The Perfect Candidate: A Lance Priest / Preacher Thriller (No. 1) (7 page)

Lance was out of body again. He was watching himself take the Foreign Service Written Exam eight weeks earlier in Tulsa.

He put a few details into the vault. The guy in the back row across the room was a pencil chewer. He’d made a mess of his No. 2. The gal two rows over could not stop blinking, absolutely could not stop. She was going 200 to 250 blinks per minute as if a blink was required after each letter of each word she wrote. And the gentlemen in the flannel shirt on the second row across the way had looked at Lance at least 80 times since the start of the exam. Lance knew now that gentleman sometimes went by the name Drew Marsco.

He watched from above as Marsco eyed him. It didn’t bother Lance much, he was quite used to garnering the attention of others, including those of the same sex. It had just always been like this. But the way Marsco was watching him was different. The guy was trying to keep it undercover, but he was constantly watching. At the time, Lance had struggled to come up with a word to describe what Marsco’s watching felt like. He knew now. It was surveillance.

What Lance couldn’t see were the thoughts going through the psychologist’s head. Indeed, surveillance is half art and half science. Stuart Braden had mastered neither. As a psychologist and a subject evaluation specialist, he is an expert in the intricacies of the human condition, with an emphasis, or specialty, as he likes to call it, in body language.

For Braden, the human body is a book with a cover that does tell a story – often the whole story. He trained alongside the elite psychologists in the country in evaluating a person’s feelings, state of mind, desires, hidden secrets and greatest fears – all visible in the furrow of a brow, flutter of an eye, rise and fall of the chest and bounce tap-rate of a foot. Braden is a walking, talking lie detector.

Instead of going into practice for himself, he practiced his craft on behalf of the intelligence-gathering arm of the U.S. government.

Braden found himself in Tulsa on a rainy Saturday in September to do what he does best – evaluate people. In this case, one person. The subject in this instance being a candidate. But this particular setting in a university classroom was not ideal, not even close. Instead of evaluating a subject in a controlled and secure interview or interrogation room or even a somewhat secure courtroom, he was asked by Seibel to examine this candidate in a pressure setting.

His mark was Lance Priest, male, 21, student, part-time car salesman. The young man set off a few alarm bells with his T12A questionnaire response. It was the first time Braden could recall this particular trigger.

Looking across the room at young Mr. Priest, Braden tried to be as discrete as possible, but field surveillance was simply not his bag. His notes, written on a single sheet of notebook paper, so as not to stick out among the other exam takers, detailed a mixture of observations recorded over the past two hours. Looking over his notes again, one word kept showing up. C
omfortable
. Braden had written comfortable multiple times across the page.
“Comfortable, is that the best word to describe candidate Priest?”
he furrowed his brow.

At ease, casual, stress-free; all applied, but comfortable best captured the kid’s essence. Glancing around the room, Braden could play his one-word association game with everyone taking the exam. “
Bored
” fit the heavyset woman two desks over. “
Flummoxed
” best detailed the young man dressed in denim. “
Perched
” most accurately described a female student with a long nose and glasses. “
Lonely
” applied to the boy trying very hard to be a man directly across from him.

But
comfortable
just fit Priest. A detailed observation h2t, or head-to-toe for non-government intelligence professionals, revealed a healthy, attractive young man completely at ease in a potentially stressful situation. Braden’s notes had captured the following details -- breathing normal, no fidgeting, eye movement steady, facial expression relaxed. Yet, there was something that Braden couldn’t quite nail down that lay just below the comfortable quilt of sorts this kid had wrapped around him. If he had to say, he would call it
awareness
. This kid was comfortably aware of everything going on around him. It was not overt, but it was there in his eyes. Braden wrote
comfortably aware
.

And the psychologist had no doubt Candidate Priest had caught him several times. In field surveillance instances such as this where he is detected, protocol calls for playing gay. He had become quite good at it. One time in a delightful seaside cafe in Majorca surveilling a team of Serbian arms dealers to determine which one was a KGB agent, Braden was nailed cold by one of the men. The man rose rather abruptly and approached him in a menacing manner. Braden escaped harm by affecting a lilting French accent and commenting on the guy’s excellent choice in slacks. Interestingly, the chap turned out to be both KGB and homosexual.

His current evaluation subject didn’t present any obvious danger. If anything, Mr. Priest looked the nonviolent type. Braden wrote
possibly unable to act with violence
on his sheet. He returned to the word comfortable.

He had sat in on interviews with cold-blooded murderers who were also incredibly comfortable. They sat by calmly as insults and threats were hurled at them by interrogators. But below the surface and only flashed in the briefest of moments with a squint or a fleeting eye roll, was a torrent of evil. These moments gave bad guys away. In these situations, Braden was able to step out of the interview room and give the investigating officer or interrogating agent a sliver of insight to use as a wedge to begin unraveling the subject. He’d done it dozens of times over the years.

His now bulky file on Subject Priest held a number of details indicating levels of narcissism and detachment, but nothing in stone. Priest was just a naturally calm and at-ease individual.
And then there was the lying.

