Unless you had other things on your mind.
Jack checked his watch. Four-twenty, still no Copeland.
He stood there wondering if he should stick around a while longer or call it a day. Maybe check in with Maxine, see how the video was coming. Just as he made up his mind, his cell phone rang.
It was Tony.
Jack clicked it on. “Hey, Tony, I can’t really talk right now. I’m in the middle of—”
“You’ll want to talk about this,” Tony said. “Are you near a TV?”
“No, why?”
“Your friend Bob Copeland is all over the news.”
Jack’s gut tightened. “What do you mean? We’re supposed to be meeting right now. I’m standing here waiting for him.”
“Yeah, well, you’ll be waiting forever,” Tony said. “Copeland’s dead.”
15
It didn’t take long for the smear job to start.
Bob Copeland himself had said it best: “Nobody spews that kind of venom unless they’ve got something to hide.”
His body was found in a landfill in Oakland, when the driver of a garbage truck dumped his load for the afternoon. Copeland came tumbling out like an oversized rag doll, his three-piece suit stained and askew, one of his shoes missing, and enough bruises on his body to suggest he’d been beaten pretty badly.
The part about the shoe hit Jack hard. He couldn’t purge his friend’s slurred voice from his head, talking about the shoe, and he kept second-guessing himself, wondering what he could have done to prevent this from happening.
“Don’t start the blame game,” Tony told him.
But the truth was, if Jack hadn’t contacted Copeland in the first place the man might still be alive.
The initial reports on Copeland’s death were sketchy, but as the night wore on more and more sordid details came to light, and the more Jack heard, the more he wanted to break his TV.
Those initial reports had told of Copeland’s service in Vietnam, his work with the think tank, the Pentagon, and the two Bush administrations, his dedication to cybersecurity, and his regular appointment to the board of trustees for the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center.
In other words, Bob Copeland was a patriot, through and through. An outstanding human being on just about every level.
But once the news had gotten that part out, they were done with it and quickly moved on to the more salacious details, half of which seemed to have been cooked up by a bad mystery writer.
Every time you changed the channel there was a slightly different version of events. But as far as Jack was concerned they’d all gotten it wrong. This was, the news insisted, the story of a man who had had a mental breakdown, distraught over a lawsuit, a dispute with his neighbor about the building of an addition to the house across the street from his home in San Mateo.
According to police, several incendiary devices—smoke bombs, it turned out—had been set off at the construction site shortly after midnight, and they claimed they’d found Copeland’s cell phone buried under some construction debris.
Early the next morning Copeland was caught on video wandering the aisles of an Oakland convenience store, walking with a limp and missing that shoe. The proprietor said he was so drunk and disoriented he’d taken him for a homeless guy and had kicked him out.
There were conflicting reports on whether or not the police believed Copeland was murdered or his death had merely been an accident.
Some department spokesmouth—who seemed to have come from nowhere, and had no forensics credibility whatsoever—publicly made the claim that Copeland’s bruises were consistent with a fall. But the cops soon realized that nobody believed that a guy Copeland’s size—no matter how drunk he might have been—could accidentally fall into a chest-high Dumpster, and his death was officially ruled a homicide.
The question was, who had done it and why? The police weren’t talking, but according to reports, they were working on the theory that Copeland had gotten drunk and run into a gang of muggers or drug addicts who robbed and killed him before hastily disposing of the body.
The story was ludicrous, of course, but all the news channels seemed to be eating it up. The Big Bad City and all that. Stay in your homes and lock your doors. Derelicts and gangbangers want your wallets. Oh, and don’t forget to stock up on breakfast cereal and toilet paper.
Jack had contacted the Oakland Police about the phone call from Copeland this morning, but their interest in his story was minimal-bordering-on-nonexistent and Jack doubted there would ever be a follow-up.
The only ones making any real noise about the whole thing were the talk radio hosts and their listeners. Many of them were convinced that there was a cover-up afoot, and Jack certainly couldn’t disagree. But all they had were theories, from a mob hit to an SEC investigation conspiracy—and Jack knew the truth.
Bob Copeland had been killed by the very same people who had killed Jamal Thomas. The same people who had broken into his boat and put that noose in his shower stall. The very same people who were behind William Clegg and his ridiculous charge against the Constitutional Defense Brigade.
The way Jack saw it, those smoke bombs had been used as a distraction while Copeland was kidnapped from his home. He’d been drugged and interrogated and somehow managed to escape before he was found again and promptly eliminated.
Now three people were dead, and Jack was convinced it was all because of the message Copeland had left for him in Carolyn Cassady’s autobiography.
All because of Operation Roadshow.
* * *
“So here’s what I started with,” Maxine said.
Jack had phoned Tony and asked his friend to meet him at Max’s place. He didn’t tell him why and Tony was hooked. The two were looking over her shoulder as she punched a key on her computer. The large rectangular monitor on the wall came alive with the video that Leon shot with his cell phone. The image seemed less shaky than before, and on the big screen the guy with the sunglasses was easier to distinguish. About forty or so, with a muscular frame and a military bearing. And to Hatfield’s mind, there was something off about the guy. Call him crazy, but the man didn’t strike him as American.
South African, maybe?
“He looks private,” Tony said, confirming Jack’s earlier assessment. “Definitely no amateur.”
They were all sitting in task chairs, surrounding Max’s desk in her video editing booth, which was really nothing more than a spare apartment bedroom jammed full of specialized electronic equipment.
