Bird's-Eye View

by J. F. Freedman

  Jack’s a prototypical old-school nerd from back in the days when the geeks wore slide rules on their belts like holsters and cinched their pants up to their chests. Rayon shirt, of course, old-fashioned Converse All Stars in black, eyeglasses with chunkier frames than Clark Kent’s. Classic, except that Jack is no older than twenty-five. I can’t tell if his accent is northern British or Irish; it’s thick, working-class, like the Beatles when they hit the scene back in the ’60s.

  It’s ten-thirty at night. There are other people working in the building, but I don’t see any of them. Jack doesn’t want me to; and he doesn’t want anyone to see me, either.

  “Let’s see what you’ve got,” he says when we reach the area where we’re going to work. It’s a windowless rectangular room full of computers, imagers, scanners, digital cameras, similar to a science lab in a university, except there are no petri dishes or microscopes.

  I hand over the transparencies I want to enhance—the before shots, not those of the actual killing. No one’s going to see them.

  “First off,” he says briskly, “we’ll feed ’em into the computer. Then we’ll tweak ’em, see what we can pull up.”

  I perch on a stool and watch him do his thing. There are a dozen monitors connected to his computer, like a video bank in a broadcasting booth. He scans the transparencies into his computer, brings them up side by side on the center screen. On this large screen they’re less clear than my originals.

  “We’ll fix that,” he says, alluding to the quality.

  He fiddles with the color and contrast, changes the pixel dimension on the screen, plays with them a bit more, and voilà!, the photos displayed on his computer screen are as bright and clear, even more so, than my originals.

  “Quality okay for you?” he asks me with a nonchalant air. The guy’s a pro, and usually handles much more complicated problems than mine, I’m sure.

  “Excellent.”

  “Dandy. Let’s move on, then. I see your problem, of course. You can’t make out any of the features, can you? What time were these taken?”

  “An hour after sunrise.”

  “Shooting right into the bloody sun. I take it they weren’t posing for you.”

  “You take it correctly.”

  “Who interests you the most?”

  I point to the face of the man I think could be the Russian counselor.

  Jack peers at it through his thick-lensed spectacles. “This’ll be a bit of a challenge. The sun’s directly behind his bloody head. The other one”—he points to the man who pulled the trigger shortly after these pictures were taken—“he’d certainly be a problem, since the shades and that hat hide most of his face anyway. Almost as if he was taking precautions not to be seen,” he muses.

  “Probably his style,” I say, realizing that Jack’s statement might be true. Almost certainly is true, as I think about it.

  Jack points to the third man in the picture, the pilot. “What about him? He’d be the easiest, he’s standing at more of an oblique angle.”

  “I’m not concerned about him, although if you can do it, I’ll take it. This one”—I point at my objective—“is why I came.”

  “Any idea of where this man you’re looking for lives?”

  “Washington, I’m pretty sure. If not D.C. proper, Virginia or Montgomery County.”

  “Good, that’ll narrow down the field, save some time.” He squares his shoulders. “Let’s give it our best shot.”

  He turns his attention to his computer, starts typing in a series of commands, and all the screens start going crazy. Images flash across them almost faster than the eye can take them in—faces, all different. They seem to be similar to the general outlines of the face in my photos.

  “Who are these people?” I ask, trying to keep up. “What’s going on?”

  “This is everyone in the computer’s database who bears a basic resemblance to the man in your pictures,” Jack informs me.

  “How . . . where did these come from?”

  He smiles morbidly. “Big Brother’s watching you. Didn’t you know that?”

  “That sounds like CIA stuff.”

  His smile turns into a laugh, right in my face. “Of course it is, for God sakes. CIA, FBI, plenty of agencies, here and abroad. This is the digital age, the computer age, or have you not noticed? Modern technology’s opened the world up to infinite possibilities—and it’s also taken away any vestige of privacy that you have, or think you have.”

  In front of us, the screens are still going crazy with images of faces—they’re dissimilar in many respects, but the basic shape of the head, the hairline, the features, and so forth, is of one general variety.

