Shelley's Heart

by Charles McCarry

  “Will that make it any easier to find the right person?”

  “It ought to make it more likely. But I think we need help.”

  “Help?” Mallory said. “What kind of help?”

  “I’ll be frank,” Macalaster replied. “Your people are too close to the situation; they feel responsible and hurt. You need someone who can come to it cold and see things for what they are.”

  “Like you?”

  “I’m the worst of the lot because I have a theory I want to prove. The cops are right about that.”

  “So far your theory seems to be holding up.”

  “Luck. If I hadn’t run into Monty Love I would never have picked up on this detail.”

  It was growing late; the weather had changed. Rain sluiced through the floodlights in diagonal sheets and beat against the bulletproof windows at Mallory’s back. He was no longer upset, but he was restive. “So what do you advise?” he asked.

  Macalaster told him about John L. S. McGraw. He was not surprised to learn that Mallory knew all about him already. He said, “I agree that he’d be good, but he works for Lockwood.”

  “Not Lockwood, Olmedo. And he’d be working with me, not for you.”

  “That’s a thin cover story.”

  “Yes, but sometimes it’s worth taking a chance.”

  All this time Mallory had been holding a book in his lap; he seemed to read in the way other Presidents talked on the telephone to an endless queue of half-strangers, as a way of escaping back into humanity. While he considered Macalaster’s idea he drummed his fingers on the binding of the book, a rare sign of nerves in Mallory. At last he said, “Will McGraw do this?”

  “I think he will.”

  “Can he keep it to himself?”

  “You mean can he keep it from Lockwood?”

  “He can tell Lockwood anything he wants. I mean keep it from the media, the bureaucracy.” He paused. “The Patrick Grahams of this world felt Susan deserved to die, you know.”

  Macalaster took a deep breath. “I know,” he said. “But McGraw is just a cop.”

  “All right, talk to him. He can have anything we have.”

  When Mallory called Lucy and Wiggins in the control room and gave them the necessary orders, Lucy turned to Wiggins with devastation in her eyes and said, “Oh, no.”

  11

  Bundled up in the Gore-Tex Eddie Bauer parka he had bought for his trip to Chile, McGraw awaited Macalaster at an indestructible vinyl picnic table on the banks of Bull Run. The day was windy and gray; they were alone except for groups of schoolchildren trudging along the trails of Manassas National Battlefield Park.

  McGraw offered Macalaster take-out coffee in a disposable thermos cup from Dunkin’ Donuts. “Okay, I’m listening,” he said.

  Macalaster related what Monty Love had told him, what he himself thought he remembered, and what the pictures of the assassination showed.

  “You’re sure it was a woman?” McGraw said.

  “Yes. Or at least the computer says so. Does that interest you?”

  “Girl terrorists are one of my main things,” McGraw said. “I think maybe I was shot by one once.”

  Macalaster said, “Then you’ll have a look at the pictures?”

  “They’re Mallory’s pictures, I’m working for Lockwood right now. Why me?”

  “Because you’ll be looking at the images with a detached mind. You might see something the rest of us missed.”

  McGraw snorted. “Don’t be too sure about the detached mind,” he said. “But now I’m curious, so okay.” He sat in silence for a moment, then held out his hand for Macalaster’s empty coffee cup. Macalaster handed it over, then handed him a leaf from his notebook with Lucy and Wiggins’s secure phone number written on it. “You’re sure this will be all right with Olmedo?” he asked.

  “That’s not your problem,” McGraw said. “Believe me, he’ll know what I know.”

  It was raining harder. McGraw was already wearing an Irish tweed cap that matched his parka, but he covered his head with the hood and pulled the drawstring tight. “You should wear a hat,” he said. “On a cold day you can lose fifty percent of your body heat through your scalp.”

  12

  When McGraw got Lucy on the telephone just after sunrise the next morning she said, “We’ve been expecting your call. Where are you?”

  “In the White House.”

