5:42 PM

11
5:42 PM

     Agent Danley had checked himself into a motel back a ways on Route 6, though he had in no ways stopped working. He had take a few plum files with him and he was sketching a timeline of events. But when he sat down on the motel bed, and really thought about it, it was that woman's face that kept appearing to him. She knew something. She wanted to tell him something. He ought to get back in the car and drive over to that diner and--
     He heard the whir of a vending machine click on, and he came back to the situation. That might fly in a drug bust situation, but this was the broad, wide middle of Texas. He couldn't go to people's homes, bust some doors open, and scare them into telling him everything he wanted to know. That kind of action would invite a very negative reaction. The kind of reaction that would get his budget cut, or worse, find himself asked to leave the Bureau.
     He found that the most difficult part of his mandate was that he was being asked to operate in environments where the normal tools at the disposal of law enforcement were not appropriate. Witness interrogation was one where the norms in a small town in Texas and the norms in an urban environment in say Chicago were so drastically different that it left Agent Danley with a bit of ennui. Since he couldn't really operate as was necessary to solve these crimes effectively, he couldn't really do what he was asked to do.
     Since it was painfully obvious that the threat from places like the middle of Texas was growing to the Federal Government, owing to a generation that experienced the painful losses of Watergate and Vietnam, not to mention cultural changes which, on the one hand encouraged people like Agent Danley who believed in an open world in which goods and people moved effortlessly across borders, discouraged people who relied on manufacturing that probably wasn't coming back. Just like Palestinians and other Arabs, jobless and angry, had pined for some supposed traditional way of life, one that probably never existed in the pure form these radicals were imagining, so too would these young men, disillusioned by American society, start to actively resist it.
     When push came to shove, how would agents like Agent Danley get to and prevent the next terrorist act? He hadn't managed to prevent this one. The things that law enforcement agencies were able to do in response to drugs it probably would never be able to do in this place. And if it did, there would be a counter-reaction that would be hazardous to the department, or the Federal Government generally. The cycle of violence would commence, and probably never become disarmed.
     What he felt buzzing up in his was a glorious memorandum! Yes, it really was. "Terrorist Threats Within the United States: Operating Framework for Understanding and Dismantling the Enemy Within." This was going to be good one. One for the ages.
     He wondered who would read it, though? Someone from the gaze of history, he supposed. Someone who would look back on his work and say, "a-ha!" here is someone that got it way before everyone else. But would it make any change in the department? Would it cause people to prepare for the coming future?
     No, probably not.
     Well, he thought, I have only this going for me, and that's that criminal acts are done in long strings, where each next criminal act has a chance to upset enough of the right people to cause every criminal act they commit to become forbidden.
     Sure, they may start by harassing an abortion clinic, but they would not be able to let it end there. No, eventually they would do something that would let people know their acquiescence to violence to solve political questions led down a terrible road. You could, as Agent Danley did, believe in the same end goal. But there was no use to violence in a working democracy. If you had a need to commit violence either the democracy was not working, or else the person was not willing to commit to democracy.
     Agent Danley thought, fundamentally, we live in a working democracy. Yes, there were some things that could use improvement, but fundamentally, we live in a free country. A country where you could convince the broad majority of Americans to make illegal again abortion, or else to make it infrequent. You could run for local office. You could run for state office. You could campaign for candidates that shared your point of view. And, ultimately, if you didn't get you way, you had to abide the law, no matter your feelings towards it.
     Well, he still had hope. Tomorrow they were going to crack this case open, and find squirming behind this guy every other person in a long intricate set of links to every other person who intended to do harm to anybody ever. It could happen, right?