Facial Recognition Technology wasn’t going away. But Katie Kessler struggled over whether it was getting in the way.
She read editorials with dire predictions of Big Brother scenarios: how one day, surveillance cameras will be mounted on every street corner; how pedestrians will be photographed and analyzed in their own neighborhoods.
She also found cases where FRT had identified real criminals, one who had procured seventeen fraudulent driver’s licenses. Katie read about its widespread and successful use in more than eighty casinos, on school property to track potential child molesters, and at airports where suspected terrorists had been detained.
On balance, she wished she had better researched her topic before she spoke. She came to the personal conclusion that FRT shouldn’t be the sole basis for arrest. But it could be an effective instrument in helping to identify and track suspected criminals and their movements.
At 4:15, she set the privacy issues aside for good. Christ, he’s turning me into a Republican! If Roarke found his man through FRT matches, she’d live with her personal quandary.
What Katie didn’t know is that while she was working, she was also being observed by three cameras. The law firm’s security department eyes were always on, a result of technological upgrades installed in the last few months. The partners and staff were politely notified that some additional cameras were installed to prevent break-ins and theft. She never considered that the network was far greater than advertised, and that they’d ever be used for internal spying.
“Sir,” the security officer reported over the phone, “you asked me to keep you informed on any of Ms. Kessler’s prolonged studies.”
“Yes,” said Donald Witherspoon, an officious, but rising young attorney who organized the effort to equip the building with state-of-the-art surveillance measures. Roarke had met him and concluded he had asshole written all over him. Kessler resoundingly agreed.
“Where is she? What is she doing?”
“She’s in the library.” He zoomed in the hidden camera behind her, reconfirming what he’d already discovered. He switched to a second and third angle. “Ms. Kessler is reading up on something called FRT. The print is a little too small to tell for sure. But she’s scrolling through some cases or opinions. We have to get some better lenses in there, sir.”
The security guard’s explanation made Witherspoon sit up. He called up an office log on his computer. Kessler. Kessler. He found her name and scrolled down her current assignments. Nothing associated with FRT. What’s that cunt up to?
“How long has she been at it?”
“About four hours. Lexis/Nexis. Google. Harvard Law Library online. She’s got a pad full of notes.”
Notes for a case she’s not working on? This worried Witherspoon. She’d been seen with the Secret Service agent. There were even rumors that she had made a quick trip to D.C. the morning of the inauguration, the morning that Teddy Lodge was killed. Why? Kessler never spoke about it, but she didn’t deny she was seeing a man in Washington.
“Thank you, Freddie. I’ll just go down and say hello. But it’s all fine, and I appreciate you keeping me posted.”
“Yes, sir.” The security officer hung up and turned to his other cameras.
“Good afternoon, Katie,” Witherspoon said, feigning real interest. He looked like he had reason to be in the archives, with two thick volumes in hand.
Katie looked up. “Donald.”
Witherspoon busied himself for a moment, returning the books to a shelf. When he finished, he was standing directly behind her.
“Some pressing case? You seem really engrossed.”
“Naw. Just researching.” Butthead. “Stuff for the future.”
The computer screen displayed a Florida newspaper extract. It confirmed what the security officer had described.
“Staying ahead of the curve, huh?” he offered.
“Yup.”
“Interesting stuff?” he asked.
“Some.”
He looked at her yellow pad.
She sensed his eyes bearing down, and Katie quickly turned to the next, blank page. “If you don’t mind, Donald,” she said, swiveling in her chair.
“Citing some future client privilege, are we?”
“I just don’t like it when someone starts breathing over me.”
“Sorry. Anything I can help you with?” He paused, then decided to add, “For the sake of the firm.”
“No, thank you, Donald.”
“Who did you say it was for?” he asked, trying to draw her out.
“I didn’t.” Too many questions, Katie thought. “Like I said, it’s just research,” she added sharply.
Katie turned away and typed in an innocuous, unrelated research parameter. The screen immediately came up with a list of new links.
