big cheekbones, she has that Nebraska farmer look but an athletic build. She clicks a window closed before I can get a proper glance. What I see looks like a profile of an agent.

“I’m looking for Dr. Ailes?”

She points to the conference room. “He’s over there right now.” She turns back to her computer before I have a chance to reply.