Disclaimer: see chapter 1

Chapter 5: Making Sense

"I think it's starting to smoke."

It took Colby a second, but then he realized that one, David had to be talking to him, and two, he had no idea what he was talking about. "What?"

"The door," David replied without ever taking his eyes off the report he was reading. "That's what you've been trying to do, isn't it, burning holes in it through staring?"

Colby grimaced. "Very funny."

"You know, instead of brooding over this NSA stuff, you could actually do something useful and help me get through these reports."

Colby swiveled around in his office chair so that he was now fully facing his partner. "Do you really want to tell me you're okay with this? That they just take over and commandeer this Miller guy to spy on us?"

"He's not here to spy on us, he's our link to the NSA, he's helping us on the investigation," David repeated Thorndike's earlier words.

"Right," Colby said sarcastically, still not sure what to think about this official explanation. "And what about this whole thing with Don's brother? You don't think it's at least a little weird that they'd want to make him go from enemy to ally without so much as talking to us first?"

"What do you want me to say? It's unusual, sure, and I don't know what to think about it myself, but it doesn't really matter now, does it? He turned them down, so you can stop worrying about him and instead take a look at our other suspects."

Colby gave a deep sigh and took up one of the folders that kept accumulating on their desks ever since they'd been asking pretty much every available agent from other units to help them interrogate their suspects. Before he'd found the inner impetus to open it, however, he let it fall on his desk again. "We won't find anything in there," he complained. "If they had revealed anything of importance, our guys would have told us."

"But maybe we'll find something in these statements that they didn't notice during the interrogation, maybe something that'll only show in the overall picture."

Colby sighed again and accepted his fate, opening the folder. Yet, he still wasn't convinced. Reading reports was definitely not his idea of what fighting terrorism should look like.

"Why can't we hand this stuff off to the NSA?" he asked before he'd even made it through the first page, still with a slightly plaintive tinge to his voice. "They should be good for something."

Now, it was David who gave an exasperated sigh. "I didn't just hallucinate your presence earlier though, did I? You did hear the part about Miller and the NSA checking out the coded messages, and don't tell me you wanna trade."

Colby grinned ruefully. David was right, if there was anything worse than going through a mountain of interrogation reports, it was staring hours and hours at the same few symbols pretending to find any meaning in them.

Charlie was scribbling furiously. It was around noon now, and he was feeling restless. After a quick stop at home and a badly needed shower, he'd come here to catch up on some paperwork that had been piling up during the past two days in detention – and to deal with the bureaucratic repercussions of his absence. Luckily, since he'd been released without being charged of anything, he wouldn't have to fear any disadvantages work-wise, but sorting it all out with the dean was still something that required a lot of energy, resources that Charlie would have preferred to apply elsewhere.

He heard a soft knock at the door, and when he turned around, Larry was slowly edging inside. Without so much as a greeting, Charlie turned towards his board again and continued scribbling. He knew he was being rude, but he also knew that Larry would understand – and that he would accept the fact that right now, if he didn't want to get yelled at, he needed to let Charlie blow off some more steam.

And so, Larry went towards the big, sturdy desk, not the one that was overflowing with piles of paper, but to the one that offered enough space for him to sit on in a cross-legged fashion. Charlie continued working on the expression on the board, all the while distinctly sensing the solemn presence in his back, and he could see Larry's calm posture in front of his inner eye, his patient gaze resting on Charlie, the clasped hands supporting his chin. He found a mistake on the board then, not his first one today, and impatiently wiped it away with his hand. He was well aware that Larry's presence was distracting him from his math, but then again, he was also aware that most thoughts on his mind hadn't been related to the problem on his board even before Larry's entrance. Then, when he found another mistake on the dark green, he decided that his hand wasn't going to do the trick anymore, that he needed to erase his thoughts more extensively, so he took up the sponge and wiped out the whole board with vigorous, erratic movements. Yet, the thoughts on his mind were still there, and they were still the same, running in circles and never reaching an end.

"Given your behavior, I assume that the answer is 'no'," Larry's quiet voice floated over to him just as he was throwing the sponge back in the rough direction of the board.

"What answer?" Charlie gave back, even though he didn't really care. He kept pacing the small space in front of his board and glancing at the dusty surface somewhat erratically, as though he was waiting for the right symbols to appear there by magic. He was impatiently twisting a piece of chalk between his fingers, trying to think of a new approach, to fill the board with something he could work with, something to keep his mind occupied.

"The one to the question of whether or not you're okay."

Charlie stopped his pacing and turned around to his friend, sighing gravely. He brought his hand up to his forehead, massaging his temples with his thumb and his middle finger and only realizing now how much his head was hurting.

"I don't know," he finally admitted in a low voice.

Larry remained silent, but his kind eyes were resting on Charlie with such liberating openness that he had no trouble recognizing that look for what it was: an invitation – one that he took gratefully.

"You know who interrogated me?" he asked and couldn't ban the sour tone from his voice.