“Well, let me know if I can help. We newbies have to stick together. After all, someday we might make partners together.”
In your wet dreams. “Never know,” she offered aloud.
Witherspoon leered more than smiled and left. Although he wouldn’t do it immediately, there was one call he’d make from a random public phone. Slowly, carefully, unobserved. He’d report just the kind of behavior he was told to look for, from the only person he was instructed to watch: Katie Kessler.
Chapter 11
Chicago, Illinois
“You want to know what you can do?” Elliott Strong asked the caller on the tape. It was Gonzales’s second time listening.
“Yes.”
“You are the government,” Strong explained. “Not a liberal congress. Not a president you didn’t elect. Not a vice president you booted out. Not the Supreme Court.” The usual rambling. “You are the government. Do you have any idea what that means? Ever hear of something called an Amendment?”
Gonzales laughed. Strong spelled out the word. Then the host added, “It’s one of the ways you change things. A bit slow for my taste, but it works.” Elliott Strong had been putting ideas in people’s heads for sixteen years, the last six of them as a nationally syndicated host. It was hard for even the most faithful listeners to say they knew much about him. They just liked what he had to say.
Occasionally he dropped a thought or two about how he lifted himself out of the horrible life his parents led. He admitted that they were unskilled migrant workers. Real card-carrying white trash, forced to follow the sun and the seasons to scrape out a pitiful living.
Strong often recalled how he couldn’t wait to escape his parents’ reach. His father beat him until the day he finally fought back. His mother died of emphysema but it was hard for him to care. She never showed any love for him whenever his father was around.
So, according to Strong, he retreated into books. He read everything in sight, from American and world history to travel and political nonfiction. He worked on his speaking voice, realizing he wouldn’t become anything if he couldn’t communicate. He recounted the story every year on the anniversary of his first day in radio.
“It was on my seventeenth birthday. I hitched a ride to Fresno in a navy blue Ford pickup truck that stunk from lousy cigars and nickel beer. I would have gone farther, but when I couldn’t stand it any longer, I said, ‘Pull over there!’ I don’t think he ever came to a complete stop. I jumped out, and he took off. I walked for about a mile or so and came to a radio station. It was a little single-story Navajo white building with bright blue call letters over the door. That, my friends, was Mecca. I marched straight into the offices of that 1,000-watt station and said to the first person I saw, ‘Hi, I’m Elliott Strong. And I’m here for a job.’”
Strong never embellished his story. He always told it the same. “There was a girl. She was twenty-one and beautiful, with a full head of blonde hair done up like Farrah Fawcett’s and lipstick the color of the reddest rose, with lips just as soft. She was unbelievable, but then again, I was seventeen. I’d never seen anyone like her. ‘And you are?’ She asked.
‘Elliott Strong, miss. And I’m ready to start my career in broadcasting.’” This is the point where he always broke up telling the story. “I had dusty overalls on, a plaid shirt and worn boots. She must have wondered which tractor I’d fallen off.”
‘Doing what? Mowing the lawns?’
‘If that’s what it takes. Yes.’
“The secretary took some pity on me. She gave me a soda and went into the general manager’s office and closed the door. I heard some laughter. After a few minutes she came back out, followed by this older man. Maybe he was forty, maybe fifty. What’s a kid know? But he was wiping his mouth, and believe you me, he didn’t get rid of all the lipstick. That’s when I realized she was more than just his secretary.”
‘Gina tells me you’re ready to get into radio, son.’
‘That’s right. I can read real good. You’ll see.’
‘We don’t need anyone new. I’ve got a fine staff here. Some of them have been with me for almost a year. Anyway, it’s ‘I can read really well.’’
‘Thank you. Really well. You’ll never have to tell me that again, sir. Honestly.’
‘No, I don’t imagine I will,’ the manager said. ‘And I don’t need to go anywhere. I can wait for one of your announcers to leave. You won’t have to look around. In the meantime, I gather the grass needs some attention.’
