“I don’t know if I should say anything more,” Hamilton said. “If you’re accusing me of a crime, or . . . Look, Detective Lone, you’re a cop. And Alondra, you’re part of the Justice Department. I don’t know how you’re mixed up with these people. I don’t think I want to know.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Larison said from by the window. “I trust you. I know you would never compromise anyone in this room. Ever.” He smiled at her. “Isn’t that right?”
Hamilton nodded quickly. “Yes.”
“Great,” Larison said. “Now how about if you go on telling Livia everything you know, just so no one starts to think maybe you’re playing for the wrong team.”
Everyone was silent for a minute. Larison looked at Livia. “Sorry.”
She didn’t like it. On the other hand, that bone-chilling smile had its uses. She summarized again for Manus.
“If I may,” Carl said to Livia.
She looked at him and nodded, not minding the interjection. She trusted his instincts. And unlike the case with some of the others, also trusted his ability to mesh his own efforts with hers rather than just going his own way.
He leaned forward, toward Hamilton. “You said Schrader told you Hobbs would be receptive now because he was receptive when he was the US Attorney in South Carolina.”
Hamilton nodded.
“All right,” Carl went on. “But why was Hobbs receptive back then?”
No one said anything.
Carl leaned back. “I mean, I suppose it could be anything. But it wouldn’t surprise me if Mr. Guardian of American Justice and Values makes a personal appearance in those videos. You sure your client didn’t say anything about that?”
“No,” Hamilton said. “He didn’t.”
“Did he give you any specifics at all?”
“No.”
“Well, what did he tell you?”
Hamilton looked at Livia. “He told me he had designed the system so that if anything happened to him, the videos would be uploaded.”
Diaz nodded. “He told me the same.”
“There’s more,” Hamilton said. “The system . . . He has to operate it himself. It’s not like a normal account, where you can log in from anywhere if you know the URL, the username, and a password.”
“What do you mean?” Livia said. “Operate it himself how?”
“He has keypads in his houses. Look, I’m not technical, I don’t know the details.”
“Okay,” Livia said, suppressing her excitement. “But what did you tell Hobbs about the system?”
“Why does that even matter?”
“Because,” Carl said, “there’s a substantial likelihood that right now, your client is being tortured for information about this system you say he set up. And it would be handy for us to have some idea of what he might be telling his torturers, and what they might then do about it.”
“The initial plan was to kill me,” Diaz said. “In Freeway Park this morning. Without me to spearhead the indictment, the whole thing would have fallen apart. Schrader would have walked.”
“But when that didn’t work,” Livia said, “they shifted to some kind of alternative plan involving Schrader himself. Given that Schrader was the secondary plan and not the primary, we’ve been operating on the assumption that Schrader told someone about the dead-man switch. It sounds like that person was Hobbs, through you.”
Hamilton nodded. “Yes.”