"Never met her." "Your hard drive says you're a liar, McCall." "We've recovered e-mails, chat room conversations-- the whole sick courtship." "You're a registered sex offender with a appetite for teenage girls." "That's what all the neighborhood flyers say." "You're sick, Ryan." "You need help." "Step one is being honest... honest with us" "...concrete answers." "Charlie, the clock's runnin so..." "Hey, Megan." "Hey." "How's it going?" "David's hit him from pretty much every angle, but he's not having any luck in there." "And the victim's still refusing to talk, and the files we found on the computer aren't enough to hold him, never mind convict." "Physical evidence is our only chance to put it together." "Well, there's always Charlie's Inequality Bounding... thing." "There is always Charlie's Inequality Bounding thing." "To examine the defined data points..." "Charlie, Charlie, Charlie..." "All right, all right." "There's two dogs chained to different corners of the backyard." "Right." "Now, the lengths of their chains, as well as their respective positions will limit the area that they can come into contact." "So, what, we do the same thing with McCall and the victim?" "Starting with the known locations, and employing the timeframes of the attack." "We can focus our search efforts on a... get down" "Stay down!" "All right, paramedics." "Who's hit?" "!" "Who's down?" "!" "He's still breathing." "You all right?" "Did you get hit?" "Huh?" "Let me see." "No." "No, no!" "You sure you're okay?" "I'm okay!" "MEGAN:" "SWAT's mobilizing, the paramedics are on their way," "I got two bullet wounds, they're both minor, and some cuts from the glass." "That's it?" "No." "Whoever this guy is..." "I think he got who he came for." "The shooter's wallet says his name is Alec Schane." "He's a realtor from Pasadena." "He walked in the door and told them he had information about a museum robbery." "Then he met agent Labella at the elevators, disarmed him and put him in a choke hold." "How's he do that, how does he disarm an agent?" "Well, all Labella could say was that he was really fast and really strong." "And then Schane used him as a human shield and he let off 15 rounds." "Yeah, Ryan McCall, the predicate sex offender." "DAVID:" "SWAT team gave the all-clear to reenter the building, but Evidence Response wants a few hours to check out the bullpen." "All right." "Why don't you just grab whatever space you can, start working on the connection between Schane and the sex offender." "All right?" "Uh-huh." "Hey, Charlie." "Hey." "How you doing?" "You all right?" "I'm fine." "I'm fine." "How is everybody?" "Well, you know, I mean..." "Look, all things considered, I'd say we got off lucky." "Lucky." "He nearly killed all of us" "I don't see how you get up and deal with this every day." "Eh, you know." "I don't get shot at every day." "Come on, I'll get you some coffee." "No, I gotta go, I should go back to school." "I should get some work done." "Mr. Schane?" "Mr. Schane, can you hear me?" "I'd like to know why you shot Ryan McCall." "Did he assault your daughter?" "DAVID:" "Mrs. Schane?" "Have you ever seen this man before?" "No, I've never seen him before." "How about you, Samantha?" "No?" "Do you have any idea why your husband would do this?" "Well, I still don't believe that he did." "What did he say?" "He asked for a lawyer." "Then I shouldn't talk to you either, should I." "Mrs. Schane, your husband killed a man inside of a federal building." "We're just trying to understand why." "Well, I can't help you understand what I don't!" "And if he doesn't want to cooperate with you..." "I trust him." "And, so, Don and I are simply talking... talking about inequality bounding." "And, uh... and then I heard breaking glass... and a bullet goes past my head." "There's noise." "There's blood." "Chaos." "Chaos..." ""Chaos" presupposes an observable or measurable system." "A deterministic equation with an outcome sensitive to initial conditions." "I was speaking in the vernacular, Charles." "And, yet, you know, we have stumbled into a rather lofty discussion here." "Because one could argue that violence on the human scale is reflective of a fundamental state, as evident from the magnificent collisions of subatomic particles, the operatic clashes of galaxies." "Is that supposed to be reassuring, Larry?" "On the macro level, yes, absolutely." "Though microcosmically, perhaps not so much." "Don laughs it off like it's some funny thing