Angel Killer (17 page)

“Sure,” Ailes replies seriously.

“Back then, things were different. My grandfather could travel with a much larger cast than my father or I could. He had thirty chorus girls in the show. Women had less variety in makeup, hairstyles, and clothes. Lots of them wore hats. When people came into the theater, my grandfather would watch from the wings and pick a woman who looked like one of his chorus girls. With thirty girls backstage, we were bound to find at least one woman in the audience who could pass at a distance. If we didn’t have an outfit that matched, our seamstress could make up something close enough. He’d call the woman onstage and an assistant would lead her up the side steps. That’s when we’d switch her for our chorus girl. While the audience is distracted by the machine sparking and making a noise, the usher would bring the woman back to her seat in the dark. The chorus girl would go through a trapdoor and vanish. An instant later the spotlight would reveal the woman from the audience back in her seat. The audience was never the wiser. They didn’t realize the switch happened before the woman even got onstage. She was led back in the darkness with no idea what happened on stage. Afterward, the people around her would teller her she walked into the cabinet and vanished. She’d insist she came right back to her seat. Grandfather would suggest that she’d have no memory of what happened to her, making both accounts fit. It’s not a practical trick to try today, of course.”

“But what does that have to do with the Warlock if the DNA matches?”

“Twins.”

“Twins? You just said no twins,” Ailes seems almost agitated.

“Not my grandfather’s illusion. But that’s not my point. He could do that illusion because he had access to thirty girls. At least two or three were going to be a match for someone in an audience filled with several hundred women. Cheap human labor was the technology of the day. The Warlock is using the cheap technology of our day, raw computation. What’s the percentage of births per year that are identical twins?”

Ailes knows this off the top of his head. “It’s doubled in the last thirty years because of fertility treatments. Thirty to fifty per thousand births on average. Fraternal twins rises to almost one out of ten for mothers in their forties because they’re the ones that use fertility treatment the most. If you just count women who go to fertility clinics, the rate climbs even higher. One out of three births for that group result in twins. Not necessarily identical, but there’s an increase in that too.” Ailes notices my surprise at him having this stat on hand. “My wife is a fertility specialist.”

“So just by looking at birth records and the age of a mother, the Warlock could create a pool of twins. If he compiled a database of every woman over forty who has given birth, he knows that one out of ten of them had twins or triplets. If he cross-references that with death notices in the newspapers, he could create a subset of potential twins split up for adoption. If he had access to other records, like arrests and convictions, or even fertility clinic data, he could find more separated twins. Some of them will be genetically identical.

“The girl we found in Chloe’s grave was her twin sister. The Warlock chose them because they were separated at birth and didn’t know about each other. He wanted a perfect DNA match.”

Ailes takes a moment to think it over. “Low-income parents are more likely to give up twins for adoption. It also skews the percentage of twins who are split up and adopted. There would be tens of thousands of split-up twins out there who never knew.”

“Oh my God!” I almost make him jump out of his chair. “It’s even easier than that! He doesn’t need access to all those records.” I point to the face-matching website. “All he needs to do is look for girls who most closely match and then find out their birth dates! He can get that off of their profiles. He uses the website to find exact matches but with different names. He then compares the birth dates they’ve posted online. You and your twin share DNA, a face and a birthday. Two out of three are probably online whether you realize it or not. All he has to do is send an innocuous e-mail or an @reply to ask if they were adopted and he’s in. He looks for twins first, then checks birth dates!”

Ailes is nodding his head. “He could make a program to do that. Technically, he could limit the first search to all girls born on a specific day and look for matches.” Ailes’s eyes go up as he thinks. “Roughly five thousand girls are born every day. He could canvass tens of thousands of girls in a couple days. It’s a brilliant gimmick. He has the computer sort through millions of images looking for matches. Computationally, it may not have even been possible or realistic a few years ago. Now there are relational databases that specialize in those kinds of queries.”

