sense of panic, knew he must keep that emotion at bay: it could freeze him up, cause him to choke, to lose touch with his instincts.
Laurel 's voice: "What if you say you've lost your card?"
"Then they apologize and escort you to the exit," Caston replied. "I saw that happen when I was here a few years back. And they don't care if you're the king of Morocco. Everyone inside that place has a card around his neck."
"Even heads of states?" Laurel pressed.
"I just saw the vice president of the United States. He was wearing a slate blue suit and a yellow tie. And a Davos ID card about five inches below the knot. It's simple, and it's ironclad. These people don't play. They've never had a security breach in some three decades, and there's a reason for that."
When Ambler turned back to the others, Laurel was looking at him expectantly. "There's got to be something, right? The human factor-like you always say."
Ambler heard her words as if they had been spoken from a long distance away. Scenarios flitted by in his mind-entertained, considered, explored, and rejected, all within seconds. Almost every organization had the porosity of human discretion, because day-to-day practicalities demanded some measure of flexibility. But the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum was not a day-to-day institution. It was a special event, lasting just one week. Here rules really could be infinitely stringent. Not enough time ever elapsed for the security officers to start taking much for granted.
Ambler's eyes fell on the black WEF tote bag that Caston had been carrying, filled with the material that people were given at check-in.
He picked it up and spilled its contents on the bed. There was a copy of Global Agenda, the WEF magazine that was prepared for the occasion, and a white binder with the schedule of events. Ambler flipped through it: page after page listed panels with such stultifying titles as "Whither Water Management?" "Securing the Global Health System," "The Future of U.S. Foreign Policy," "Human Security and National Security: Friends or Foes?," "Toward a New Bretton Woods." There was the schedule of addresses by the UN secretary-general, the United States vice president, the president of Pakistan, and others; Liu Ang's address was clearly the culminating and keynote event. Ambler closed the binder and picked up a short, thick, almost cubical book, listing all the "participants" in the WEF annual meeting-nearly fifteen hundred pages featuring photographs of each followed by a career biography crammed in small sans-serif type.
"Look at all the faces here," Ambler said. He rolled a thumb across its width, like a riffle animation.
"Make a hell of a police lineup," Laurel put in. Frustration began to fill the air like a stench.
Suddenly Caston sat bolt upright. "A police lineup," he echoed.
Ambler looked at him, saw something in Caston's eyes that almost scared him-his eyes were practically swiveling in their sockets. "What are you on about?" he prompted in a low voice.
"They ought to be outlawed," Caston said. "Lineups, I mean. They're responsible for a god-awful number of false convictions. The error rates are insupportable."
"You're exhausted," Laurel said quickly. She turned to Ambler anxiously. "He didn't sleep on the train at all."
"Let him talk," Ambler said softly.
"Because eyewitnesses are highly fallible," Caston went on. "You saw someone do a bad thing, and you're led to believe that one of the people in the lineup may be the fellow that you saw. So you look-and there's a heuristic that most people follow. They choose the one who looks most like the person they remember."
"Why's that a problem?" Laurel sounded puzzled.
"Because the closest person isn't necessarily the same person. 'It's Number Four,' they say. 'It's Number Two.' And sometimes Number Four or Number Two is a cop, a stand-in, and there's no harm, no foul. The investigators thank the witness and send him on his way. But, as the odds will have it, sometimes that guy is a suspect. Not the actual perp, but a suspect. He happens to look a little more like the fellow you saw than any of the others. But he's notthe fellow you saw. All of a sudden, you're got an eyewitness testifying against the suspect: 'Can you point to the man that you saw that night?' and that whole rigamarole, and a jury imagines that nothing could be more open-and-shut than that. Now, there's a way to elicit what an eyewitness saw without that distortion: you do it seriatim. Show them photographs