that happened at the office." "AMITA:" "It's a coping mechanism," "Charlie." "I mean, he sees violence daily, so he processes it with humor." "Speaking of which, how are you coping?" "Why is..." "Everyone's asking me that, why?" "Because a little bit of post-traumatic stress is natural, if not inevitable." "And for you to return to work this early," "I think is..." "Ah, man!" "Look, guys, hey, uh, I need to concentrate on this." "So, can you guys, uh..." "Yeah." "Okay." "Of course." "Okay." "Thank you." "Thank you." "Listen, Charlie," "Yes, your concern if you want to talk... is appreciated;" "it really is." "I just..." "allow me to work." "Please." "No." "If Schane knew McCall, there's no public record of it." "What about the daughter?" "She didn't react to his picture." "And there's no Internet contact" "McCall's usual M.O. COLBY:" "I'm starting to think it might be something entirely different." "Just an attack against the FBI." "DAVID:" "He's chairman of his PTA." "You couldn't find a more typical suburban dad than Alec Schane." "Yeah, but there's no record of depression, and there's no sudden changes of behavior at work." "All right, that's what he doesn't have, so..." "Well, I can tell you what he does have is some serious technique." "VID:" "Yeah, he's fast." "I pulled that move straight from the Quantico plbook." "Yeah, and he countered with a flawlessly executed leg shoot." "I mean, that's a classic self-defense move." "Yeah, he's obviously got some martial-arts training." "DON:" "Well, that's some serious training." "Come ihere with the confidence to disarm an agent?" "Well, Alec Schane was a student here." "What is this about?" "It's about a savate kick." "A savate kick followed by a Hadaka-jime combination." "Koketsu is the only discipline that teaches this combination, and yours is the only Koketsu dojo in the county." "Sensei." "Where'd you study?" "I teach Krav Maga at the Y." "And I've seen your exhibitions on self-defense." "Alec Schane." "Brown belt in less than three years." "What happened?" "He disarmed a federal agent and shot three people, one fatally." "Apparently, using techniques that he learned here." "Alec isn't just a good fighter, he's a dedicated member of the dojo." "He brings a positive attitude to every class." "And have you seen any change in that attitude of late?" "There was a problem with Kurt." "Who's Kurt?" "Older guy, came in for a few classes, then dropped out." "The two of them seemed friendly at first, but after a week," "Alec went cold, hostile even." "I suspect that that's why Kurt stopped showing up." "Do you happen to remember if they'd done any work on this combination?" "A lot." "Kurt signed up specifically to learn disarming techniques." "Do you have an address on this guy, from a credit card receipt maybe?" "Let me check my files." "Excuse me." "Krav Maga at the Y?" "Okay, you know, you're going to arrest people that are a hundred pounds heavier than you, you're going to need to learn some hobbies." "You know, if he's been rehearsing this combination with this Kurt guy..." "That means there's another person out there who's capable of launching a second attack." "maybe a bigger attack" "This sketch is based on the jujitsu instructor's best description of Kurt." "About 180 pounds, slight accent, maybe German, maybe Dutch." "He dn't seem to know." "Because of the possibility that he might be planning a similar attack, we have every law enforcement agency in Southern California on high alert." "I see in your notes" "Kurt Weiland was a bogus name and the address he gave the dojo." "DAVID:" "Schane's out of critical condition, but he's still refusing to talk." "You know, if McCall had sexually abused someone close to Schane," "I think he'd be talking to us or talking to the press, you know?" "He'd be throwing out a justification for his actions." "You know, he spent two weeks teaching these same techniques to somebody else." "I don't think McCall was the target." "All right, guys, look." "Ballistics just matched the bullet that killed McCall to your gun." "Yeah, exactly." "So ASC wants you on restricted duty until they can get the shooting team to take a look at this." "I'm sorry..." "DAVID:" "Don, it's obviously an accident-- a ricochet or something." "Bullets were flying all over the place." "It's all right, it's all right." "Restricted duty." "Just means no field duty until they can clear you-- do a psychiatric review, that sort of thing." "And you know, a