Gideon's Sword (21 page)

“Oh my God.”

“Oh my God is right. We’re way behind the curve on this one, trying to catch up. We’re flooding the terminal with undercover people as we speak, but
I’ve got to see those tapes
. There appears to be a vital link.”

“I understand.”

“Can we do this really,
really
quietly?” Gideon pleaded. “If we spook this guy or his accomplices…” He let his voice trail off.

Now he had Longbaugh one hundred percent on his side.

“I’m on it.” The man rose. “Come with me.”

The central security operations room lay in the bowels of the airport, and it was very impressive, walls of video screens and consoles with all the latest gear. The room was dim and hushed, dozens of people staring at monitors, not just of airport locations, but also feeds from bag scanners and X-ray machines and cams observing the taxiways and hangars.

Their efficiency was astounding. Twenty minutes later Gideon was exiting customs with a fresh, piping-hot DVD.

39

G
ot a movie for us tonight,” Gideon said, sliding into the white leather banquette in the Essex House lounge, bestowing a smile on Mindy Jackson. He turned to the waiter. “Bring me what she’s having, wet and dirty, two olives.”

“What movie?” asked Jackson.

“The Mark Wu show.” He laid down the DVD. “Shows him from the time he exited the plane to the taxi stand.”

She laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

“I’ve already seen that show. It sucks—nothing on it. Nada.”

Gideon felt his face turn red. “You’ve seen it?”

“Are you kidding? That was the first thing we looked at. How’d you get it?”

The drink arrived, and Gideon took a swig to cover his disappointment. “I used those diplomatic embosses you put on my passport. And a little yelling.”

“One of these days you’re going to run into somebody who doesn’t fall for your bullshit.”

“So far, so good.”

She shook her head. “Not everyone in the world is stupider than you.”

“
I
haven’t seen it,” he said. “Will you watch it with me—upstairs in our room?”

“Our room?” Her smile turned a little cold. “What happened in Dubai stays in Dubai. We’ll watch it in
my
room. You find your own place to sleep. No more pooling, to use your charming phrase.”

Gideon made an effort to look as if he didn’t care.

She polished off her drink and rose. “You’re going to be disappointed.”

“I already am.”

Up in her room, he fired up the DVD player and slid in the disk. The first shot showed a wide angle of the gate, with a time, date, and location stamp running along the bottom. After a moment Wu appeared, looking much as Gideon remembered him: fringe of hair, domed forehead, mousey, somewhat wan. He walked through the frame, threading a group of passengers waiting for the next flight.

The DVD then cut through a series of rapid frames, one after another, showing Wu walking down the terminal, entering passport control, waiting in the interminable
NON-US-CITIZEN
line, going through passport control, breezing through customs, then walking out and down the escalators.

“Hey. There’s you!” said Jackson. “Like a deer in the headlights.”

“Very funny.”

The DVD ended outside, with the Escape driving off.

Gideon rubbed his eyes. He felt like a damn fool, taking such a risk at the airport—a risk that might well come back to haunt him—for nothing.

“I’m tired,” said Jackson. “I’m jet-lagged, I didn’t sleep a wink last night, thanks to you. Do you mind?”

Gideon was staring at the image of the car, frozen on the screen. “There’s just one thing I’d like to look at again—”

“Out.”

“No, really. Something I’d like to see again. Right at the beginning.”

“What?”

“When Wu walks through those waiting people. Did you see there was an Asian woman there with a boy?”

“There were a lot of Asians.”

“Yes, but—I want to see it again.”

She sighed, turned back to the screen. They watched it again.

“There!” said Gideon abruptly, causing her to jump.

“I didn’t see anything.”

“Watch again.” He retracked the video and went through it in slow motion.

“I still didn’t see anything. Trust me, our experts have examined this tape in detail.”

“Quiet and watch…
There!
” He froze the frame. “A classic sleight. A reverse palm-out manip.”

“A what?”

He felt himself blush. “I studied magic.” He didn’t go into the reasons why he had studied magic. “You learn how to manipulate smallish pieces of paper. Magicians call such moves ‘manips.’ Usually they’re for cards.” He backed up the DVD and went through it again, frame by frame. “Check it out. The boy drops the teddy bear as Wu approaches…she leans over to pick it up…anyone watching would be following her hand picking up the teddy bear. But look at her
left
hand…you see her left palm is facing out, wrist straight…Then Wu goes past, and afterward her left hand is closed and the wrist slightly bent.”

He ran it through it yet again, frame by frame.

“I think I saw it,” she said doubtfully. “He passed her something.”

“No,
no
! It’s a reverse—she passed
him
something. And she did it in a way to hide it from anybody watching from any angle.”

“Why would she pass
him
something?”

“No idea.” Stopping the replay and getting a small piece of hotel notepaper, he demonstrated the move.

“I’ll be damned. But if she passed him a piece of paper, where is it?”

“Who knows? I expect he destroyed it when he realized he was being pursued.”

“That woman,” said Jackson, “is key. We’ve got to find her.”

Gideon nodded.

She turned to him. “We’ll split up the job. You look for the boy, I’ll look for the woman.”

“How in the world could I find the boy—?” But then he stopped, having noticed something else in the video; something that she, and everyone else, had apparently overlooked.

Jackson was already putting on her coat, gathering her wallet. “Call me if you find anything. I’ll do likewise.”