  “Good. It’s oh-six-eighteen. Go for a walk. At oh-six-twenty-five, make a call to the weather number. Keep listening to the forecast and keep walking.”

  At 6:31, having homed in on the unique transmission code of McGraw’s pocket telephone with the special equipment in the charcoal-gray van they were using that day, Lucy and Wiggins glided up to the curb beside him. He was walking along a quiet stretch of New York Avenue a few blocks west of the White House. The back door slid open. The person inside fit Lucy’s description as furnished by Macalaster: Italian girl, strong teeth, big old-country nose, abundant dark hair tied up behind, wonderful body, no perfume, wedding ring, and nestled beneath her designer jacket, an airweight 6mm all-vinyl machine pistol in a quick-draw shoulder holster. As McGraw got in, Lucy leaned forward, shook hands firmly, and looked him straight in the eye while he carried out his visual inspection. The combination of womanliness and desexed professional manner tickled him. His eyes crinkled. She said, “You are amused, Mr. McGraw.”

  He said, “Just thinking how nicely all this lives up to expectations.”

  The van was equipped with one-way windows and insulated with some sort of soundproofing material that seemed to capture every syllable in midair, cleanse it of static and ambiguity, and deposit it gently onto the eardrum. The interior was a sort of miniaturized conference room with aromatic leather swivel chairs, a table, telephones, and other outer-edge-of-the-envelope equipment. A heat-sensitive keyboard computer was set flush into the tabletop, like a chessboard in a games table.

  “We thought it would be more convenient to work in the car,” Lucy said, sliding the door shut. Locks clicked. “And more secure, of course.”

  “Fine by me,” McGraw said.

  Wiggins, up front, drove across the Memorial Bridge and then followed labyrinthine roads through Arlington National Cemetery before passing through the gates of Fort Myer and parking in the nearly empty lot of the post chapel. Then he moved into the front passenger seat, ran it back on its track with a whine of servomotor, and swiveled to face McGraw. He too shook hands. No names were exchanged. The two of them called him Mr. McGraw, very respectfully, as though they were even younger than they looked, and he honored their professional discretion by calling them nothing at all.

  Lucy handed him a pair of opaque blinders that resembled a snorkeling mask. She said. “It will look to you like the images are suspended in air, about six feet in front of your eyes. Put them on.” He did so, adjusted the focus, and saw a three-dimensional, natural-color, life-size image of a football player, the great Jim “Freeze-Frame” Cerruti of the Steelers, making an acrobatic catch at the goal line. McGraw could read the trademark on the pigskin and count the individual whiskers on Cerruti’s unshaven chin.

  “That was a test shot, okay?” Lucy said.

  “As long as they weren’t playing the Gi’nts it was,” McGraw replied. “Is this what they call virtual reality?”

  “The media used to call it that,” Lucy said. She manipulated the mouse, turning the image upside down, bringing it closer, then farther away, zooming in on various body parts, and finally walking around it by instructing the software to deduce and paint the figure from all angles of sight on the basis of the front view. “All right, here we go,” she said. “If you want to see anything twice, or from a different angle, or enhanced in some fashion, say so.”

  She ran the footage of the assassination. The images were much more disturbing in this form than they had been yesterday on the screen. Lucy could not bear to look at them, and after a moment she closed her eyes inside the blinders. She had spent a te
rrible night filled with specters, trying to think instead of feel. The discovery that the assassin was female had set her off on a chain of suspicion. Every link had something to do with Zarah. Lucy had never trusted her. Wiggins refused to go along with her suspicions; Mallory had put Zarah beyond suspicion, and as far as Wiggins was concerned, that was that. “You have no rational basis for feeling the way you do,” he told her over and over.

  But that was precisely the problem: rationality would not do the job. Zarah was a blank file. Backgrounding her was like checking out an invader from space: you had no idea where to begin. Was she what she seemed to be, or was there a cunning extraterrestrial reptile hidden beneath that glowing skin, that golden hair? Did an alien brain brood behind those preternaturally intelligent eyes? Did this intruder speak so many human languages because no human being could possibly understand her own strange vernacular? Did she know so many of the arcane facts in which Mallory delighted because she had been prepared for a secret mission by some agency that had somehow mapped the contents of his memory?