psychiatric review is totally standard procedure." "You do this long enough, we've all been through one." "DON:" "Exactly." "You should take advantage." "Take a few days off, go surfing, whatever." "All right, look, guys," "I appreciate it;" "thank you." "But if this guy's still out here, he may be planning another attack" "I'm going to be here." "You need everybody on this case." "I'll be on my desk." "I'm not going anywhere." "DON:" "We're going with the assumption that this Kurt is planning another attack." "I know, but, look, this one, I just don't see how my math can help you." "That's the thing: we gotta make sense of the first one." "We get Schane's motive, maybe that'll tell us something about Kurt, right?" "You remember that work you did with paths?" "What, combinatorial optimization?" "LARRY:" "Sure, there's minimum spanning tree, the traveling salesman problem." "Neither of which are applicable to this analysis." "Well, how about applying weights to the potential victims?" "Right, like what you did with the threat analysis but in reverse." "See if we can figure out who the intended target was." "If there was a target at all." "Larry, come over here." "Tell me, does the shooter's path look Brownian to you?" "Well, Stochasticsure," "Markovian, maybe, but Brownian?" "Let me see." "Wait, wait, wait, wait, I do see this." "See what?" "What?" "Picte a pool table... with a cueball in constant motion." "The cueball-- our shooter-- is following a straight path until it hits an obstacle-- another ball or a boundary, the rail." "And then it sets off in a new straight path, until it hits another obstacle." "The table is the office, the ball is the people in it?" "Yeah, a Brownian path would indicate an initially random direction followed by random direction change, which means he wasn't moving toward any particular point." "CHARLIE:" "Or shooting at any particular person." "In fact, inflicting injury might not have even been his intention." "If I can examine the diffusion," "I may be able to shed light on his motive." "We got the war room up and running again." "You can look at the security footage." "How's that?" "I can't go downtown." "Not now." "I..." "I'm in between classes and my cognitive emergence work." "Charlie, we're talking about another attack." "Don, you're not listening." "I'm saying I can work on your case, okay?" "I can work here, and I can work at home." "And... anything you have, send it to me." "He doesn't seem good, huh?" "Well, protests to the contrary, yesterday's events seem to have affected his demeanor." "Yeah, well, a bullet misses you by that little, you get a new look inside your own head." "Look, I understand." "I just think you need to acknowledge the emotional impact of that." "Yeah." "He'll be all right." "Right?" "COLBY:" "I had this screen-capture enhanced." "Schane may not have liked Kurt, but that's exactly who drove him the morning of the attack." "Had his I.D. confirmed by the jujitsu instructor." "And the plates on the car came back to a Motorco rental car company, stolen off the lot two hours before." "He didn't even change the plates?" "Knew it wouldn't show up on the hot sheets in time?" "Put out an APB, hope we'll get lucky." "Gets more done at his desk than the entire FBI." "Anyway, that facial recognition software came up with nothing, so I'm going to go out wide to local law enforcement, see if we can't get an I.D. on this guy." "He's taking it pretty hard." "We all know he's going to get cleared." "He has had a pretty bad day." "And I think, all in all, he's hanging pretty tough." "I remember buying those." "Little did I suspect that it would take you 20 years to play with them." "I can't make sense of this path, so I figured reconstructing the office with a three-dimensional model might jog some thoughts." "Well, why don't you just go down there?" "You haven't said much about what happened." "Well..." "Well, you didn't seem to want to talk about it." "I don't." "Figured that you might want to." "Figured that you'd be..." "What?" "Upset?" "Angry?" "Freaked out." "Well, no, I was, um, um, uh, relieved." "Yeahyeah, I was freaked out." "I was looking right at him." "I gotta tell you," "I don't think I knew what being scared was before that." "You know, fear is a very practical feeling, Charlie." "It's, um... well, it's mostly common sense, telling you not to poke the alligator with the stick." "I know this kind of thing happening again is improbable, but just the