Tom Clancy's Net Force 6-10 (116 page)
So that would be the biggest challenge. He would have to figure out a way to get to the files and destroy them. Fortunately, the man he had put into the hospital was in no position to work on them, at least for a while. He could start the ball rolling on the GRU and Turks with a couple of calls. Money was no object to Mr. Cox—an amount that would make a man rich in Moscow or Ankara was pocket change to a man worth billions.
Natadze felt good about things, better than he had since the snafu with Gridley. He was on top of the situation, he had been very careful with the Russian, the death would look like an accident, and in any event, he’d left nothing behind to follow him. Mr. Cox would be pleased with him. Thinking of which, he picked up the throw-away cell phone and pressed in Cox’s number.
“You have good news?”
“Yes. It is done,” he said. “No problems.”
“Excellent. I’ll see you soon.”
“Yes.”
Natadze discommed. He would destroy the phone at the first stop for petrol, and would scatter the pieces into several garbage cans at different locations. No more mistakes.
Washington, D.C.
Jay asked the doctor point-blank: “If you were me, would you stay here?”
Dr. Grayson smiled. “If I were you, I’d probably be in a circus sideshow, me being a woman and all.”
“Funny,” he said, not answering her smile. “And not a bad sidestep of the question, either.”
She sighed. “You were in a deep coma, Mr. Gridley,” she said. “After having a bullet thwack you in the head. Another day or two in the hospital is a smart idea in the long run.”
“In the long run, Doc, we’re all dead. And you’re still dancing.”
She shook her head. “If I were you and I knew what I knew, I’d stay here for another day. People are both very tough and very fragile, and we don’t begin to know all there is to know about this kind of injury.”
“But I’m not in a coma now, my head wound is not serious, I’ve got a bandage on it and all, and I can lie around in my own bed a lot cheaper than I can this one.”
“Why don’t we wait for your wife to come back from lunch and discuss it?”
“Oh, no, then it would be two against one. I want to go home.”
“What’s so important there it can’t wait?”
“The guy who put me here is still out there. I can help track him down. Wouldn’t
you
be perturbed if somebody had shot you?”
you
be perturbed if somebody had shot you?”
“If I agreed to let you go home and you had a relapse, my malpractice insurance company would never forgive me.”
“I won’t sue you.”
“That’s what they all say.”
“Come on, Doctor. I need to be out of here.”
She nodded. “It’s not a prison, Mr. Gridley. You can check out AMA if you wish.”
“AMA?”
“Against Medical Advice. You sign a waiver, then if you drop dead on the way home, you can’t blame us—though the families usually do anyway.”
“Where do I sign?”
She smiled again, and shook her head. “That’s what your wife said you would say.”
“Saji talked to you?”
“On the way to lunch. She said you would tell me you were checking out of the hospital, and no matter what I said, you wouldn’t be swayed. She said she would keep a careful eye on you.”
Jay frowned. “How could she know this? I didn’t discuss this with her.”
“Apparently she knows you better than you think.”
He sighed. Yeah. Apparently so.
But that didn’t matter. He was going home.
25
Net Force HQ
Quantico, Virginia
Quantico, Virginia
Even though he knew it was theoretically possible, Thorn hadn’t really believed he’d be that lucky. Now and again, it happened, just often enough to keep him from discounting it.
The Super-Cray had come up with a match on Jay’s shooter and whoever killed the dead Russian.
Alone in his office, Thorn had his holoproj float the two images side-by-side. The picture on the left was from a bank ATM cam near the spy goods store—the man hadn’t been using the machine, but had been walking past it in the background, behind a woman withdrawing money from her account. Forty dollars, according to the ATM’s records. It was not the sharpest picture in the world, and only caught him from about the knees up, but it showed a dark-haired man of perhaps thirty-five glancing in the camera’s direction. A scale running down the size of the image showed his height in centimeters, based on the known height of a NO PARKING sign on a post behind him. He was about six feet tall.
The woman, a young and attractive brunette who was visible only from the chest up and blocking most of the frame, wore a skimpy red halter top that had trouble keeping her rather voluptuous breasts in check, and if the rear view was as interesting as the front one, Thorn guessed that this was the reason the passing man was looking over his right shoulder her way. He was checking her out.
That would mean he was heterosexual.
Or maybe he was gay, she had on designer pants, and he was admiring those.
Or maybe she had a puppy standing next to her and he was a dog breeder . . . ?
Leave that for now.
The second image was taken by a traffic cam covering an intersection in southern Connecticut, the town of Bridgeport, four miles away from where the Russian spy’s body had been found. A car was halfway through the intersection, making a clear right-hand turn on a red light, right next to a NO TURN ON RED sign. The traffic cam had snapped an image, showing the driver and the front of the car with its license plate, all neat for the local authorities to run the plate and mail the driver a ticket. The picture was date and time stamped.
The driver was an elderly woman, white-haired, and barely able to see over the top of the full-sized Cadillac’s steering wheel.
But: Behind that car, stopped behind the crosswalk, was a new Dodge, and seated at the wheel of that car was a dark-haired man whose head was surrounded by a pulsing red circle.
“Enlarge two hundred percent. Unsharp mask, selected field, on image two,” Thorn said. “Apply reasonable extrapolation generator.”
The computer obeyed, doubling the size of the image inside the circle, sharpening it, and augmenting the colors and shapes rendered based on a specialized enhancement program, the REG.
It looked like the same man to Thorn, but the big thing was that the Cray thought so, too. It had a much higher accuracy rating than Thorn’s eyes.