‘See,’ the secretary whispered. ‘He’s cute. Why not?’
“The man nodded. ‘Okay. Overstreet’s the name.’ He offered me his hand.
‘Elliott Strong, Mr. Overstreet. Pleased to meet you.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘Here and there.’
‘Well, now you’re here. By your appearance, I’d say you’re pretty comfortable in the great outdoors. That’s where I do need some help. Buck-fifty an hour. Cash, which I think you’ll appreciate.’
‘How much do your announcers make?’
“He laughed. ‘Buck fifty, but we take taxes out.’
‘Sounds fine to me. Keep my seat warm.’”
As Strong told the story, he was doing the graveyard shift in less than four months. By the end of the year, he was also getting a little extra from Gina on the side.
Over the next six years, he earned his high school equivalency and lived the life of a gypsy disc jockey. Fresno to Prescott, Arizona to Bakersfield, California, and on to Sacramento and Phoenix. Along the way, he audited as many college political science courses as possible. When he got bored with straight announcing and spinning records, he moved into talk radio with a bright, witty, fast tongue and a conservative point of view. He found himself in the right place at the right time, when radio made a sharp turn to the right in the mid-1990s.
“That’s right,” the broadcaster continued on the tape. “Amend the Constitution. Just like you did a few years ago. Or don’t you remember that battle? Now there are twenty-eight Amendments. How do you think they got there? Out of thin air? Materializing on parchment in the National Archives?” He was on one of his rants. “As Americans, you decide how to live your lives. We decide. Not somebody waiting for “Hail to the Chief” as a cue to walk down some red carpet…someone whose only connection with the people is through the windows of his stretch limo.
“You decide, my friends, just as all the colonists decided they didn’t want the British to be running things here. They didn’t want to support some clown in a crown thousands of miles away who said, ‘Pay the taxes or go to the stockades.’ And Americans before you said that presidents aren’t kings, so they can’t serve for life. Your parents and grandparents decided that in 1951 when they voted state-by-state to limit a president to two terms. No more dynasties like Franklin Roosevelt’s. No imperial presidents. And how did they do it? By amending the Constitution. For the record, it’s number twenty-two. Go look it up.”
Gonzales heard him take a sip of water.
“Two terms. Not three. Not four. Eight years. That’s all. But look, we’re on the verge of a dynasty again. This Lamden-Taylor thing could take us another twelve years. Count along with me. Twelve more years between them. Sixteen in all. We had Taylor’s first four. Now Lamden-Taylor for four. Who says it won’t be a Taylor-Lamden or Lamden-Taylor switching off for the next eight after that?”
Strong didn’t bother to consider Lamden’s age, which made his argument highly unlikely. Nor did he suggest that perhaps they wouldn’t want to run. He had his agenda and he went for it.
“Did you vote for the repeal of the twenty-second Amendment? I sure didn’t. Nobody has.” He failed to mention that Ronald Reagan actually floated the idea during his term stating, “I have come to the conclusion that the twenty-second Amendment was a mistake. Shouldn’t the people have the right to vote for someone as many times as they want to vote for him?”
There was no response from the caller on the tape. Strong had dropped him well into his speech. But the host still acted as if he was there, appearing to talk one-to-one, but actually reaching millions of individuals.
“So you amend the Constitution. You rewrite the law of the land. You change it. You replace them with leaders we want, not ones who are the poster children of the military-industrial establishment.” A familiar rallying cry for Strong. “Go to our www.StrongNationRadio.com or www.ElliottStrong.com websites. All the e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and fax numbers are there. The White House. The Supreme Court, and each senator and congressman. All of them. You’re going to write them and call them, and tell them how you feel. By Monday morning they’ll get a real sense of what Americans are thinking. What we’re thinking. What we want.” Each phrase came quicker, with more passion, with greater authority. Strong wasn’t asking. He was commanding.