He saw Larry slowly nod. "Alan told me."

Charlie huffed, and now that he'd started his ranting, he felt his anger increase even further. "He thought I was a terrorist! He thought I was collaborating with foreign terrorist cells to build bio-chemical weaponry!"

Larry was silent, and his silence was fueling Charlie's anger, for he knew what it meant, it meant that he was right, that there was nothing that could justify Don's behavior.

"And you know what they did then? They asked for my collaboration! First they accuse me of being a terrorist and then they want me to spy on everyone else who got arrested along with me!"

A deep frown had appeared on Larry's forehead. "That does seem rather odd," he said thoughtfully. "I wonder what made them carry out such a somersault."

Charlie huffed again. "The NSA intervened. They told them I'd been working with them in the past, and apparently, they finally let someone competent take a look at the document that got me into this mess."

The frown on Larry's face deepened. "I'm afraid I don't quite follow."

Charlie gave another impatient sigh and then explained to his friend how exactly the FBI had come to suspect him, and how they'd come to see their errors.

"That's really rather interesting," Larry said when Charlie had finished, and Charlie took a deep breath to keep his anger inside. True, to Larry, this might seem like a curious little problem. He hadn't been the one who'd spent the past two days in detention. "When you think about it, it's a perfectly scientific approach."

Charlie abruptly stopped exhaling the breath he'd been holding, not sure he was following his friend. "What is?"

"The FBI's investigation on you. Just consider the steps they have been taking one after another: they started with a couple of scattered clues that made them look harder at this matter and investigate this group further. Then, they found substantial proof, the document you mentioned, that enabled them to formulate a valid working hypothesis, your guilt, and that's the hypothesis they assumed as likely true until they were given contrary evidence, which made them reject their original thesis."

Charlie could feel that he had his jaw clenched. He realized that Larry had a point there, but he still couldn't let this go so easily. "There's a difference," he insisted. "When I find my thesis to be wrong, I have to clean my blackboard and start over. When Don follows a wrong thesis, chances are he destroys a life in the process and they'll need to start over."

Larry emitted a deep sigh, but said nothing.

"What?" Charlie prompted him, realizing that he was getting further infuriated, but finding no resources within himself to stop that tendency.

Larry shrugged. "I just think it can't be all that easy," he said with a gesture that almost seemed apologetic. "I mean, consider the pressure that comes with the responsibility of having to make decisions that might affect people's lives in such a drastic manner. The knowledge of the severity of the damage both false positives and false negatives might cause… well, it can't be easy to bear."

Charlie was silent and could feel that, despite himself, large chunks of his anger were slowly dissolving into thin air. Yes, Larry had a point, Charlie knew that, he was aware of what kind of responsibility people like his brother were shouldering, it had always been a reason for him to look up at Don, to admire him. Somehow though, he'd forgotten about those difficulties when he himself had experienced the bad luck of tasting some of the disadvantages of this system. Yet, he knew that such detriments were a necessary evil, for he was well aware that the outcry would have been enormous if there had indeed been a terrorist attack, and if later on it would have become known that there had been signs that had pointed in the right direction, that they just hadn't been investigated properly.

"That still doesn't mean I can just forget everything they did," he insisted, "it still doesn't make it okay to abridge people's rights like that."

Larry was silent for a moment, showing clear signs of hard thinking on his face. When he continued, Charlie noticed that he'd assumed his lecturer's voice, the one Charlie still remembered from their time in Princeton.

"There is an interesting thought experiment, one that was proposed by contemporary philosopher John Rawls, and that's become known by the name of the 'veil of ignorance'," Larry explained. "The idea is that a community constructs the rules that should apply to themselves from behind an imaginary veil, that is without knowing their own individual position in society, or anyone else's, for that matter. Rawls claims that the laws that are made up in this manner will be the best embodiment of justice, since nobody knows whether they'll later be privileged or disadvantaged by those laws, so everyone will want to make sure that possible disadvantages aren't too great and always serve the greater good."

"Okay," Charlie said slowly. He thought to be vaguely familiar with the concept, but not enough to see where Larry was going with this. "And this relates to my situation how?"

"Well," Larry said and started nervously scratching his ear-lobe, "I may be wrong, but I've never before heard you mention any doubts concerning the rules about questioning people who are suspected of terrorism."

Charlie felt the heat rise to his head, feeling caught, like Larry was looking in those dark corners of his mind he was trying to keep hidden even from himself. "That's because I hadn't known before."

Larry was looking back at him over his folded hands, holding his gaze, but not saying a word.

"What," Charlie went on, feeling a shade of his former anger return, but knowing it wasn't directed at Larry, "you're saying that I'm just opposed to this sort of treatment because I was the one who had to bear the disadvantages of this system?"

