Agents were defined by their resources, authority being just one among many others. Agents didn’t have to restrain themselves because of a code or pretend to be ashamed when they transgressed that code. There was no good agent/bad agent routine. There was just investigation. And good investigators closed their cases by using all of the resources at their disposal, choking included.

Case details swirled in her head as Tilly made her way back to her office. Sims had given her silhouettes, but at least things were no longer shapeless. She still couldn’t figure out why African American teenagers would be hijacking a government satellite, but if they had the money and the know-how to pull it off, they had to mostly have been from Cobb. The Clayton county tag would have to be looked into, but Clayton County barely produced graduates; there was no way it was producing terrorists.

“You look content,” Rick said as she entered her office.

“You look comfortable,” Tilly replied, eyeing his outstretched legs, which were resting on her bookshelf.

“I am. The case is back on track! I watched the live feed of the interview. I can’t believe the recorder routine still works. These plebeians really think that the FBI records interviews using a tape recorder that is embedded in a table. We always leave them in the room alone for at least fifteen minutes, phones confiscated, and they still never seem to notice the damn closed-circuit camera in the corner. I think CSI: Miami might have permanently ruined criminality. It’s really a shame because we depend on the criminals to do our jobs well.”

“Are you finished?”

“Yeah, I got Sims’s phone from the front desk. I’m going to call up AT&T and request the logs first thing tomorrow.”

“Good. Anything else?”

“Sims was probably right about them using burners. But maybe Saint Snowden will bless us, and we’ll score some actual recorded calls. Knowing the perps’ voices won’t help us find out who they are if we don’t already have voiceprints, but it will help us verify once we know.”

“Do you feel like we’re closer to knowing?” Tilly asked, needing him to answer confidently.

“Slightly. We’ve got car models and counties. We can try to pull some surveillance footage from the night. Both Cobb and Clayton are off the interstate, so maybe we’ll get something. That new car recognition software from ATF can recognize car colors and models pretty well, but it will still be a lot of images, so we will have to choose very accurate parameters. Plus, now that we know this is ‘just’ a domestic case, that NSA money is probably gonna get cut off, so no awesome supercomputers to do all the work. We’ll have to use our eyeballs!”