  “These matches are close enough to warrant looking at more deeply,” he tells me. Then he asks, “Do you have a driver’s license?”

  “Yes.” I start to dig for it in my wallet.

  He waves me off. “I’m sure it’s a beautiful portrait, like all driver’s license pictures. That’s not my point. You have a driver’s license, you have credit cards, you have bank cards.” He points to the screens. “You’re in the system. Every man, woman, and child is in here, almost. Only people who don’t use any of those things escape the dragnet. Give me your Social and your birthday.”

  I tell him my Social Security number and my birthday by month, day, year. He punches the numbers into his computer, starts a series of commands. Almost instantaneously, my Texas driver’s license picture pops up on one of the screens.

  “You live in Texas?”

  “I did,” I say, dismayed at what I’m seeing. “I haven’t switched back to Maryland yet.”

  “Well, if I wanted to, I could find out a lot of things about you, from knowing no more than your birthday and Social Security number, which anyone can find out. It’s how insurance companies and credit companies and banks keep track of you, Fritz Patrick Tullis.” He’s reading from the license data on the screen. “And government agencies that don’t have your best interests at heart.”

  “This sucks.” Goddamn, there really is no privacy left, if this is true, which it obviously is. What do they know about me, how detailed is their knowledge? Do they know I hang out with exotic birds? Are there satellites flying over my head recording my every move? Was I photographed photographing the murder? The prospect is chilling.

  “Yeah,” Jack says with a shrug, “but it’s the way of the world. Too late to change things now. We’re living in the information age, don’t you know? And you and me and everyone is a piece of that information, a couple of bytes in the massive vortex. Don’t fight it—you’ll be pissing against the wind. If you want to escape, give up all your credit cards, driver’s license, move into a wilderness area. Better yet, leave the country entirely, move into the deepest recesses of the Amazon, or some remote former Soviet republic, where they still farm with oxen and stink their breath up with garlic to ward off the evil eye. Maybe you’ll be safe in one of those places—for a while. Sooner or later, they’ll track you down, if you leave any kind of paper trail.”

  “Thanks for the warning,” I tell him sourly.

  “You want to find this man, don’t you?” Jack says bluntly as he points to the screens, bringing me back to earth. “If so, you have to take the good with the bad and hope that the big boys who have access to all this stuff don’t abuse it.” He shrugs. “There’s so much of this stupid information floating around out there in cyberspace no one knows where most of it is, nor does anyone care, unless you’re deemed dangerous by someone who can access this and use it. If it really worked, half the population would be in jail, not just the druggies and the dumb shits who can’t get out of their own way.”

  He turns back to the computer. “Enough jawboning. I can’t have you here any longer than’s necessary.”

  He plays with the computer some more. More pictures come and go; then about a dozen and a half fill the various screens and remain, frozen in two dimensions. They’re small, no more than an inch square. I look at each of t
hem, straining to see if one of them is the Russian counselor. I can’t tell.

  “Okay.” Jack smiles. “Now we’re starting to make sense of this.” He scrolls a forefinger in front of the images. “These men are the closest matches to your photo. If the man in your picture lives in the metropolitan D.C. area, he’s one of them. Now . . .” He brings my scanned pictures up on the one screen he’s left blank. “Let’s start painting.”

  He starts playing with the man in the picture whose face is in backlit shadow. Quickly, a portion of the darkness goes and the face becomes lighter, so that some features begin to show. He twiddles the computer some more, and more features become apparent—not enough to make an identification, but clearer than it was when we started looking at it.

  “We’re getting there,” he whispers intensely. “Come on, baby.”

  Slowly, bit by bit, a face begins to emerge. I’m staring at it intently; is it who I think it is? I can’t tell—it still isn’t clear enough.

  “Fuckin’ backlight,” Jack mutters under his breath. “What kind of photographer are you who takes pictures of faces in this kind of crappy light?”

  “They weren’t posing for me,” I remind him.

  “I know,” he says with aggravation. “If they were, we wouldn’t be here, would we?”

