"Man with a bad heel," she said. "Killed Hector and dragged his body around the gates of Troy. Also had a thing for a captive girl named Briseis."
"You know that's not the context."
"I know more than that. I know you must have got the name from something Bean wrote, because the name is not pronounced uh-KILL-eez, it's pronounced ah-SHEEL. French."
"Someone local there."
"Dutch is the native language here, though Fleet Common has just about driven it out as anything but a curiosity."
"Sister Carlotta, I don't appreciate your wasting the expense of this conference."
"And I'm not going to talk about it until I know why you need to know."
Graff took a few deep breaths. She wondered if his mother taught him to count to ten, or if, perhaps, he had learned to bite his tongue from dealing with nuns in Catholic school.
"We are trying to make sense of something Bean wrote."
"Let me see it and I'll help you as I can."
"He's not your responsibility anymore, Sister Carlotta," said Graff.
"Then why are you asking me about him? He's your responsibility, yes? So I can get back to work, yes?"
Graff sighed and did something with his hands, out of sight in the display. Moments later the text of Bean's diary entry appeared on her display below and in front of Graff's face. She read it, smiling slightly.
"Well?" asked Graff.
"He's doing a number on you, Colonel."
"What do you mean?"
"He knows you're going to read it. He's misleading you."
"You know this?"
"Achilles might indeed be providing him with an example, but not a good one. Achilles once betrayed someone that Bean valued highly."
"Don't be vague, Sister Carlotta."
"I wasn't vague. I told you precisely what I wanted you to know. Just as Bean told you what he wanted you to hear. I can promise you that his diary entries will only make sense to you if you recognize that he is writing these things for you, with the intent to deceive."
"Why, because he didn't keep a diary down there?"
"Because his memory is perfect," said Sister Carlotta. "He would never, never commit his real thoughts to a readable form. He keeps his own counsel. Always. You will never find a document written by him that is not meant to be read."
"Would it make a difference if he was writing it under another identity? Which he thinks we don't know about?"
"But you do know about it, and so he knows you will know about it, so the other identity is there only to confuse you, and it's working."
"I forgot, you think this kid is smarter than God."
"I'm not worried that you don't accept my evaluation. The better you know him, the more you'll realize that I'm right. You'll even come to believe those test scores."
"What will it take to get you to help me with this?" asked Graff.
"Try telling me the truth about what this information will mean to Bean."
"He's got his primary teacher worried. He disappeared for twenty-one minutes on the way back from lunch - we have a witness who talked to him on a deck where he had no business, and that still doesn't account for that last seventeen minutes of his absence. He doesn't play with his desk - "
"You think setting up false identities and writing phony diary entries isn't playing?"
"There's a diagnostic / therapeutic game that all the children play - he hasn't even signed on yet."
"He'll know that the game is psychological, and he won't play it until he knows what it will cost him."
"Did you teach him that attitude of default hostility?"
"No, I learned it from him."
"Tell me straight. Based on this diary entry, it looks as though he plans to set up his own crew here, as if this were the street. We need to know about this Achilles so we'll know what he actually has in mind."
"He plans no such thing," said Sister Carlotta.
"You say it so forcefully, but without giving me a single reason to trust your conclusion."
"You called me, remember?"
"That's not enough, Sister Carlotta. Your opinions on this boy are suspect."
"He would never emulate Achilles. He would never write his true plans where you could find them. He does not build crews, he joins them and uses them and moves on without a backward glance."
"So investigating this Achilles won't give us a clue about Bean's future behavior?"
"Bean prides himself on not holding grudges. He thinks they're counterproductive. But at some level, I believe he wrote about Achilles specifically