I nod. “If he comes up with several thousand matches he can have an automated system hit them with messages or e-mails from other accounts asking if they were adopted.”

It’s a scary thought. He could find a large supply of split-up twins who never knew they had a sister or brother. From a forensic point of view, there’s little we could say that would dispute the idea that they’re the same person. The DNA would pass in a court of law. There are other markers, like surface methylation, but we don’t have reliable forensic tests for that.

“What about Swanson?” asks Ailes.

“He doesn’t need to be a genetic match. Just an identical appearance. He used the system to find Chloe and her twin by crunching millions of images. That probably took some time. For the original Avenger pilot, all he needed was a similar face. That’s as easy as uploading a photo of the pilot.”

“Of course,” Ailes agrees. “I’m convinced. But . . .”

If we can’t prove our twin hypothesis, when word gets out that the girl who burned in the fire is an exact genetic match to Chloe, the Warlock wins. People will think he’s the real thing.

We can’t let him.

“You have to let me go to Texas and talk to the owner of Faceplaced. We need to find out what kind of data is amassed on the other side of this screen. We need those server logs. The Warlock used it to find Chloe, her twin, and a physical double for the lost pilot. I’m sure he’s going to want to use this gimmick again. It’s too good. It’s too damn good!”

Ailes pulls out his phone. “I’ll do you one better. This is critical. I think there’s a jet ready to go. We can have you in Texas in two hours. And if the director doesn’t go for it, then I’ll have Gerald pretend to be him to get you permission.” I think the last part was a joke. I think.

I slide my laptop into my bag and head for the airfield as the flight gets arranged. We’re close. So much closer than the Warlock realizes.

A
FTER THE JET
reaches cruising altitude I call Ailes on the satellite phone. It feels a little weird being on the plane by myself. When I flew back from Fort Lauderdale, I shared it with some forensic people bringing samples back to Quantico. This feels almost excessive. I tell myself it’s not a waste. The fuel, the pilots, all of the expense is worth it if we can stop the Warlock. That’s to say, this is worth it if I can persuade this programmer to help us out.

Getting the data from that website is now more critical than ever. I’m convinced the Warlock’s next victim is in there somewhere. The Warlock is too smart to be traced through there. It only takes a minute to download software that essentially makes you invisible online. It’s like a library; even if you don’t know who checked out what books, knowing what books were looked at can tell you a lot.

“How did the demonstration go with the assistant director?” Ailes had Gerald video conference Breyer masquerading as the head of the FBI

“He was impressed and disturbed. He knew the NSA and the CIA psy-ops were working on something similar, but he didn’t know how to react when I told him one of his agents put it together from a game console from Toys ‘R’ Us, substituting millions of dollars’ worth of government hardware for something that costs three hundred dollars. He asked Gerald to start working on a way to tell when we’re looking at an altered image; a sock puppet, as Gerald calls them. He thinks he can do it by dissecting the motion algorithm. It won’t tell us if someone is using a different method, but it can spot one similar to ours.”

Being able to tell electronically if we’re talking to a real person or not is crucial. We may have to track down tens of thousands of people. We have call centers with video conferencing in the FBI where we can do that from if we’re sure we won’t be spoofed by the Warlock.

Screening this many people in just a few days is a logistical nightmare. Anything we can do to narrow the field would help immensely.

“What are the other departments up to?” I ask.

“Right now the big discussion is with Chisholm and behavioral analysis is how this affects the profile of the Warlock. They seem to think this could make him some kind of super-genius hacker. Gerald and I are trying to convince them it doesn’t. There’s a difference between knowing how to use a tool someone else made and being the person who invented it. We don’t even know that he’s made a video puppet. And if he does, all it means so far is that he’s very resourceful. People tend to read too much into skills they don’t have.”

I can relate to that. Some people see you do a simple mind-reading stunt and they think you’re psychic. I used to pull the watch steal I did on Jensen on first dates. I stopped doing it when I realized that it might be a reason men were too afraid to call me for a second date. Or at least I think that’s the reason.