thought of going back to Don's office just puts knots in my stomach." "And I realize the only thing I'm really afraid of is being afraid again." "Hey, Charlie." "Do you remember Sam Tichell?" "How could I forget him?" "He terrorized me through the whole third grade, and I had to wait for Don every day, to walk home from school." "Yeah." "And the one time Don didn't walk you home..." "I got into a fight with Sam Tichell... right in the Meyers' front yard" "I know;" "I was standing at the window watching." "I saw him knock you down from behind." "I didn't come outside to help you." "Yeah, you did." "You broke us up." "Eventually, but not right away." "See, Charlie, you were always so loved, you were always so protected." "It was at that moment that I wanted you to understand that the world was not always going to be a safe place." "I came outside to help you only when you started to fight back." "Because that's when I knew that you had enough heart to take whatever life was going to throw at you." "DAVID:" "What's the first thing a New Yorker notices about L.A.?" "MEGAN:" "No good pizza." "Okay, the second thing." "Everyone drives everywhere." "You're gonna steal a car out of a rental lot, how you gonna get there?" "Drive your own car, park it somewhere nearby?" "You can't take the bus or a cab, 'cause somebody might remember you." "When you're done with that car, where you gonna dump it?" "Somewhere close to where you parked." "MEGAN:" "Wait a minute." "Do you see something up there?" "Yes, I do." "We won't find Kurt's prints on that car." "You know, I'm getting the feeling that this guy isn't just following some soccer dad's lead." "More like the mastermind behind the scene, two steps ahead of us." "only he knows when this is going and we don't" "Just got the crime scene reports back on the torched car." "Yeah?" "Anything?" "No, nothing." "We don't catch a break soon, the next time we see Kurt is gonna be the next time he decides to attack." "This is forensics on McCall." "The bullet that killed him had Schane's blood and tissue on it." "It went through his shoulder, the window, and landed in McCall's skull, so you got nothing to worry about with the shooting team." "It's gonna be a walk." "All right." "Well, how long till I'm back in the field, do yothink?" "Like a week, maybe two." "Yeah." "I don't know why it sounded better when I heard it, but..." "A man's dead, Don." "Colby, you cleared your line of fire." "You took a good shot-- the bullet took a bad bounce." "Now, come on, there's nothing you can do about that." "It's not your fault." "Yeah, I know, it might not be my fault, Don, but it's still my bullet." "Your dad says you've been in here all night." "I was sure that the shooter's path was... was Brownian that the pure randomness would... would somehow tell me something about Schane's actions." "Something isn't right." "I tried using a loop-erased random wal tinkered with a Langevin Equation, and still, there's a disparity there, telling me something that maybe this isn't Brownian motion, that maybe there's a corruption in the data;" "I don't know." "At the Jaipur Observatory, they have these huge, magnificent sundials, and they're so accurate, they were used to set standard time until the 1940s." "Now India's standard time is set by the Allahabad Observatory." "Do you know why?" "I'm assuming because Allahabad is more accurate." "No." "In order to keep all of India in the same time zone, they have to split the difference between the east and west halves of the country." "And Allahabad is exactly five and a half hours off of Greenwich Mean Time." "I see that your metaphors are starting to sound a lot like Larry's metaphors." "The Jaipur sundials aren't wrong, Charlie." "The sun and the moon still move through the sky the same way." "You see, people ve changed their perspectives on time, Charlie." "I think what Amita's telling you is to take a step back from your problem, try a new perspective." "Or a new dimension." "ALAN:" "Oh, now, there's a toy I remember." "Tessa..." "It's a tesseract." "A four-dimensional hypercube." "Could be why I bought those soldiers." "Those I can understand." "A square on a chalkboard represents two dimensions:" "an x and y axis." "You add a third dimension, a z-ax..." "You get a cube." "See, I do have a passing familiarity with geometry." "Right, but three-dimensional objects exist in a fourth dimension:" "in time, so if we add a fourth dimension to the cube, just like