  Lucy had not felt such hostility and suspicion toward another member of her gender since junior high school. Before such terminology was banished from American English, her emotions would have been described as woman’s intuition or girlish jealousy. Though he was not so foolhardy as to say so, this was what Wiggins thought they were. Lucy realized this and regarded his refusal to treat Zarah as a suspect as the best reason to respect her own intuition. She had made up her mind in the night to access all the many stored images of Zarah and subject them to the same analysis as the images of the assassin. If she found what she thought she might find, she might even go a little further. She’d have to break rules and do it alone or trick Wiggins into it; he’d never go along willingly.

  Lucy’s eyes were still shut. She realized the projection session was over when McGraw said, “Amazing. Is there any way you can get the computer to make a stab, like an IndentiKit picture, at how this female looks without the gas mask?”

  Lucy opened her eyes and saw the final image, the birdcage representation of the killer, hanging in space. “No, what you see is as far as the software can take us,” she said. “There’s not enough data for a facial reconstruction. Would you like to see the footage again, or any part of it?”

  “Maybe later, parts of it,” McGraw said. “Have you got any suspects?”

  Lucy realized that this gave her the opening she had been looking for: she had found a way to break Zarah down into her component parts and discover what made her tick. They still had their blinders on, so she was able to say what she said next without meeting Wiggins’s eyes or revealing what was in her own. She said, “Not exactly. But I’d like you to help me look at some footage of another woman, as a controlled comparison, and to show you what this system can do. We have some new software from Universal Energy that classifies behavior by breaking down body language and vocal factors and analyzing them against a pattern-weighted experiential-derived data base.”

  “No fooling?” McGraw said. “You mean like the twitchy hijacker tics they used to look for in airports?”

  “That’s the origin of the system, but this is a lot more sophisticated.”

  “What does it tell you?”

  Lucy organized her reply. McGraw observed that she was tense, impatient, distraught, and that her eyes were swollen from a lot of recent crying. This kid must be getting her period, he thought. Wiggins intervened. “It gives you a numerical score of how honest a person is, based on the spontaneity of gesture and speech, and so on.”

  “Just like Grandma used to do,” McGraw said. “Let’s have a look.”

  Because of the Sturdi situation, which had been so time-consuming, Lucy had never before had the leisure to capture the many stored images of Zarah into a single file for analysis. She did this now, using only images and voice samples collected while Zarah was interacting with Mallory. At the speed at which this system handled data, it did not take long for the result to pop up. Zarah’s score was in the ninetieth percentile. This meant that she ranked in the top ten percent of all subjects ever tested for the unconscious signs of honest, spontaneous, unfeigned behavior.

  The number amazed Lucy. She had never before seen such a high score, and she fought against the impulse to regard it as another reason to be suspicious of Zarah: it was hardly human. Had she, Lucy, made some sort of input error? She ran the data again in a slightly different sequence and came up with the same result within three decimal places—in Zarah’s favor.

  After the appearance of Sturdi, and especially after Zarah began to take those interminable walks around the city, the surveillance had moved outdoors. The product of these operations was much less fragmentary; the cameras and microphones had been running all the time. As a control factor, Lucy searched the files for pictures and voiceprints of Zarah interacting with others: the agents who had approached her on the street, casual contacts with strangers while on her rambles through the city, and finally the telling encounter with Sturdi. But in no case did Zarah’s integrity index ever fall below the ninetieth percentile; in the encounter with Sturdi, when she was angry, it registered in the ninety-ninth.

  McGraw’s voice said, “What’s the passing mark?”

  “The sixtieth percentile is considered average,” Lucy replied.

  “Looks like this chick made the honor roll,” McGraw said. Lucy made no reply. He said, “Do me a favor, will you? Test the other female.”

  “The other one?” Lucy said.