“What about matching the birthdays?” I ask. The idea of putting matching faces to matching birthdays to find twins simplifies things. If the Warlock is looking for matching pairs, so to speak, that would allow us to narrow our potential victims by a larger margin. We have computers to sift through the data; the trouble was finding a source for that information.

“Yes. That was very helpful. It gave the director enough reason to push ahead with the Yearbook Project.”

I hadn’t heard about that. “Yearbook? I don’t know what that is.”

“It’s our own social network database. Unlike some of our databases targeting terrorism suspects, where we need a court’s permission to even enter a name, this is a database of publicly available information all cross-referenced and processed by artificial intelligence. If a bunch of people wish your username on Twitter a happy birthday, we can then add a birthday tag to your profile. If you upload a photograph with faces in it, the system uses deductive logic to figure out who they are and then uses a face search similar to Faceplaced to build a profile.”

I’d read we were working on a project like this but the Department of Justice lawyers weren’t sure of the legality of collecting personal profiles en masse for non-terror cases.

“I didn’t know it was that far along,” I reply.

“That was sidestepped when an outside contractor did all the heavy lifting and basically presented it to us for no charge.”

“I see. That outside contractor wouldn’t have been a certain computational mathematician who now consults for the FBI?”

“No comment,” replies Ailes flatly.

So he went ahead and built the Yearbook Project on his own dime and just gave it to them. The man’s heart is all in.

“I’ve got some other little tricks we’re putting into it,” says Ailes. “We can glean all kinds of information from body language in photographs. Did you know that we can tell with eighty percent accuracy whether or not you’ve had sexual intercourse with someone based upon your posture and expression in a photo of you next to them?”

“I hope you don’t mean me personally.” My mind immediately thinks of all the photos online of me with ex-boyfriends.

“Uh, no, Agent Blackwood. I admit it’s creepy. But this kind of data is everywhere if you know how to collect and interpret it. Online marketers are already using this stuff. You’d be amazed at how much we didn’t have to invent. It’s shocking the amount of information we put online about ourselves that we’d rather not share with the world.”

My magazine cover flashes in my mind. “Trust me, I know. What should I know about this programmer? I’m about to call him.”

“Liam Reynolds. He’s twenty-eight. Has a degree in computer science from Texas A&M. He makes his living as a freelance programmer. He’s done a lot of contract work for different companies. His hobbies are the usual—video games. If you play, don’t make the mistake Jennifer did in telling him her online handle.”

“Why is that?”

“He found out he was nowhere in her league and didn’t take it well. Of course, she also qualifies in the top five percent in marksmanship in the FBI. Gerald says he once watched her hit a perfect series with a blindfold. She was doing it all from muscle memory.”

I knew she was scary. “No need to worry about the video game thing. If it’s not an app for my phone where I’m trying to solve word puzzles or line up pretty gems, I haven’t played it.”

“Good. I think we need to play up the other side. Just be your charming self. Don’t intimidate him. Please don’t steal his watch. The mere fact that an attractive girl is talking to him will probably be more than he can deal with. Hold on.” Ailes pauses. “Gerald just handed me a note. He says that it’s a seventy percent probability Reynolds hasn’t had a date with a girl in the last three years. For what that’s worth.”

It feels terribly manipulative, but I got over that while learning how to do undercover work in the police academy and then in the FBI. I haven’t done a lot of it in the field, but you realize that most of the people you’re going to be lying to aren’t actually the ones you want to arrest. With Liam Reynolds, I have to pretend that I don’t think he’s a power-mad creep standing in the way of us stopping the Warlock from committing another murder. I just need to be an attractive woman asking for a favor.

Sometimes it works. Other times it backfires badly. I’ve seen some girls embarrass themselves trying to flatter men into letting them have their way. If a guy is just happy for the attention, then it doesn’t matter. If he’s really insecure and starts to feel manipulated, he will shut off entirely. Reynolds strikes me as the insecure type.