we added a third dimension to the square, we get a tesseract, but this isn't really a tesseract, just like that isn't really a cube." "See, my mistake was that" "I took a twoimensional mapping data, and brought it into the third dimension." "I'm..." "I'm still short one dimension." "You mean time?" "I need to see a picture of a man's movements through real time." "I'll have to go back to the FBI." "Hey, guys." "How we doing?" "Hey." "Charlie?" "Oh, ye, they must have brought those out here." "We'll get you another one, all right?" "Everything all right?" "We're going to need the surveillance footage, some tripods, a laser pointer, and we're gonna need string." "String?" "Lots of string." "AMITA:" "This is a four-dimensional modeling program." "It's used to analyze weather patterns, geographical surveys, even factory efficiency." "And this is Schane's journey through the office." "And when we render it over time, the flaw becomes apparent." "What do you mean, "flaw"?" "Well, up until this point..." "And after this point..." "His movements are reactive, but here-- here-- they aren't." "So, what, you saying he found a target?" "The opposite." "Don, remember when I compared" "Brownian motion to a cue ball ricocheting across a pool table?" "It's as if the cue ball saw that it was about to hit the eight ball and stopped dead in its tracks and turned around." "Schane pulled a 180." "The only time he retraced his steps." "So what backed him off?" "Roughly?" "This workspace." "More specifically," "I believe he was avoiding one or both of these people, making a very specific effort not to shoot at them." "COLBY:" "John DeVries and Dave Taggart." "They're both GS-7 intelligence assistants." "Criminal data entry and analysis, both with top-secret clearance." "There's no connections to Schane yet, but I'm still digging." "All right, well, get their computers stripped, put them in the rooms, all right?" "Yeah, I got DeVries in One." "Taggart called in sick after the shooting." "What do you mean, "called in sick"?" "Get him in here-- I don't care." "I got Megan and Dave on their way to pick him up right now." "Heard the Agent Shooting Team is going to clear Colby." "I heard the same." "How come everyone seems happy about it but him?" "I've never seen him shut down like that before." "You know, it may not be about this shooting." "Sometimes, intense events can open up all kinds of other doors." "Looks like somebody got up early and packed for a trip." "Looks like someone saw us coming, too." "It's still warm." "MEGAN:" "When you were a kid, were you the worst at hide-and-go-seek ever?" "DeVries is checking out clean, but Taggart, on the other hand, seems to have had a reason to run." "He's got a second bank account in Wichita Falls." "He's had deposits of $10, $20 and $50,000 over the last four months." "So what, he's being paid off?" "What does 80 grand get him?" "Well, check this out" " Taggart's been using our databases to access personal information about Schane's family." "He gets the wife's DMV file, his daughter's school schedule he's even been pulling photos off the LAPD public surveillance cams." "This must be why a real estate agent from Pasadena ends up attacking an FBI office." "Yeah, also backs up" "Charlie's thing about him changing direction, right?" "He shoots Taggart, Kurt kills his family." "Why make him attack us to begin with?" "Victor Meuller." "He's an arms dealer, on trial for selling decommissioned" "Soviet tanks and fighter jets to the wrong countries." ""On trial," as in it already started?" "Two weeks ago, and it's expected to go least three months." "Taggart's computer logs show him fishing through Meuller's case files on three separate occasions, then downloading what he found to a flash drive on the morning of the shooting." "The techs say the data theft wouldn't have even showed up for weeks or months, if they hadn't been looking for it." "Victor Meuller-- he's on trial, knows he's going to jail, so he needs the names and addresses of the witnesses against him." "And you were willing to sell a hit list for money." "COLBY:" "I don't know what rock he turned over, but he found you." "Now, the problem is, you got no way to get the case file out." "No way past the screeners." "less there's an emergency evacuation of this building, like if some crazy son of a bitch goes on a shooting rampage." "I don't have to answer any of your questions." "Then don't, because the computer trail is more than