“You can do it!” He slammed his fist down hard. Punctuation. An exclamation point to his lecture.
“You can do it! You live in the greatest nation in the world. You live in America where your voice counts.” He pounded his fist again. “Let’s start acting like God-fearing Americans instead of some third-world peasants. We don’t have to take it anymore. We’ll be right back.”
A commercial for a foreign automaker came up.
Chapter 12
Staritsa, Russia
Aleksandr Dubroff looked like any of the other old men digging for mushrooms in the ankle-deep mud. A hint of his denim shirt was visible under his nearly worn out khaki vest. It’s not worth the money to buy another, he thought. After all, how many more years will I be at this? One, maybe two?
His vest, shirt, and worn corduroys were covered by a leather, fleece-lined coat, underneath it all, long johns. He wore his favorite beret, a ragged brown checkered gift from his wife, Mishka, from the last year of her life. The hat, like her memory, fortified him against the early morning chill.
None of his clothes gave away his status. Not that status mattered anymore.
Aleksandr Dubroff had long ago retired from the Politburo, the Central Committee of the now-defunct Soviet Union. At that time he was a good three inches taller than his 5’7″ frame today. He had been one of the elite, a man who set Soviet policy and ran the country. He left, not because he saw the end of Soviet life coming, but because his beloved Mishka needed him. They’d been married for just over forty-six years when doctors told him she would not see their next anniversary.
So Dubroff decided to spend every remaining minute with Mishka. They moved to their state-provided dacha, in the wooded Tver region, about a four-hour car ride outside of Moscow.
Despite Dubroff s diminished stature, he was still strong, a barrel-chested man with bushy, black-as-night eyebrows that jutted out a full half-inch, and a thick salt-and-pepper moustache to match. His face was lined with age, but red cheeks always projected a cheery manner. Over the years, too many people took that for a jovial, soft demeanor. They were wrong—some of them, in fact, dead wrong. As a retirement present to a trusted friend of the Party, Soviet Premier Nicolai Andropov renovated Dubroff’s dacha. That meant he and Mis
hka would enjoy electricity and a generator, hot running water, and an indoor bathroom. By neighbors’ standards, they’d live in the lap of luxury.
“All the comforts of home,” the Premier told him at his goodbye party. “You and your Mishka should be comfortable.”
Dubroff thought the rest. For as long as she has. But he said, “Thank you, Mr. Premier. I can’t begin to express our sincerest gratitude.”
“No, Sasha. We, the people of this great country, are grateful for your dedicated service. From your defense of Russia to your tireless work for the Party.”
Tireless work for the party said it all and said nothing. Some of the other Politburo members had known of Dubroff s earlier work. Others only heard the rumors. And others still, like Mishka and the other wives, were told to ignore the lies of the West. It was easy to do. Aleksandr “Sasha” Dubroff always looked so cheery.
Now most of his colleagues from the old days were gone. He even outlived the Soviet Union and its measly pension by decades. Had he not created his own savings in Dubai banks, he would have gone hungry years ago.
But now Sasha Dubroff foraged for mushrooms, anonymous to everyone around him. He picked his way through the wetlands, slicing away the dry branches above with his razor-sharp knife.
Every spring and fall, Dubroff returned to the marshes, but not because he really liked mushrooms. It was the hunt—like in the old days when he looked under different kinds of rocks. Here he found Beilee, Podberiozouik, Gorkoshkee, and Maslikyonok.
When he started, an old mushroomer—even older than him—said, “Only the Seeroyejhka—the fresh, edible ones. The pink, lilac, green, red, and maroon-cap mushrooms.”
“How will I know the poisonous ones?” Sasha asked. He knew a great deal about dispensing poisons, but he didn’t care to die consuming any himself.
The old man pointed to some intriguing looking mushrooms with his walking stick. “The ones that are most likely to catch your eye. The ones that you laugh at because they remind you of dicks and balls, or the ones that appear to be umbrellas for dolls. Look, but don’t touch.”
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