Ailes is not crazy about Chisholm’s idea of using me as bait. So far he and his cohorts haven’t come back to me with a specific plan for how they want to agitate the Warlock, beyond using the media. The current idea is to have me do interviews with cable news playing up my own expertise and dismissing him. The goal is to get him to break his silence and communicate with us or a news agency we have good relations with.

I don’t know how well it will work. Evidence suggests the Warlock is extremely composed. Ailes even threw the idea back at Chisholm, saying that the whole hotel room was staged to look like he’s obsessed with me so all the behavioral analysis skull fuckers (his words) would spin their wheels trying to come up with a scheme like this.

I’m not sure where I stand. I’ve seen firsthand how obsessive men can be. But then I think about Ailes’s point that the Warlock wants to control every facet of the illusion. Registering under the obvious name, the telescope and the magazine are all desperately transparent.

He set up the hotel room so we would find it and have one more thing to distract us while he plans his next move. I think about the kris knife stabbed through my photo and it makes me realize something. Ailes is half right.

“He already won this battle,” I tell him.

Ailes looks up from his screen. “What do you mean?”

“You had the director pull me out of the field and now he has everyone arguing about what to do with me. Maybe that was the real goal. Not just tie up Chisholm and behavioral analysis, but you and me too?”

Ailes thinks it over. “Cognitive capacity.”

“What?”

“It’s the total amount of brainpower you have. We only have so many neurons in our brains. If they’re focused on one problem, then there are fewer resources to worry about another. I’ve been thinking about something. He knew our number cruncher would take seven days to break his code. It’s how he knew when we would find the girl in the cemetery. One digit too few and we would have cracked the code in hours. One too many and it would have taken centuries. He knew almost to the minute.”

“Inside information?” I ask.

Ailes shakes his head. “You don’t need it.” He points to his computer. “It’s all out there on the Web. There are articles about our main cruncher and how powerful it is. A simple formula would tell you how complex of a code you’d need to tie it up for a certain period of time. The Warlock is looking at this like a math problem. Besides the computing power, he probably has at least a rough idea how many people each division of the FBI has and how many we’ve tasked to the case. It’s all online and in reports to Congress.

“Once upon a time we thought things like computers and DNA would make quick work of solving crimes. Then we got computer crime, multiple DNA samples in a crime scene, and all the other complications that go with that. Sometimes I fear the next technological evolution.”