But just like that, Braden knew he was made. No doubt about it. Candidate Priest met his glance and smiled. The exchange lasted a fraction of a second, but in that moment, Braden knew his attention and focus had given him away. He followed protocol and averted his eyes for 30 seconds and then brought his attention back to Lance. The kid’s second smile at him made it clear he was aware. Not good. Impressive on the kid’s part, but not good. Not a real big deal because of the logistics of the classroom and the absence of firearms, but the next phase would need to be timeline advanced. Further observation would be completed by video surveillance. Braden didn’t like videotape. Didn’t trust it. He preferred to see his subjects in person to be able to catch the details that two-dimensional video and its accompanying bad audio often missed.

As planned, Braden dropped his pencil and bent to pick it up. When he returned to sitting position, he and the exam monitor exchanged a glance. The exam monitor, a man of 50 or so with unruly hair, dirty glasses and jacket with elbow patches, stood. “Your attention please, you have two minutes to complete this portion of the exam.” He announced to the room. Most had finished, but a few still working on their answers released sighs of exasperation and ran fingers through their hair or rubbed their brows.

The exam monitor moved closer and took a position directly between Lance and Braden, creating a momentary visual barrier. He then cleared his throat. When Lance looked at the gentleman, Braden got up and bolted out the door. The professorial gent smiled and turned to finish his rounds of the room.

All of this went as planned. All of it except the part where Lance saw the entire thing unfold. He watched the replay again from above. At the time, he couldn’t be 100 percent certain the guy he knew as Marsco was only watching him. Now he was sure.

He was used to it of course – the watching. Even though he worshipped anonymity, Lance had always garnered the attention of others. Girls in elementary school stalked him in games of kissing tag on the playground. Older girls whispered to their friends as he walked by in high school hallways. And dudes who liked to kiss other dudes could never be sure if he was one of them or not. Marsco appeared on the surface to be this type. But something tugged at Lance and told him there was another element at work here.

“And that is time ladies and gentlemen,” Mr. Exam Monitor made his way back over to the podium. “Please close your exams if you haven’t already done so. I invite you to stand up for a few moments. Take a deep breath and maybe stretch your legs. Please do not talk to each other though. The third and final portion of the test will begin in five minutes and will last one hour and ten minutes.”

His fellow exam takers did various forms of stretching, exhaling, yawning. Lance did the same. He stood up and raised his arms over his head to release a little pressure in his back. He waited for another student to approach the exam monitor and then casually made his way over near Marsco’s desk. He quickly reached out and opened Marsco’s test to see the first few pages and what he found surprised him indeed. The faker had not answered any of the questions in the test.

Lance turned ever so slowly and walked back to his desk. It was all one fluid motion. From above, Lance thought it was pretty slick work.

Lance’s replay of the scene didn’t include Braden being impressed with the move. The psychologist was also watching from above. Two floors up, he stood next to contract electronic surveillance expert Frank Wyrick who sat in a chair in front of a video monitor. They both smiled at what they had just seen.

“Pretty good.” Wyrick whispered.

“Pretty good is right,” Braden replied.

The video cameras for this particular surveillance opportunity just happened to be inside the two 21-inch televisions hanging from the ceiling in the corners of the classroom. Whichever side candidate Priest had chosen to sit, the cameras concealed behind see-through opaque glass, could zoom in on him.

“Did you get enough?” Wyrick asked while still watching the screen.

“More than.”

“You sure he made you?”

“Positive.” Braden confirmed

“How long?”

“Tell you the truth,” Braden rubbed his forehead. “I think the little shit made me within minutes. I think he knew I was there from the git-go and was trying to figure me out.”

“Think he took you for a friendly kind of guy?” Wyrick smiled and winked.

“That’s the vibe I was giving, but I’ll tell you what, I think that I was the one being evaluated here. I don’t know if I recall anyone this aware with his surroundings.”

“What, you mean ever? In all your years digging through people’s minds?” Wyrick asked.

“Ever.” Braden replied.

They both watched the monitor as Wyrick zoomed the camera in on Lance. His eyes gave nothing away, just like a professional. “The word I kept coming back to is comfortable. He is like a throw blanket on a couch or maybe a robe.” Braden added.

“Or like a friend you can open up to. Almost like a shrink you can trust.”

“That really hurts man.” The psychologist shook his head. The two of them had worked together dozens of times.

Wyrick laughed. “I’m just wondering if you are going to write the word ‘blanket’ or ‘robe’ in your TER?”

“I might.” They laughed a moment. “It fits though doesn’t it?”

“Yep. This one is a natural,” Wyrick added. “You can see it inside of a minute. Like we did the first time. The moves, the recognition, the assessing going on; it is like a computer program running in his head. And then there’s the lying. Man that’s artwork.”

“From everything I've seen, he’s a liar on par with the greatest.” Braden added.

“You got it,” Wyrick leaned back in his chair for a moment and put his hands behind his head. He had spent a good part of the last two weeks reacquainting himself with Lance Priest and had become an expert of sorts. “This kid’s entire life is a lie. You interview five different people and you get five different stories. Very subtle differences. Totally believable, totally detailed; amazing. I’ve been with more than a dozen so far and I can tell you this kid, Preacher, is the real thing.”

“Preacher. Can you believe that nickname? That’s irony for you.” Braden sat down in a desk and stretched out his legs. “I felt like I was reading in layers in his file. One set of lies, built upon another level of falsehoods which was in-turn built on a foundation of 100 percent prevarication.”