by David Roys
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.’
FORTY-TWO
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.
FORTY-THREE
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.
The extra sample data he had managed to pull from the cameras built into the monitors of the staff made him wonder whether he could somehow create a routine to circumvent the security system. He wondered whether they had given him access to images of Joshua himself. He searched through the samples and was surprised to find that they had indeed opened up the feeds to every camera in the building, including Joshua’s. He used the images of Joshua’s face to build his three-dimensional model. He wondered whether he would be able to fool the image recognition system into thinking that his face was Joshua’s. It should be easy enough since he had access to all of the source code and it just needed him to put in some special algorithms. If he got this right, he should be able to get some elevated permissions in the system which could only be a good thing. It wasn’t just about facial recognition. There was the problem of the key cards too, and copying one of those was going to be difficult considering he had no way to bring the hardware he needed to read and copy a card into the building.
Chris thought back to the time when Wyn and himself had been taken into this building and he realized they hadn’t gone through any kind of security scanner and there was no swiping of cards, and no surrendering of weapons as they entered the building. But they’d also entered through a different door. Was this door controlled in a different way? Maybe it was a special lock that could only be opened by Joshua’s face or other senior members of the team. The changes to the software would take all afternoon. He took a stroll to the canteen and grabbed a soda from the fridge and there was another programmer there making a coffee for herself. She was a red-head and kind of cute, maybe in her twenties.
‘I’m Chris,’ he said holding out his hand. ‘I’m new around here.’
‘I know who you are,’ she said, ‘there was a memo.’
‘I must have missed the memo that told me who you are,’ he said, his hand still extended in the hopes of a greeting.
With that the girl smiled and shook his hand. ‘I’m Stephanie,’ she said. ‘We were told to keep an eye on you, make sure you’re not making a nuisance of yourself.’
‘I’ll remember to try and be good,’ said Chris. ‘So what do you do here?’
‘I work on stabilization. I create routines that take feeds from electronic gyroscopes and wind speed indicators and use that to calculate thrust vectors that help to keep aircraft perfectly stable.’
‘Sounds interesting.’
‘It is. I get to play with some serious hardware. Most of the work I’m doing is normally done through creating physical models and testing them in a wind tunnel. Did you know we have more computing power in our department than in the whole of the NSA?’
‘Yes,’ said Chris. ‘I get the impression that money is no issue for these guys. But tell me, how do you feel about the other thing?’
The girl finished making her coffee and looked a little perplexed. ‘What other thing?’ she asked.
‘You know,’ said Chris, ‘killing people.’
‘I try not to think about that. The way I see it, if it wasn’t me working on these routines, it would be some other person and this is too good an opportunity. I know the work I am doing is going to be used in military applications sometime in the future, but for now, I can just concentrate on the ground-breaking work I’m doing.’
‘You sound like someone I know.’
‘And just who would that be?’ she asked.
‘Me,’ he said with a smile. ‘But do you know, the thing is that the work we are doing isn’t just going to be killing people at some time in future, it’s being used to kill people now. In some cases innocent people.’
‘Like I said, I try not to think about it.’
Chris was stunned. ‘That’s it?’ he said. ‘I tell you that your work is being used to kill innocent people and you tell me you try not to think about it?’
‘Listen Chris, I’m twenty-six and there are dozens of young graduates desperate to land a job like this. A lot of them are probably smarter than me. I know when I’m on to a good thing and this job is helping me do work that would be impossible in the commercial sector. Who knows, by the time I’m thirty I could be running my own company, consulting to the big aeronautics companies. Or even retired.’
‘So that’s it? You don’t give a shit about other people just as long as you’re getting what you want?’
‘It’s not like that. Sure I like the job and the opportunities I get. How many jobs are there where you get to work with such state-of-the-art equipment like they have at this place? But it’s not just that. We’re actually doing some good. Protecting our nation from the terrorist threat. Creating a safer country for our fellow citizens and for future generations.’
Chris held up his soda can, ‘I guess I need to keep drinking the Kool-Aid,’ he said. ‘Where do you draw the line? Don’t you sometimes feel like you’re Oppenheimer, working on the first atomic bomb? Maybe he felt the same way, that he was serving a greater good, protecting his country. Maybe he was excited to be given the funding and equipment that allowed him to continue with his ground-breaking research. But what happened when they dropped those bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? I’ll tell you what happened. Hundreds of thousands of citizens died, and not all of them in the intense inferno of white heat that destroyed those cities. Some of them died slow and agonizing deaths. Some of them are still suffering today and their future generations are still plagued by the after effects of having their genes ripped apart by the radiation that resulted from Openheimer’s work. I wonder whether, if he had known what he was creating and how it would be used, whether he would have continued with his work just because if he didn’t do it, someone else would?’
The girl was starting to look uncomfortable. Either she wanted to get away from Chris because she was finding him irritating, or she was being forced to look at what she was doing without blinkers for the first time.
‘The work we are doing will save millions of lives,’ she said. ‘What about the twin towers? If we could have stopped those bastards before they flew planes into our world trade center, don’t you think we would have taken that opportunity?’
‘Sure we would, but how do you know for sure that someone is going to pull the trigger? What about a reasonable doubt? What about being presumed innocent until proven guilty? What about the law? Do you just kill everyone that has the wrong colored skin? Or the wrong religious beliefs? There was another group of people that did that back in the 1940’s, you may have heard of them? The Nazis were led by fanatical power-hungry villains who fed off the kind of idealistic bullshit that you’ve been spouting to me. How many of those soldiers that put the Jews into the gas chambers were just following orders? Or serving the greater good? How many of them truly believed they were doing the right thing?’
The girl didn’t seem to want to discuss this with Chris any longer. She left her coffee and stormed out of the canteen, but before she left, she turned to Chris. ‘Before you start throwing accusations, I think you need to take a long look at your part in this. I only write the software that makes thing
s fly. You write the code that paints a cross-hair on people’s faces. If either of us should have trouble sleeping at night, it should be you.’
FORTY-FOUR
Ben tried Chris’s number again, but the phone was still diverting to his answer service. What was it with this guy? Didn’t he switch his phone on? He’d given up on leaving messages and had decided to drive over to his house. Ben remembered that Chris had often commented that he seemed to be the unluckiest guy on the planet, but now Ben knew about Joshua’s background, things started to make a lot more sense. The hard part was knowing what he could do about it. If Joshua was still working for the government, whichever set of initials that happened to be, then Ben was treading on thin ice. If Joshua had the powers to try to get a citizen killed to cover up another murder then he was clearly a dangerous man and appeared to be operating above the law. But what if his actions were not sanctioned? What if this Joshua character was a maverick, acting outside of his remit? Who could Ben go to for help? To whom would a man like that be answerable, and who could be trusted? He wondered about Agent Salter. Was he a man he could trust? What if he was part of this whole operation and had pulled Ben in just to find out how much he knew?
Ben walked up to the house and knocked at the door. There was no answer, he looked to the lock and thought about picking it. He’d picked locks on very rare occasions, but if he was honest, it wasn’t a skill he had mastered. There was seldom a need to pick locks, if he had a warrant or reasonable cause to enter a property, he could bring a specialist with him or even get the landlord to open the door for him. He was surprised to see that there were no keyholes on the door. He thought about Chris and realized that the door probably opened when it saw him coming. Nothing would surprise Ben anymore. He left the house and called back to the station and got the number for Michelle. She answered on the third ring.