“You know what you’re doing. You make the call.”
Keisha waved the remote through the air, and a circle appeared on the display, with the odd gouge dead center.
“Okay, ladies,” she called out to the others, who, with the exception of Frank, were now watching the big screen. “Start your engines. We’re doing a targeted outpost search. Those cliffs. One hundred meters back from the edges, starting inland, radiating out. Let’s build the grid. Frankie—you, too.”
At the lunch table, Frank scooped up his M&M’s, stuffed some into a shirt pocket, and the rest into his mouth before shuffling over to his own station.
“Gonna stick around, boss?” Keisha asked.
Ironwood was tempted. “How long to search the cliffs?”
Keisha hit some keys, watched some numbers change at the bottom of the screen. “They’re about ninety feet above current sea level, so if we start there . . . say ten search grids? Nineteen with overlaps. Half-meter slices moving up. Two minutes a grid . . .” She did the math. “If there’s nothing there, we’ll know in about twenty hours.”
“And if there’s something?”
“Hey, if it’s in the first grid, we’ll know in two minutes.”
“Give me a call. I’m just upstairs.”
Keisha held up the remote. “At least get the party started.”
Ironwood smiled and took the control.
“The big blue button at the top,” Keisha said. She turned to her team. “Switching to SARGE.”
Ironwood pressed the button, and all the colors on the display changed to the arbitrary false shades that made it easier to distinguish different materials.
“Aaannd . . . they’re off!” Keisha said, as the screen began flickering with the rapid appearance and disappearance of the wireframe diagram of an outpost.
Ironwood handed back the remote and left them to their fun.
Fifteen feet above them, David Weir remained, uninvited, and saw everything as it happened.
Merrit’s eyes stayed on the casino’s security screens as his hands moved over the security console’s switches, sliders, and keyboard to follow the advance and retreat of video frames illustrating David Weir’s journey through the retail arcade more than an hour ago.
Seeing Weir go into a souvenir store, he called up surveillance footage from inside it, then watched as Weir purchased a sweatshirt and two baseball caps, received a large shopping bag, and then stuffed his knapsack and jacket into it.
Merrit went back to the arcade camera records. This time he followed Weir in the midst of shopping tourists as he moved through the mall, his face blocked by a ball cap. For every store window Weir stopped to check out, Merrit zoomed in to examine the items on display, but found no pattern other than crude misdirection. Whatever Weir was up to, the kid knew he would be tracked, and had done all he could to delay his inevitable detection.
Finally, Weir reached the end of the arcade and slipped into a men’s room. There was no coverage inside. Was he switching to a new disguise?
After fast-forwarding five minutes, it became obvious Weir wasn’t coming out.
“What’s he doing in there?” J.R. said.
Merrit suddenly had it. “Stay here. Keep watching that door.” Weir was no longer in the men’s room because there was another way out—a locked door marked MAINTENANCE, which led to the hotel’s service corridors, below and above its public areas.
“Where’re you going?”
Merrit was already on his way out. He didn’t know how Weir had figured it out, but he did know where he was going.
The last place on Earth he’d ever see.
The dimensions of Heaven matched those of the room beneath it.
The difference, David noted, was that up here, the only solid floor space was the metal-railed balcony ringing the outer walls and linking to an open network of crisscrossing metal catwalks. Below the balcony and catwalks, a grid of thick wires was suspended above undulating, clear plastic panels, whose undersides formed the ceiling of the room below. The grid of wires supported sixteen cameras, each pointing straight down at the plastic panels.
Though clear from above, the plastic panels were mirrored when viewed from below so the network of overhead cameras would not be detected as their focus shifted from table to table, dealer to dealer, player to player—their God’s-eye view searching for any sign of cheating. In casino lore, that was why a room like this was “Heaven.”
This particular Heaven had been easy to enter. From the maintenance area of the men’s room, David had taken a backstage staircase to the hidden level set between the casino’s main floor and the first convention floor. From there, a second set of blank-walled corridors had led him here. Protected only by a card reader, the door had snicked open the moment he’d held his reprogrammed keycard to it.
He edged farther along the balcony to reach the control station for the centralized surveillance system: a four-monitor console with rocker switches, a dial for cameras, and a single joystick. No indicator lights, though. The cameras trained on the room below were not switched on.
David ran a finger over the controls. One rocker switch was labeled TEST. Perfect. A manual option. He switched it on.
Then he turned a camera dial to select a camera. Number 14. Using the joystick, and watching on one of the console’s four monitors, he moved it until—
He saw the air force hard drive on one of the computer workstations in the room below.
Then he saw Ironwood and a woman with beaded dreadlocks tracking flickering images on a wall-sized computer screen. Satellite imagery of a coastal area. Unfamiliar to him.
Without audio, David could only observe, not listen, as the huge display abruptly changed color, then changed again.
A moment later, Ironwood left, but David stayed, watching what he knew had to be a search program flashing into action, comparing the imagery on-screen to a three-dimensional shape unknown to him.