“List facial feature matches, normal tolerances.”
A pair of grids showing sizes blossomed, one under each image. The computer brought the two grids together into one image in the middle. All the features that were plus or minus a millimeter lit in flashing red for a beat, then locked. There were twelve matches of the eighteen factors scanned.
Same size nose, same size right ear, same distance between pupils, same ratio of forehead to ear height to chin angle . . .
Thorn didn’t need to go any further. Once you hit five major facial points, it was either the same guy or his twin brother, and Thorn didn’t think that was likely.
This was the guy who had bugged Jay’s car, shot him, and who had killed the Russian spy. Thorn was sure of it.
“Ha!” he said. “You are
mine,
pal!”
mine,
pal!”
Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be that easy. He searched the rest of the file, but there was no obvious way to identify the man—at least none that the Super-Cray had been able to come up with. The Cadillac in the foreground blocked the bottom of the car the shooter had been in, so there was no license plate visible. No other images of that car were in the traffic cam, and if the Cray hadn’t seen him elsewhere in its strain, then it wasn’t like a set of human eyes would do any better.
“Print images,” he said.
Thorn passed out hard copies of the holographs to General Howard, Colonel Kent, and Lieutenant Fernandez.
“This is the guy?” Howard said.
Thorn nodded. “I believe so, yes. What’s the word on Jay?”
Fernandez said, “He’s checked himself out of the hospital and gone home. We have guards watching the house. Saji says he’s planning to head back into VR and start looking.”
Thorn frowned. “VR? I would think the doctors would want him to stay out of that for a while.”
Howard nodded. “They do, but Jay’s more stubborn than they are.”
Thorn said, “I’ll call him and pass this along when we’re done. “I’ve run the driver’s license databases from all fifty states through the mainframe. The Super-Cray is checking all military photo records, current passports, and federally incarcerated prisoners—nothing yet. NCIC and CopRec databases are matching the image through local and state jail and prison systems, and that will take a while even with big crunchers. If he’s in the system, we’ll find him. Eventually.”
“You want us to go out on the streets looking?” Fernandez asked.
Thorn smiled. “The regular FBI is doing that already. They’ve got agents flashing these pictures in the vicinity of the spy store, the area where Jay was shot, and in the dead Russian’s neighborhood.”
“Good. At least that’ll give them something to do,” Fernandez said. “What’s this on his fingernails?”
Thorn frowned. “What?”
Fernandez pointed at the picture. “Looks like he is wearing nail polish on his right hand, see?”
The picture was too small to see more than a little gleam.
Thorn tapped the computer console on the conference table, called up the ATM image, and had it focus on the right hand—the left was behind him and out of sight. The computer enlarged and enhanced the hand.
A little fuzzy, but sure enough, it looked like the guy had fairly long fingernails, neatly manicured, and they did seem awfully shiny. Kind of an odd, slanted shape, angled to one side. That didn’t mean anything to Thorn, though.
“What’s the other hand look like?” Kent said.
“Can’t see it,” Howard said. “Miz Halter Top there is blocking it.”
Thorn called up the other picture, in the car. The man’s left hand was on the car’s steering wheel, at about ten o’clock. He had the computer magnify and enhance the image. It was grainy, not as sharp as the ATM image of the right hand, but it appeared as if the nails on that hand were much shorter and duller. Odd . . .
“He’s a guitarist,” Kent said.
“What?” Thorn said.
“I have a nephew, in Tucson, Arizona, my sister’s oldest son, who teaches music at the local U. He plays classical guitar, and that’s what his hands look like. Nails on his right hand are long, polished, and angled, and the ones on his left are clipped short—it’s how you play the instrument.”
The others looked at him.
“You pluck the strings with your nails, but if you have long nails on the other hand, the strings buzz when you fret them—at least that’s what my nephew told me.”
“So maybe he’s a country-western guy, or bluegrass or folk music player,” Fernandez said. “Even a rock star.”
Kent said, “Could be, but rock stars mostly flat-pick, and acoustic guitars have steel strings. Fingernails simply don’t hold up against those, so those guys wear curved finger-picks or have fake nails. Classical guitars have nylon strings.”
“How do you know all this?” Thorn asked.
“When I was stationed outside Atlanta, one of my sergeants was a serious blues guitarist. I used to go and listen to him play at local clubs, and I picked up a few things here and there.”
“And you remembered it?” Julio asked.
Kent looked at him. “Not everybody older than you is automatically senile, Lieutenant.”
“No, sir,” Fernandez said. “Point demonstrated and taken.”
General Howard grinned.
“Does this help us?” Kent asked.
Thorn nodded. “Absolutely. If nothing else, it’s another place to look. And something tells me there are not a lot of classical guitarist hit men around.”
Washington, D.C.
Jay sat in the command chair of the
Deep Flight V
, and stared out at the inky black water over two miles below the surface of the ocean.
Deep Flight V
, and stared out at the inky black water over two miles below the surface of the ocean.
He tapped instructions on the keyboard and the deep-sea submersible tilted to the right—starboard—and headed toward an odd-looking pile of silt. At this depth there wasn’t much moving except him. Vaguely nautical-sounding music played out over the stereo, and there were odd creaks and groans from the structure around him caused by intense pressure from the ocean.
Except that he just didn’t
feel
it. He wasn’t
there
. It wasn’t
real
.
feel
it. He wasn’t
there
. It wasn’t
real
.
He frowned and shook his head.
I was sure this would work.
I was sure this would work.
Even as he thought it, he knew that it wasn’t true. He’d wanted it to work, but he hadn’t really believed it would.
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