  He works at it some more. “I don’t know,” he says, beginning to sound pessimistic. “I don’t know if we’re going to have enough to—”

  Suddenly, one of the screens that’s filled with the miniature frames of the possible matches flashes a silent explosion—and there, full-screen, is one face.

  Jack sits back, a big smile on his face. “Ah! The machine comes through.” He pats the computer like it’s a pet. “Good girl,” he praises it. “Good doggie.”

  I’m staring at the face on the computer screen—and begin to shake. I hope Jack doesn’t notice. I don’t think he does—he’s too happy with his success to pick up on my reaction.

  “Well?” he asks me. “Is this who you’re looking for?”

  “I don’t know who I’m looking for,” I lie. “I needed to know—” I stop.

  “What?” he asks impatiently.

  “You don’t need to know,” I tell him abruptly.

  “Well . . . okay.” He sounds miffed.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Like that, huh?”

  I don’t answer. Instead, I tell him, “Can you print this up for me? Both images, side by side?”

  “Sure.”

  He highlights the images, hits Print. The printer spews out the pictures. I stuff them into a manila envelope.

  “You can shut it down now,” I tell Jack. “And if there’s any of this stored in memory, get rid of it.”

  He hits some keys. The screens go blank. “I already have.”

  • • •

  I sit in my car in the empty parking lot, the pictures from the computer in one hand, the newspaper clipping in the other.

  There’s no doubt—the man I saw murdered on a remote farm in a small southern Maryland county is the same man who turned up a week later, still murdered, in a Baltimore slum, a hundred miles away.

  The invitation comes via e-mail: “My new sailboat is being delivered this weekend. I’m taking her out on her maiden voyage Sunday, around nine in the morning. I’d be delighted if you would join me. Sincerely, James Roach.”

  My instincts tell me to stay away from Roach. On the other hand, I love to sail, and I haven’t been out on a big boat in years.

  In the end, my appetite for adventure gets the better of my caution. I respond to Roach’s e-mail, thanking him for the invite, that I’ll be there. I’ll have to be on guard that he doesn’t find out I was lying like a rug when I told him that I don’t venture down there, which of course I do, almost every day, when I go to see my birds. But I can handle that; if I can keep my mouth shut about a murder that happened on his property, I can finesse my way through a day’s sailing.

  • • •

  Bright and early Sunday morning I’m driving to Roach’s farm. It’s a roundabout route, doubling back by my mother’s place, up to the two-lane, drive a mile south, then turn onto Roach’s private road. I could get there in half the time in my little putt-putt, but I don’t want him to know I navigate those waters.

  I pull up to his dock at the appointed hour and spot the new boat sitting in the water, pretty as a Winslow Homer painting. The name Helena is freshly stenciled on the side. If this is Roach’s idea of “nothing special,” I’d like to know what he considers “special.” This is a beautiful vessel. I eyeball it to be at least seventy feet in length.

  “Glad you could make it!” Roach, standing on the teak deck, a glass of champagne in his hand, booms out a welcome to me. He’s dressed in old boat shoes, well-worn baggy shorts, a New York Yacht Club polo shirt frayed at the collar, his head covered by a long-billed cap, the kind you see Hemingway wearing in the old deep-sea fishing photos.

  Standing next to him is a large, white-haired man his age, maybe a few years older. Unlike Roach, this man is showing his age. His florid complexion and big nose crisscrossed with broken veins remind me of Tip O’Neill, the late speaker of the house from Boston. He’s wearing a short-sleeved shirt and khakis, and expensive hand-tooled cowboy boots. I knew people in Texas who wore boots like his. None of them had ever punched a cow—the closest encounter any of them had ever had with one was when they cut into a steak.

  “Come aboard!” Roach calls out jovially as I approach.

  I jump onto the deck.

  “Fritz, I’d like you to meet an old friend of mine, Ed Flaherty. He’s going to join us today.”

  Flaherty and I shake hands. His grip is solid—he could have been a football player forty years ago.

  Flaherty smiles broadly. “Perfect weather for sailing, isn’t it?”

  He definitely isn’t from Texas—his accent sounds pure Chicago.

  “The gods are smiling today,” I agree.

