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his maid, his lawyer, and his lawyer’s daughter, who was a frequent visitor. The five remaining latents he sent to West Virginia, which would in turn notify relevant field offices of any hits. Seattle, Washington, was, some hours later, the surprised beneficiary. Four were unknown. But they believed a thumb partial to be that of a resident of Port Angeles, Washington, who had been arrested and fingerprinted during the Seattle protest against the WTO. The duty officer in Seattle, in turn, called in a favor from the state police, who—a neat symmetry, I thought—used contacts in local law enforcement to identify the womanas a quite recent arrival in town, a new hire at a small Internet advertising company, who was said to have left on a car trip some days previous.
    From here, it was all very simple: you want to learn about anyone in Port Angeles, go to the single café and wait for the first chilly, lonely local to come in and start to chat. By six o’clock that evening, Kevin Cornelius had a social security number, and was running it through what was known as the “array”—a series of different electronic sources that included databases as banal as Nexis and PACER Legal and extended to the Internal Revenue Service and, literally, thousands of medical records storages.
    As always, the array gave out a lot of garbage: minority percentile hits, doubles, self-contradictions, errors. Thousands of databases relying on tens of thousands of input sources had been visited. Cornelius, in this as in all investigations, used more art than craft. What he noticed was not the garbage but the fact that one of the few 90-percent-or-over hits was the IRS, which reported that the social had no other trace and was less than six months old.
    That didn’t necessarily mean anything—social security numbers are not terribly reliable. But Cornelius knew that by the FBI’s own analysis, it was a datapoint that had been shown to be over 65 percent reliable in the identification of fugitives.
    And therefore Cornelius was more than interested enough to start assembling a full surveillance routine on the house in Rosendale. No known fingerprints existed of Sharon Solarz. But if they could find grounds for probable cause, they could stop her and question her. This, in fact, was what they planned to do.
    The record is crystal clear. Albany field office logged Seattle’s call at 6 P.M . and notified Special Agent Cornelius immediately. Surveillance on the Rosendale home, which was found to belong to a New York City labor lawyer and his psychologist wife, was quadrupled by nine. By morning parabolic listening devices had been put on the kitchen windows, and the telephone had been redirected through an FBI switchboard. The woman spent the entire day inside, talking to no one. At5 P.M . she got in her car and drove northeast, apparently returning to Cusimano’s. When, however, she bypassed Billy’s and headed up toward 23, agents began to have doubts, and a roadblock was set up on the Catskill Thruway entrance. She stopped for an hour in Catskill, talking on pay phones, but due to her frequent changes of telephone, no reliable trace could be set up. She could, however, be digitally photographed, the image sent back to the office and computer enhanced, by means of comparison with photographs taken in the early seventies, before Sharon Solarz went underground, to remove the effects of aging. These results, Kevin Cornelius felt, were unambiguous. And therefore, when she went for the Thruway, which was of course the road to Canada, the roadblock was deployed, and at eight o’clock that evening Sharon Solarz was quietly, smoothly—and, Cornelius noted with satisfaction, in time for the
Times
’s deadline—arrested from twenty-five years as a federal fugitive.
    And I, who had by now been along for the ride since the night before, wrote the story.
    Now, I have just to add one more detail, Isabel, and I think we can consider the scene appropriately