Larry tilted his head, but kept holding his gaze. That was an affirmative answer right there, one that Charlie wouldn't really have needed, but Larry didn't stop there and instead went one step further. "The aim of this thought experiment is to put any personal characteristics aside," he continued his lecture, "including personal feelings that might cloud our rational judgment of what is right."

The hint was so broad that Charlie couldn't ignore it. He swallowed, trying to keep his anger down because he realized that even though he felt betrayed, as though Larry had lured him into a trap, his friend had only done that to help him see the truth. Still, Charlie was trying to not rush to conclusions and find a different explanation for what he was experiencing. "So you think this is about Don," he stated and did his best to deliver the words with a healthy load of doubt.

Larry gave him a shrug. "It was the thirst thing you chose to say about this matter," he reminded him.

Charlie didn't reply at once, but concentrated on his breathing. He was trying to level himself, but had to realize that his nasal wings were slightly trembling, always a sign of suppressed anger. "I just don't know what to think about this," he finally admitted in a low voice. "They still don't trust me, that's for sure. Even after the NSA had told them about the document, they still weren't convinced, I could feel it."

"I thought Don said he believed you?"

Charlie bit his lip, as if he was trying to keep the unwanted truth inside, but it wasn't the truth yet, was it? It was only a thesis, and he knew, if there was an error in his reasoning, Larry would help him find it, and that was what he desperately needed. "That's what he said. But… I don't know. Given everything that has happened since then, I can't help but wonder if maybe it was all a trick, like a long con, because they're hoping that I'll somehow betray the rest of the group. I'm afraid they might just be trying to use me."

Larry thought for a long moment. With hardly bearable tension, Charlie waited for him to speak his mind, and to maybe reveal to him some hidden clue he might have missed. "I'm aware that you and your brother have been at odds," he finally said, "but do you think that this is a plausible scenario, that he would try to manipulate you in this manner?"

Charlie shrugged, biting his lip down harder still. He didn't want to answer, but his mind was taken back to Don's first interrogation with him, to the accusations he'd thrown at him then, accusations that, as Charlie would have readily sworn only three days ago, Don would know better than to make. He'd been so relieved when Don had told him he believed him, but now he wasn't so sure whether that feeling had been justified. What if that whole toing and froing about his charges, about accusing him and then believing him again, had only been made in preparation for what had happened today? Who knew, maybe they were tailing him right now because they hoped he would lead them to some hidden hideout of Life's Matter?

"I just can't trust him anymore," he all but whispered, trying to fight his way through the thick feeling of betrayal suffocating him. "I mean, I understand it rationally, I can understand that the FBI would see the evidence and consider me a suspect, some kind of threat they had to keep away from the rest of society, and that they would come to see their errors when new evidence turned up. But Don's not just an FBI agent, he knows me. Or at least, that's what I thought."

He was staring at a point somewhere between his eyes and the floor, trying to look into his head instead. Larry had been right. His problem wasn't with the FBI, not really, it was with Don, it wasn't having been suspected of terrorism, but having been suspected by his own brother. But that was his problem, and that didn't give him the right to blame the whole system for his feeling of having been treated unfairly. The system, while not perfect, was working well in general, even though every once in a while, an individual might have to suffer some disadvantages so that the greater good could be furthered. Larry had been right, the FBI's approach to this matter had been perfectly scientific, perfectly logical, and so Charlie didn't have anything to object to that. Yes, in his case, they had been wrong, but that wasn't the fault of the entire organization, not the fault of the whole system, it was the fault of one employee who had provided them with flawed data. No, in general, Charlie had enough trust in law enforcement to believe that they must have had sufficient reason to investigate Life's Matter, and that right now, they were doing everything in their power to prevent possible terrorist attacks from taking place.

He closed his eyes and slightly shook his head, exasperated with himself as he was thinking back to his conduct at the FBI this morning. He'd been such a pompous ass. What could have ever given him the right to verbally attack these agents like that and tell them off without so much as hearing them out? True, they'd been wrong, and true, he'd had some unpleasant hours because of that, but that didn't change anything about the fact that they'd done their job, and apart from the technician who'd misinterpreted his analysis, they seemed to have done it well. And even though Charlie had trouble imagining that Life's Matter would turn out to be a terrorist organization, he knew that he couldn't be sure, not sure enough to risk letting the group harm innocent people – and that meant that he needed to do his share. If they thought he might help them prevent bad things from happening, then he needed to collaborate, to do whatever was in his power to help the NSA and the FBI see some truth in this case.

"I have to go," he told Larry as he grabbed his bag, suddenly feeling hustled. Still, when he reached the door, he took the time to look back at his friend, who'd turned his head slightly to watch his exit with the ghost of a lenient smile on his lips. At that moment, it hit him how lucky he was to have a true friend like him. "Thanks, Larry, I'll talk to you later!"

He was already out of the door, but upon leaving, he'd seen the quiet waved goodbye of his friend, showing an understanding for Charlie's sudden activism that once again told him, despite how cryptic his friend's words seemed to him sometimes, how well they were talking the same language.