40

T
om O’Brien’s stubbled face slipped away from his supporting palm, and he awoke with a jerk. He glanced blearily over at the clock: just past ten. He’d been asleep at his desk for several hours and both his legs were tingling. It had happened again: he’d gotten so engrossed in the Python data-handling extension he’d been coding that he’d “wrapped around” the previous night and totally forgotten to sleep.

He stood up with a groan and massaged his legs. Food: that would wake him up.

Sliding a Sacramentum CD into the player and cranking it up, he padded into the kitchen. Pushing away piles of dirty dishes to make a work space, he pulled a baguette from its paper sheath and cut it lengthwise. Quickly he assembled a sandwich: peanut butter, sliced banana, mini marshmallows. A few slices of deli pickle added the final touch. He pressed the two halves of the sandwich together, tucked it under one arm, plucked a liter bottle of Dr Pepper from the fridge, and headed back toward his office.

He neighed in surprise and dismay at the sight of a man in his living room. Bottle and sandwich fell to the floor in unison, marshmallows and pickles flying everywhere. Then he saw it was Gideon Crew.

“Stop
doing
that!” he yelled at his friend. “If I die of a heart attack, who’s going to solve your little problem?” He knelt down and began reassembling the sandwich, picking cat hairs off the pickles.

“Don’t tell me you’re still eating peanut-butter-and-pickle sandwiches,” Gideon said. “Not interested in living to enjoy your Social Security, I guess.”

“Don’t you worry about me. I’m not the one being chased by half the spooks in Langley.” He scowled. “I haven’t had time to do any more work on those numbers.”

“No? Why not?”

“Unlike some people, I have to work for a living.”

“Yeah. Assistant lecturer at Columbia. When are you going to stop being a perennial grad student and actually earn that degree?”

“And face the real world?” He took a bite of the sandwich and headed into his office, Gideon following. “Look, it’s not just my work. It’s the nature of your problem. I told you, it’s like having a recipe without the ingredients. Three tablespoons of X, two ounces of Y, and a pinch of Z. Without the ingredients, I can’t do squat!”

“There’s something else I need your help on.”

“Do I get another thousand?”

Gideon ignored this, reaching into his coat and pulling out a DVD. “There’s a video capture on this. I need you to blow up and enhance an image for me.”

O’Brien took it and felt his face light up. “Oh. That’s easy.”

Gideon pointed at the music player with a pained expression. “Before we get started, mind turning that off? If any music could be carcinogenic, that’s it.”

O’Brien glanced at him in mock horror. “You don’t like blackened death metal?”

“Not even when it’s the blue plate special.” Gideon looked around for a place to sit, but there was only one chair in the tiny, impossibly crowded office and O’Brien was already in it. “I’ve never seen so much junk crammed into so little space. When are you going to clear some of this crap out?”

“Junk? Crap?” O’Brien sniffed as he turned down the volume of his player. “Everything in here is absolutely necessary to my work. For instance.” And wheeling his chair around, he plucked a gray metal device the size of a shoe box from its precarious perch atop an ancient UNIX terminal, placed it on his desk, plugged it in, and attached it to his PC.

“What’s that?” Gideon asked.

“It’s a VDT.”

“I repeat: what’s that?”

“A virtual digital telecine. Normally used to transfer different kinds of video stock from one format to another. But this particular model is very useful for forensic video work.” Turning it on, he pressed a few buttons on the tiny LED screen, then slid Gideon’s DVD into the slot. As the machine whirred, he took a huge bite of his sandwich, double-clicked an icon on the computer desktop. “I’m firing up the VDT’s host application.”

A large window appeared on the screen, surrounded by several smaller windows that included fine-grained transport controls, gamma correction, and utilities for image manipulation. “Where is it?”

“Just start playback. I’ll tell you when you reach the target image.”

O’Brien clicked the forward button in the transport control window, and an image appeared on the screen. “An airport,” O’Brien said. “Shit. It’s a security tape.”

“So?”

“Their quality sucks. Heavily compressed, too.”

They watched in silence for a minute as a worried-looking Asian man crossed the screen and made his way through a tangle of passengers.

“It’s been hard-telecined,” O’Brien said, staring at the monitor. “A hair under thirty fps—”

“There.” Gideon pointed at the screen. “Back up just a bit, then go forward, frame by frame.”

O’Brien returned playback to the moment the man encountered the group of passengers, then moved forward again.

“Slower, please.”

O’Brien took a lengthy pull of the Dr Pepper, worked the transport controls. “One frame per second.”

They watched together as a boy in the crowd dropped a teddy bear, a woman beside him picked it up, handed it back.

“Pause,” said Gideon. “Now, you see the satchel that boy is carrying?”

“Yup,” O’Brien said, peering at the flickering screen.

“I want you to find the clearest frame of that satchel, then enhance it. It’s got a blurry logo of some kind. I want to know what it is.”

“Sure thing.” O’Brien went backward through the frames, then forward, until he found the clearest shot of the satchel.

“Blurry as hell,” he muttered. “Whoever demultiplexed this for you did a lousy job.”

“They were in a hurry.”

“I’ll have to de-interlace the image or the combing will kill us.” O’Brien’s fingers ran over the keyboard. The image in the main window faded, grew larger.

“What are those bars across the image?” Gideon asked.

“That’s 2:3 pulldown. I’m trying to compensate.” Again he typed a rapid-fire series of commands. The image brightened, stabilized. “That’s better. Let me apply some unsharp masking.” O’Brien moused through a series of sub-menus.

“It’s a shield with a motto,” Gideon said, staring.

O’Brien worked the machine, further refining the image.

“
Pectus Est Quod Disertos Facit
,” Gideon read from the screen.