  “Ed and I go back a long way,” Roach says. “We fought the good fights shoulder to shoulder, in the trenches.”

  “And survived, although it beats the shit out of me how,” Flaherty laughs.

  Roach nudges his friend in the ribs. “You’ll have to change out of those fancy boots before we take off,” he joshes the other. “I don’t want my brand-new deck scuffed up.”

  “Got a brand-new pair of Sebagos,” Flaherty says. “I’ll put ’em on now.”

  A college-aged kid comes up from below. “All secure below,” he announces, giving me a sideways glance.

  “Joe Pitts,” Roach says to the kid, “say hello to my guest and neighbor, Fritz Tullis.” To me, explaining: “Joe’s going to be taking care of the boat.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I say.

  The kid grins. “Same here.”

  He disappears back down the hatch, leaving the three of us on deck. There’s an ice bucket at Roach’s elbow. He hands me a glass, fills it with bubbly. Veuve Clicquot, Grande Dame. This guy goes first-class all the way.

  “Cheers.” He raises his glass.

  “To your new boat,” I reply. “Helena. Is there any personal significance to that?” I don’t know if he’s married—no women here today, and he bachelored it at my mother’s.

  He shakes his head no. “I named her after the woman whose face launched a thousand ships.” He smiles. “A thousand and one, now.”

  “And whose abduction caused one of the bloodiest wars.” I’m a history professor, I can’t help putting in my professional two cents’ worth.

  He laughs. “I prefer the reference of tragic beauty to that of bloodshed.”

  We sip champagne. It’s exceptional. “Let me show you around,” Roach offers.

  He proudly points out various features as we walk the length of the deck. Twin head stays with Reckmann hydraulic furlers, Lewmar electric winches all over the place, North sails, top-of-the-line Brooks and Gatehouse nav instruments, Furuno radar, a Zodiac Sport Boat hanging on th
e stern. This boat was built without compromise. Down below, three computers and every possible piece of nav equipment is here: a Furuno 1850 chart plotter with differential GPS, Robertson autopilot, satellite phone, single sideband high-seas radio. The engine’s a Caterpillar diesel.

  The galley is equally impressive. Granite countertops, an Alpes Inox vent and stove, Smeg oven, a microwave, a dishwasher, washing machine. This yacht has all the bells and whistles, bar none.

  Joe Pitts is putting provisions away in the refrigerator. He grins as I gawk.

  The master stateroom should be featured in Architectural Digest. A queen-sized bed, custom cabinets—all the wood on the boat is custom, teak, mahogany, cedar. The master bath has a tub with Jacuzzi jets, stainless steel fixtures, the full works.

  Roach waits while I take all this opulence in, then silently opens a wooden door in a corner of the bathroom. I look inside. It’s a sauna, big enough for six.

  This is a level of sailing beyond any I’ve ever known. “A hell of a boat,” I tell him. What else can you say?

  I follow him back up on deck. Flaherty’s changed out of his cowboy boots into brand-new boat shoes. Looking around, I calculate in my head. This yacht had to have cost three million dollars; maybe more. Add a jet airplane. A private airstrip. As my father used to say in his wry, understated way, a million here, a million there, pretty soon it adds up to real money.

  Roach pours more champagne for the three of us. As he’s about to drink he looks off abruptly, over my shoulder.

  Another man is approaching us. He moves lightly; I didn’t hear him coming, which unnerves me—I don’t like people sneaking up on me. This guy’s in his mid-to late forties, bristly blond flattop, muscles cut sleek. He’s wearing a WWF T-shirt, tight bike shorts to mid-thigh, new boat shoes, is carrying a small day pack. Mirror shades from the old Paul Newman prison movie Cool Hand Luke. There’s an ominous aura about him.

  Roach introduces us. “Fritz Tullis, Ed Flaherty, say hello to Wade Wallace. Wade’s the new head of my security detail,” he informs me. “A recent addition,” he adds, “a necessary but intrusive drawback of the job. The sensitivity of my recent activities has forced me to do this. It’s not all wine and roses, being in a position of prominence.”