enough to convict you as is." "The real question is, how much of forever you want to spend in jail." "Tell us about Kurt." "He's a freelance hitter Meler brought over from Europe." "So how did the two of you find Schane?" "Kurt cruised the self-defense schools, looking for someone random, untraceable." "Schane stood out: big, fast." "Good enough to disarm an FBI agent." "Dave, you threatened to murder his family." "That was Kurt-- the things he said he'd do to Schane's family, made me sick." "I want you to tell us what witness he's after next." "And where do we find him?" "Even if I knew, I wouldn't tell you." "I have family, too." "Interpol just I.D.'d the picture." "His real name-- believe it or not-- is Kurt." "Kurt De Lock." "South African Special Forces, 451st Parachute Batallion." "Yeah, he's suspected of doing wet work for the secret police during apartheid." "He's wanted in five countries." "Six." "We have extra security on the courthouse and on everyone connected to the Meuller trial." "and two witnesses have been moved to new safe houses." "Eh, it's too defensive, no-- I mean, this guy's too good." "We got to take the game to him, I think." "I mean, we'd better be anticipating what he's going to do next." "CHARLIE:" "You guys ever notice how a criminal trial exhibits self-organized criticality?" "Self-organized criticality describes the ability of multi-body systems to manifest complex behavior-- so forest fires, earthquakes, financial markets." "All right, picture a pile of sand." "As more sand falls onto the pile, let's say a grain at a time, the grains come to rest at a landing position." "As the slope of the pile steepens, the pile reaches what we call a critical state, a state in which, if a single grain of sd falls onto the pile in the right position, you can create an avalanche." "It's actually got a name." "It's called the Bak-Tang-Wiesenfeld Sandpile." "Kurt doesn't need to kill every witness to collapse this case, just the key one or two." "You have that Meuller file?" "Mm-hmm." "Okay, how do we find this grain of sand you're talking about?" "We apply values to components of the case-- significance of the witness or vulnerability." "Hang on a second-- Agent Matt Pribitech, all right?" "This case against Meuller started with a sting in Belgrave-- a phony missile buy." "Pribitech was the undercover." "He was the key to this case-- he's in so deep, he's testifying in closed court." "Which would explain why Kurt needed the file-- to I.D. him." "Without performing an initial analysis, Pribitech...?" "...sounds like a likely candidate to me." "Pribitech's in the air right now, on his way from Prague." "He's scheduled to testify at the end of the week." "All right, I'm gonna call the airport." "Why don't you and David meet him at the gate?" "Yeah." "That's him." "What's he doing?" "He doesn't know he's been compromised." "Maybe he's just being careful." "I think that's your department." "Yeah." "Why don't you guys wear billboards?" "Your cover's been blown, Matt." "You think I don't know that?" "Kurt's got my family." "Dave Taggart is under arrest." "Every cop in the county has Kurt De Lock's photograph." "I know that he threatened your family." "You have a duress defence for the attacks, but it's not gonna get you very far if you don't help us out." "We can put your family under protective custody, but we're not gonna lie to you Alec" "The only way that you'll be safe is if we find Kurt." "He showed me pictures of Thrish and Sam." "Told me what he'll do to them if I didn't..." "De Lock is threatening another man's family now." "another wife, and two kids, only this time, he went and kidnapped them." "He's going to do to that family what he threatened to do to yours if you don't help me out." "There's a trailer." "Out in Needles." "He made me go out there meet him a few times." "Pribitech." "KURT:" "You are going to change your testimony, do you understand?" "When Victor Meuller is acquitted, your family goes home." "If not..." "I need to talk to them first." "Soon enough." "Now, take down these directions, Agent." "DAVID:" "Yep, there's the tiler, right where he said it would be." "Three heat signatures, all stationary." "All right, so mother, daughter, son, right?" "How are we doing on SWAT?" "I told them to stay back till we knew what we were dealing with." "Eppes." "All right, Kurt just called Pribitech with directions." "That doesn't make any sense." "Why let Pribitech see his family