The speed with which the algorithm worked was stunning. The image changed every two minutes, presumably the amount of time it took the algorithm to finish with one search grid and move on to the next.
Using the joystick, David moved camera 14 to focus on each of the room’s other workstations, and discovered that their smaller screens—each with its own intent attendant—held portions of what was on the larger screen.
Minutes stretched to an hour, and he took the opportunity to further study details of the Red Room. A thick bundle of cabling ran from the workstations to what seemed to be a retrofitted internal wall that sectioned off half of the available floor space. Whatever was behind that wall was beyond the reach of any camera.
Two hours into the search, David was back on camera 14 and saw signs that, of the eight technicians in the room below, seven were packing up their cases, getting ready to leave. One man, in torn jeans and a plaid shirt, continued working.
Half an hour later, the last man was still there, slouched now in a chair at a conference table, one knee bouncing up and down, endlessly arranging M&M’s, green only, in complex fractal patterns.
David directed camera 7 to observe the lace of candy grow, so he was watching as, moments later, the man jerked back in his chair, sending M&M’s skittering across the table to the floor. At the same time, through the ceiling, David caught a faint electronic beep.
David dialed up camera 14 and angled the joystick to get an oblique, downward view of the quicksilver, flashing 3-D wireframe model now fixed in one position on the large screen, slowly blinking on and off.
The man below agitatedly dug through all his pockets, stopping only when he discovered his phone in his flannel shirt. He punched in a number, and waited . . . waited.
David knew what was wrong. The phone wouldn’t work inside a room that blocked electromagnetic transmissions.
It took another few seconds before the man apparently recalled the same and bolted for the room’s one exit, presumably to make his call outside.
Whatever the algorithm
had been set to find, it had found.
David saw his chance and took it.
TWENTY-SIX
The instant the door below closed, David had his knapsack on and was sprinting onto one of the metal catwalks, where he reached down and lifted up a ceiling panel. Easing over the railing, he lowered himself until he was hanging through the opening.
Six feet below his sneakers was the candy-littered table.
David dropped, rolled to one side as he landed, and fell off the table edge, colliding with three wheeled office chairs before he struck the floor, unhurt. At once, he scrambled to his feet and ran to the workstation connected to the air force hard drive.
The big screen was still awash in information.
Centered against a background of random color splotches, the wireframe pattern continued blinking on and off in one place. A strip of coded numbers ran along the screen’s bottom edge. David didn’t recognize the program, which meant he had no time to explore how to save a file.
He did, however, recognize elements of the screen’s layout, enough to recognize the local network operating system. He hit the CTRL + ALT + PRINTSCREEN keys.
A window promptly opened on the workstation display, asking him where he wished to send the print request. He was offered a choice of several printers, plus five auxiliary drives where the image file could be saved for later printing.
David selected Jack Lyle’s drive, and a smaller window popped up showing the progress of the write request. It was startling how slow that progress was: three minutes to write the data on the big screen to his drive. The nine-foot display wasn’t simply showing an image file. It apparently contained a massive amount of other data.
He tapped his fingers against the side of the workstation, considering his next move. This combination of software and hardware had found its target within a few hours. Even if he erased the results, they’d be easily reacquired. He’d need to do something more to be sure Jess MacClary had information that Ironwood didn’t—and couldn’t—get.
He decided to erase the search database itself. He overrode the sysop function, typed in his command, hit ENTER.
It was simpler than he’d hoped. No security measures had been considered necessary and none had been taken to protect the isolated workstations, likely because they had no physical connection to any other computer network, or to the Internet, and were contained in a room impervious to radio transmissions.
On-screen a progress window opened: The system would need four hours to erase the entire database.
David knew it was unlikely the process would be allowed to continue to completion, but even an hour would help. Until they restored their database, Ironwood’s team wouldn’t be able to reproduce their results.
He left the big screen and ran back to Jack Lyle’s hard drive, checked its progress. Thirty seconds left.
Then he heard the thud of footsteps, and a door slammed open.
In Heaven.
Merrit stood in the open doorway to the security facility above the Red Room. He moved his gun in a two-handed sweep from left to right, scanning for movement as his eyes adjusted to the unnatural underlighting. There was no one in the observation room.
Then he saw the camera console. It was powered up. Images on all four screens.
He stepped onto the metal balcony and looked down at the Red Room for the first time, seeing only a bank of gaming consoles, computer stations, and equipment. No personnel. No Weir.
The next thing that registered was the missing ceiling panel.
Weir had been here—and because the only way out was past three former marines with shoot-to-kill orders, he was still there.
Merrit ran onto the catwalk and dropped over its railing through the missing panel to the table. He was on his feet in a heartbeat, gun in hand.
The catwalk above clanked.
“You’re not supposed to be in there!” J.R. called down. Then a pained grunt announced his clumsy drop beside Merrit.