  “The stalker,” McGraw explained.

  “Good idea,” Wiggins said. “Maybe the system is susceptible to gorgeous blondes.”

  “That’s entirely possible if the program was written by a certain type of man,” Lucy said tartly.

  She ran the Sturdi tapes again from start to finish, forward, backward, and inside out. As images and fragments of speech flashed in random sequence, she thought she saw something. It was subtle, way out on the far edge of perception. She wasn’t quite sure what it was.

  Apparently McGraw saw something too. He asked to view certain frames again, some of them two or three times and from a number of different perspectives. Finally he said, “Before you score this dame, run the parts we looked at twice one more time in slo-mo, will you?”

  Lucy projected the footage again, this time concentrating closely on Zarah instead of Sturdi. She did not see—or, more accurately, feel—whatever it was she thought she had perceived the last time. This was disappointing but not conclusive. Except that they never got tired or bored or cranky, computers were a lot like people because they were programmed by people, and sometimes they missed or misunderstood the obvious, just as human witnesses did.

  “Let’s see the scores,” Wiggins said.

  They popped up. Lucy was stunned. Sturdi’s numbers were all in the fortieth percentile, and even lower than that when she was eyeball-to-eyeball with Zarah.

  “Maybe I see something,” McGraw said. “Way back, there’s one where she’s kneeling beside her bike.” Lucy brought the image up: Sturdi outside the Kennedy Center wearing her yellow goggles and biking outfit, looking upward at the car as it rolled past.

  “There’s another one, a shot of her eyes when she’s talking to the blonde. Can you take off the goggles?” McGraw asked.

  “That was the only day she didn’t wear them,” Lucy said.

  “Nice wig, too,” McGraw said.

  Lucy combined the two images and the goggles vanished as pixels were rearranged and Sturdi’s large haunted eyes appeared in her head.

  “Now make her bald,” McGraw said.

  “Bald?”

  “Can you do it?”

  An instant later an egg-bald Sturdi knelt before them. “Now move her down so we’re standing about ten feet above her,” McGraw said. Lucy hesitated, not quite understanding what he wanted. “Like she was in an elevator shaft,” he said. “On top of a jammed car.”

  The computer generated an image of an elevator shaft from the data
stored in its nearly infinite memory. The result was extremely naturalistic; McGraw could almost smell the grease on the cables and feel the chill seeping from the concrete walls of the shaft. In a moment, in weak light that filtered through the open elevator door in which McGraw and Lucy and Wiggins “stood,” he knew that he would shortly see muzzle flashes, sparklers in the void, stars, blackness, just as he had done the time the bald unisex terrorist with the big wild eyes had shot him.

  McGraw said, “Can you save that last part?”

  “Sure,” Lucy said. “Do you see something?”

  “Maybe. She reminds me of a suspect we never caught up with.”

  “Enough for positive I.D.?”

  “No. I’ve got a personal stake, so I could be seeing things.”

  Outside the van the parking lot had filled up with the cars of a funeral procession. An honor guard of soldiers in dress blues and white gloves carried a flag-draped coffin into the chapel.

  McGraw’s phone rang. He took it out of his pocket, listened and said, “Okay, I’m on my way.” He put the instrument back into his pocket. “Gotta go,” he said. “But I’d like to work with you on this.”

  Wiggins smiled with unfeigned pleasure. “Excellent, Mr. McGraw. When can you start?”

  “Tonight, seven-forty sharp, Fair Oaks Cinemas parking lot. Is that okay? I gotta go out of town for a few hours, but there’s one step further I’d like to take this.”

  “Fine. What can we do to prepare?”

  “Just bring these same pictures and software,” McGraw said. He handed his blinders to Lucy. “Very impressive equipment. Can you guys drop me at the Metro?”

  13

  Attenborough had spent the night at Camp David, and shortly after dawn he joined Lockwood and his lawyers for a stand-up breakfast in front of the fireplace in the presidential lodge. He found the President watching the morning shows on the huge video screen that descended from the ceiling.