before he changes his testimony?" "Because he's planning to kill them all at the same time." "There's got to be hundreds of pounds of fertilizer at that trailer." "Let me see." "Oh, yeah, that's an oil bomb." "You think McVeigh, Oklahoma City." "Did we get arace?" "Done." "It's a cell phone." "We have it triangulated down to one of two towers, right in your backyard." "I'm going." "Hang on a second, Don." "Hang on, you're not going anywhere." "If you show up there, he's going to kill you and your family with you." "But if De Lock's watching the trailer..." "I know, we can approach, right?" "How long for a helicopter, you think?" "Half an hour, at least." "Can you, uh, can you access a satellite image of the area?" "Through DOD, but it's going to be ten or 15 minutes old." "That's fine." "Okay, the cell phone towers are where?" "Here and here." "Okay, where's Don?" "He's right about here." "And the blast radius of a 50-pound ammonium nitrate bomb is about like this, which leaves us a safety zone right there." "PRIBITECH:" "What are you doing?" "Among other things, trying to find a projection of affine three-space onto the sphere subject to some open constraints." "Assuming that he can't see Don, but he can see the trailer." "Don, there's a dirt road leading to a rise about half a mile southeast of where you ar" "You're going to find him somewhere along there." "All right, guys, let's move out." "Let me see these." "All right, guys, let'so it." "They tell me there's a dirt road back there." "If you stay small, I don't think they'll see you." "All right, be careful." "We've got a cell phone activated trigger." "There's no sign of a pressure plate or a trip wire." "Let me know when you're in position." "DON:" "I got him." "We're going in." "COLBY:" "This is the FBI." "Don't move." "Don't move an inch." "Put the phone down." "DON:" "Put it down." "One button and the trailer blows up." "I pull this trigger, your head blows up." "Keep your hands where I can see them." "Back up toward my voice." "COLBY:" "The Northern Alliance was already in Kandahar." "The Taliban was running this rear guard action out of the Shahi-Kot Mountains." "There were just caves and bunkers everywhere." "Seemed like every night these guys would come out and just pound us with RPGs." "So, finally, one night, we decided to cut them off and set up an ambush in between the base camp and the pass where they would go up into the mountains." "No one realized the SAS was already up there working that area, and by the time they put together our ambush with their call for help, there were already two British soldiers dead." "That doesn't make it your fault." "Then or now." "I know." "I know." "We never found out whose bullets killed our guys up there." "I guess I just made my peace with not knowing." "They give you your discharge, send you home, you go back to your own life, and... you know, you just think the war is over." "But, man, it's just always inside of you, just waiting to come out when something reminds you." "So what are you going to do?" "Guess that depends on how many more beers we got in that bag." "Enough." "Hey." "Where the hell did evidence response put the sugar?" "I don't know." "Some week." "Yeah." "I-I'm cool until everything quiets down." "Then it's like, my head is a bad neighborhood to be in." "Hey." "Did you know that if you bend a piece of spaghetti, it'll always break into three or more pieces?" "No, Charlie, I can't say I do." "Richard Feynman and Danny Hillis spent an entire night bending spaghetti." "Took them 20 years to figure out why you cannot break spaghetti in half." "And why is that?" "Fragmentation theory." "Math stuff." "What's your point?" "Not every story has a point." "Sometimes you just bend spaghetti to watch it break." "Oh, yeah, look at that." "Right?" "Hi, Alan." "Looks like the office is almost back to normal." "Yeah, we're getting there now." "Who are you looking for, Don or Charlie?" "Oh, I was just in the area, and I was, uh, was going to check on, um..." "Wait, I did it." "That's not bending it." "You snapped ." "It's not bending." "Actually, I would, uh, I was going to see if you'd had dinner yet." "I was just thinking about some leftover dim sum in my refrigerator." "Oh, really?" "I think we can do better than that." "Really?" "Should we get the boys?" "You know what?" "They look fine where they are." "DON:" "What about fettuccine?" "It works with any pasta." "Linguini?" "Oh, I'm sure linguini..."