“Weir’s trapped in here!” Merrit swept the room with his weapon, seeking anything large enough to hide a man.
The room was clear.
Merrit pointed to the cylindrical door. “Where does that go?”
“The computer room. Even I can’t go in there.”
Merrit was already spinning the revolving door to open it. He entered the cylinder, rotating it until—
It was like stepping into a meat locker. In the dim light, he could see his breath. He could also see, in the enclosure’s center, eight metal shelving units, five feet high, eight feet long. Each was stacked with what looked to be stereo components or DVD players, all identical—black fronts dotted with a constellation of small blinking lights. The components were on brackets that kept them a few inches from each other, top and bottom, side to side. Each shelving unit was back to back with another, with hundreds of multicolored ribbon cables woven in between.
Gun held ready, Merrit explored the stacks, alert for anything that would betray a fugitive. He stopped by the wall closest to the crowded shelves. A large ducting tube hung from the ceiling, directly over a stack of wooden crates. The tube, obviously arranged to blast cold air straight down onto the shelves, had once been joined to the wall and a large air-conditioning outlet. Now it dangled free.
Merrit moved on. No matter how haphazard an installation this room was, it was still in a casino, where the interiors of large air ducts were always subdivided into smaller ones so that no one could crawl through them.
But he found no other potential hiding place for Weir.
The cylinder door rotated again, and J.R. poked his head through. “The old man’s going to go apeshit if he finds out you were in here.”
Merrit knew he wasn’t wrong about this. Weir had been in the upper level, and he couldn’t have eluded the guards outside the only exit. He had to have come in here.
“There’s got to be another way out.”
“Like that?” J.R. pointed to the dangling wall duct.
Merrit shook his head at J.R.’s ignorance of his own family’s business. “Standard casino building rule. It’s subdivided.”
“Wanna bet? That one got added for all this computer junk. Subdividing, that costs money, right?”
Merrit swore. Ironwood’s damned cost cutting. He grabbed one of the crates and stacked it on another under the air-conditioning outlet. “Where does the duct come out?”
“The roof, probably. Above the convention floor between the towers.”
“Get up there. Take guards with you. But if you hear gunshots from the duct, tell them to back off, understand?”
As soon as he was alone, Merrit pulled himself onto the top crate, then leapt up to catch the edge of the outlet. He scaled the wall and pushed deep into the ductwork.
Weir would never reach the roof alive.
Still in the chilled computer room, David was in the floor-level inlet of the retrofitted air-return duct, his fingers numb from holding closed the vent screen.
When Merrit entered, he’d just squeezed in. There’d been no time to refasten the screen that concealed him. If Ironwood’s security chief had bothered to bend down and peer in, even without a flashlight he’d have seen his prey, and that would’ve been the end.
Literally. David had seen the gun.
Ironwood’s assurance that Merrit was not to interfere with him was no help now. Merrit had gone rogue, and there was no time to wonder why. He’d reach the roof in minutes, and then he’d come back here.
David carefully latched the vent screen before turning around and crawling deeper into the ductwork. A few feet along, he stopped and, with eyes closed, listened intently. He placed the sounds of the casino, one by one, on the mental map he’d formed of the whole resort, with his own position a dot in a three-dimensional wireframe.
Finally he heard noises that could guide him out: the far-off but unmistakable rumble of a truck backing up, the whine of its gears, the beep of its reverse alarm. If he followed that sound profile . . .
But when he reached the parking lot, he ran.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Less than sixty seconds after Weir left the casino, Jack Lyle took a call from an agent in one of three surveillance vans on the outskirts of Encounters: Weir was running.
For now, Lyle ordered pursuit only, no interference. While he’d been questioning Weir in Atlantic City police headquarters, a team of AFOSI technicians had installed a new SIM card in Weir’s phone. It could still make and receive calls as before, but now its GPS function could not be switched off. For added backup, the team had also replaced the tracking devices in Weir’s iPod and digital recorder.
As long as those three units were operational, and the target himself was under visual observation, Lyle was willing to cut him some slack. The kid could be late for a movie, out on some errand. There was still nothing to track in the Ironwood investigation—the RFID tag in the hard drive hadn’t been switched on yet.
Thirty minutes later, Lyle’s willingness to give Weir the benefit of the doubt evaporated when a second report said the target was now in a cab on the Atlantic City Expressway, heading for the airport.
By the time Roz swung the black Intrepid into the driveway of his Best Western, Lyle’s team had pulled the passenger lists for all flight departures in the next few hours. Weir’s name wasn’t on them. By the time Roz had Lyle halfway to the airport, the team had the reason for omission.
The target was on his way back to the city at the wheel of a metallic gold Cadillac DTS, rented at the airport.
Lyle checked the Intrepid’s navigation screen as it tracked the progress of the Cadillac. He had a few new questions. Why go out to the airport to rent a car when the casino could provide one? More to the point, who was paying for it? There’d been no activity on any of Weir’s credit cards for weeks.
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