Coding Isis (29 page)

‘He sounds like a real git.’

Michelle tried to figure if Wyn was just being funny or if he was hitting on her. It was never easy to tell with Wyn.

Wyn was looking around him like a typical tourist. ‘I’m surprised at how green it is with all the trees. It’s nice.’

‘This is the place,’ said Michelle as she pointed across the street.

‘It looks like a dump,’ said Wyn. The white paint was flaking off the upper part of the building letting the red brick show through, but only on the east side. Maybe that’s the way the wind blew, he thought. The red neon sign said it was open.

‘How dare you?’ said Michelle. ‘Jimmy T’s is a Washington institution. If you don’t like it, you should go back to Wales. Besides, they do a great fry-up.’

‘I’m liking it more and more by the second,’ said Wyn.

Chris was actually enjoying his new job. The place was filled with like-minded souls and that was not something he had much experience of; people he could talk technology with who wouldn’t give him that blank stare that told him none of it was really sinking in. He’d learned a bit about this building from some of the guys he’d met in the canteen. Guys like him, with a computing background, just doing their bit for the defense of the nation. The complex was split into two parts with a public-facing company and a secret part. The public-facing company was a software house that wrote programs to help companies manage their warehouses, it sounded dull and Chris pitied the poor bastards that worked there. The building was originally a warehouse and distribution center for stationery. Now most of the warehousing had been converted into offices, with the exception of a display area that was used to demonstrate the automated inventory management and picking systems to prospective customers. He’d been told that apparently the company made millions. The workers in the public company had no access to the other areas and, Chris was told, believed there was a “special-projects” division of the company but no one really knew what they did.

Maynard had left Chris pretty much to his own devices after a brief explanation of where to find the latest versions of the facial-recognition routines. They’d had difficulties with low-lighting, differing facial expressions, such as when the subject smiled, and simple things like if the person was wearing a hat or had changed their hair. Given the nature of the systems they were working on, it was important that the system was foolproof. After reviewing the data, Chris was curious as to what margin of error was allowed before the system would carry out its mission.

‘How’s it going?’ Maynard asked as he entered the room. He was carrying a half-eaten sandwich in a paper wrapper and he looked at Chris over the top of it with his eyebrows raised questioningly as he took another bite.

‘I certainly have my work cut out,’ said Chris. ‘How are you dealing with the low-light issues?’

‘We have a mixture of cameras on the UAVs. We have image-intensification technology, like you might find in a night scope, or a pair of night vision goggles, and we also use a thermal camera and an infra-red camera. We use active infra-red when it’s really dark. We can flood an area the size of a football field that will, through our lens, make it look like day again, albeit a monochrome version. The thermal imaging is useful for finding targets inside buildings and cars.’

‘Are we doing anything special with the monochrome data?’

‘All images run through the same algorithms. Do you think that’s wrong?’

‘Our routines were written to handle images from the visible spectrum only. We use colors to help to match individuals, just as much as we use biometric measurements. That could be why your low-light results are so poor.’

Maynard finished another mouthful. ‘Do you think you can do anything about it?’

‘I’ve got an idea,’ said Chris, ‘but I’m going to need a lot of data. Is there any way I can hook into the feed from the web cams used on the monitors?’

Maynard seemed to give this some thought. ‘I’ll ask around, see what I can find out.’

Ben got a ride back to the station from a junior FBI agent. It had been a lot to take in over the last few hours and he was starting to get a headache, although that could also be attributed to too much wine and not enough sleep. Agent Salter had wanted to make sure he understood the importance of the connections between the murder victims and to warn him to take care, but he didn’t have any new information that was going to help much, or if he did, he didn’t intend to share it. This was an FBI investigation and it was made clear that if Ben found anything new, he was to let Agent Salter know immediately, but he got the impression the flow of information would be a one-way street. Ben was happy to let go of this one. So what if there was some psycho sniper running around the country popping terrorist suspects? That was Salter’s problem now. There was still next to no evidence, so his chances of cracking this case had not improved any.

Ben thought about Jasmine, she was the anomaly. Maybe that’s why Salter had wanted to see him in such a hurry. He probably thought Ben knew something about her that would help him get further with his own investigation.

Ben grabbed the first case file from his in-tray and opened it. Before he could start to read, his phone rang.

‘This is Naylor.’

‘Hi Detective, are you missing me?’

Ben was not aware until this moment how tense he’d been, and it was only through hearing Margot’s voice, and feeling the stress drift away, that he realized how important she was becoming to him.

‘Oh hi Margot, I’ve only just gotten in, so I haven’t had chance to miss you yet.’

‘Don’t tell me I tired you out so much last night you overslept?’

‘No, something came up. I’ll tell you about it next time we meet.’

There was a pause, as though Margot was trying to decide how to phrase what she wanted to say. ‘I need to see you. Can you get out for coffee?’ she said.

‘I guess, what’s this about?’

‘Not over the phone Ben. Meet me in an hour, same place as before.’

Ben put the phone down and went back to reading his new case file. He wondered what Margot wanted that she couldn’t discuss over the phone. Maybe she wanted to break it off with him? That would be just his damned luck. Maybe she’d found his list of names on the terrorist watch list and figure she should break the news in person. Either way, his obsession with the Jasmine Allan case had caused enough of a backlog to keep him busy until they met up. He tried to concentrate on reading the new case notes.

Michelle watched Wyn in amazement. He ate like a pig. He stuffed at least a half of a hash-brown his mouth and nodded whilst pointing his fork at the remaining food. He made an approving grunting noise.

‘Good,’ he said with his mouth still full of food.

Michelle took a sip of coffee and spread some strawberry jelly on her bagel.

‘So what’s Chris’s new office like?’ she asked.

Wyn swallowed his food but then filled it once more before answering. ‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘I didn’t really see much of it.’

Michelle made a mental note to limit her conversation to outside of mealtimes.

‘I do know that they’ve got a hot receptionist.’

Michelle wondered what she had let herself in for when she’d agreed to play tour guide to one of Chris’s ex-army buddies. She thought about whether she could compress the two day tour into a single day.

‘I’ll tell you one thing though,’ said Wyn taking a momentary respite from attacking his fried breakfast. ‘That new boss of his is a nutter.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘A nutter. Whacko. Not right in the head. I’ve seen his type before. It happens you know? People like that get themselves into a position of power and the power makes them become righteous. But in a Machiavellian way; do you know what I mean?’

Michelle was surprised by Wyn’s choice of phrase. He acted a fool, but he wasn’t. He was very smart and the fact that Wyn found this new boss crazy worried Michelle. ‘You make him sound like Stalin,’ she said. ‘Chris seems to think he’s OK.’

‘Chris thinks he’s OK because he’s been funding his big boy’s toys project. I think Chris is going to see a different side of him now. I doubt his new boss would piss on his own mother if she were on fire. He makes Stalin look like a boy scout.’

‘Do you think he’s making a mistake?’

Wyn took another huge mouthful of food. ‘Chris is a big boy. He can look after himself.’

Michelle ate her breakfast but thought about Chris in his new job. Was this why he’d seemed so distant lately? Maybe it was time for them to move on. His work had taken him in a direction he hadn’t planned. They didn’t need to just go along with it. Chris had moved from his home in England to be with her in D.C., but they could go anywhere. Chris was a smart guy and she was sure he could get a job in a lot of places.

‘Come on,’ said Michelle, ‘eat up. We’ve got a lot to see and we’ve only got one day to see it in.’

Ben walked into the Starbucks and Margot was there already at the same table as last time. She was in uniform again. She stood when he walked up to the table and gave him a kiss on the cheek.

‘Well at least it looks like you’re not dumping me,’ he said. ‘So why all the secrecy?’

‘You remember John Amosa, the guy you wanted me to track down?’

‘Sure I do.’

‘Well I got a hit on something and I need to keep it low-key. No phone calls, or emails on this one. I’ll tell you what I found out and then you need to forget you ever asked.’

There was something different about Margot today, Ben thought. She looked a little paler than normal, more serious. He noticed that she was glancing out of the window a lot too. ‘It sounds very cloak-and-dagger,’ he said. ‘I’m intrigued, tell me what you found.’

Margot glanced out of the window once more and then leaned closer to Ben. ‘Have you ever heard of project MKULTRA?’

‘No. Should I have?’

‘Well, if you were a conspiracy theory nut, you’d probably know all of the rumors. As you probably know, during the Kennedy era, the CIA worked hard to find ways to assassinate those deemed enemies of the USA. You remember the failed attempts on Castro?’

‘Exploding cigars?’

‘Sort of. Well MKULTRA was an attempt to create sleeper assassins. They used electrotherapy, drugs, all manner of techniques that most countries consider illegal for prisoners of war, let alone for your own citizens. They re-programmed human subjects so that they could be turned into killing machines.’

‘It sounds like a movie. Is this for real?’

‘I don’t know for sure, a lot of this is based on rumors, but some of the guys I’ve spoken to go a long way back and they were working around the time this was supposedly happening. Nothing was written down, or if it was it’s been buried so deep I’m never going to find it. The project was shut down many years ago.’

‘So how does this link in to John Amosa? He’s way too young to have been involved in this thing surely?’

‘I don’t have any direct links. As I said nothing was written down, but one of the guys I spoke to knew some of the people that worked on the team and one of the names rang alarm bells with me. Amosa was transferred to a special operations unit shortly before his honorary discharge. The group commander had strong ties to a CIA officer who had links to the project.’

‘I don’t get it.’

‘Well, what if the project was never really shut down? What if this special operations unit was a front for recruiting new assassins? I figure that Amosa volunteered to be a part of a unit under the promise he was serving his country. What if this CIA guy kept the program running somehow but used army recruits as his subjects?’

‘It sounds like a long shot. Who’s the CIA guy?’

‘His name is Joshua Tully, but he doesn’t work for the CIA anymore. In fact no one knows where he is.’

‘I know where he is,’ said Ben.

Chris had managed to convince Maynard to give him the access he needed to be able to work on the improvements to the facial recognition system. He’d decided that in order to overcome the difficulties of low-light and various other scenarios, he would use the data from the different cameras to build a three-dimensional model of the subject’s face. He would then use this three-dimensional model to render an image of the subject that could be compared to the known images. It was a simple idea but quite different to any technique that had been used before, but he was sure it would work.