“This is normal HD resolution,” she said. “I applied a stabilizing filter to steady the image and try to cut down on Leon’s crappy camerawork. If he’d been thinking, he would’ve included the Escalade’s license plate and saved us all a lot of trouble.”
“If wishes were horses,” Tony murmured …
Max looked at him as if she had no idea what he was talking about, then pointed to a corner of the screen.
“That right there is our target,” she told them. “Looks like a standard parking sticker, about half the size of a playing card. It’s hard to tell from this distance, but I’d say that that black-and-white blob is probably a logo of some kind. And that’s what I went to work on.”
Jack clucked in disgust. “I still can’t believe how ballsy these guys are. Broad daylight and they don’t give a damn who sees them.”
“I already told you,” Max said. “People in that neighborhood make a habit of not seeing things. And even if someone picked up the telephone, who would listen? A teenage kid died of an overdose. Case closed.”
Jack felt the rage building inside of him again and wanted very badly to put his fist through a piece of Max’s equipment. He knew that the same thing would eventually be said about Bob Copeland’s death. In the end it would be blamed on misadventure in the City by the Bay, a drunk wandering off the beaten path, then everyone would forget about the guy.
Case closed.
“Anyway,” Max said, “ba
ck to our parking sticker.”
She stabbed a key and the video image froze. Shifting her hand to a small dial next to her keyboard, she carefully rotated it and stepped backward through several frames until she found the cleanest—and clearest—of the lot.
“So then I doubled the magnification,” she said, punching another key.
The image doubled in size and Max adjusted the frame, centering the Escalade’s windshield on the screen. Everything was bigger, all right, but it was also a lot fuzzier, and it still wasn’t big enough to make out what was printed on the parking sticker.
“Anyone feel the sudden need for Lasik surgery?” Tony asked.
“Like I said to Jack last night, real life isn’t like the cop shows on TV. We can’t just zoom in on a pin head and read the inscription written across it. There’s a little thing called pixilation that gets in the way. The more we magnify the image, the worse it gets. Especially when it originates on video.”
Jack nodded. “Video shot on a cell phone, no less.”
She punched another key and the image zoomed in even closer, now centering the parking sticker in the middle of the screen. All Jack could see was an unidentifiable black-and-white mass that could have been just about anything.
“So,” he said to her, “is that your not-so-subtle way of telling us this is a bust?”
Max shook her head. “I didn’t call you here to waste your time. We’re fortunate enough to live in a day and age when there are a lot of technical geniuses out there, doing what they can to fix problems like this.”
“Meaning what?” Tony asked.
“Meaning I have software that can help. We’ll never be able to get this sticker to the point it can be read, but we can do a lot better than this.”
Jack huffed impatiently. “How about we get to the bottom line already? Do you have something solid or not?”
Max arched an eyebrow at him. “No need to get snippy, Mr. Hatfield. I know you’re hurting, but believe it or not, I’m trying to help.”
Jack sighed. “Sorry, Max. I just want to know who these assholes are.”
“We all do,” Max said, then punched another key.
The screen went blank for a moment, then the image returned, the black blobs starting to shift a bit and take on shape. They gradually grew sharper, but even if he squinted at it, Jack still felt as if he were looking at a Rorschach ink blot behind a wall of pebbled glass.
Tony said, “Looks to me like your technowizards need another trip to the drawing board.”
“Be patient,” Max told him. “I’m not done yet.”
She hit a few more keys, typed in some numbers, and the image continued to shift, taking on more form and substance. When she was done, they were still blobs, but the blobs were defined enough to make a bit more sense out of them. A few nearly discernible numbers, the letters B and C, and—
“Is that some kind of animal?” Tony asked, pointing to the left side of the screen.
“That was my thought,” Max told him. “And I’m afraid this is about the best we’re gonna get out of this image.”
“So it is a bust,” Jack said. “We’ve got nothing.”
Max sighed. “Is that what I have to look forward to when I grow up? Zero optimism?”
“Honey, I hate to break it to you,” Tony said with a suggestive leer, “but you’re already grown-up.”
Max rolled her eyes. “Oh my God, there are two of you.” She looked at him. “You know, you’re supposed to call a doctor if that thing lasts longer than four hours.”
Tony’s jaw dropped slightly. A man without a comeback. He wasn’t used to Max’s quick wit.
Despite himself, Jack laughed as Max gestured to the screen.
“Here’s the thing,” she said. “That may not look like much to us, but a computer looks at it differently than we do. I’m pretty sure there’s enough here for an image recognition program to find a match.”
“Pretty sure?” Jack said.
“As sure as I can be about this stuff. I took the liberty of sending a copy of this to a friend of mine, an MIT grad who has some state-of-the-art recognition software—stuff he’s developing himself—and he’s promised to e-mail me the minute he finds something.”
“So how does this software work?”
“Without pounding you over the head with a lot of technical details, it interprets the pixels as numerical data, looks for patterns and sequences, then scours the Internet and several image databases, searching for the same or similar data.”
“I think I’ll stick to boat repairs,” Tony said.
“It’s not as complicated as it sounds.”
“When I was your age, young lady, we barely had ATMs. And I still haven’t gotten used to those.”
Jack laughed again, but he knew Tony was only half kidding. It was a miracle the guy had a cell phone, considering his aversion to anything you couldn’t fix with a torque wrench.
Max was about to respond when her computer dinged and a pop-up with a winged envelope appeared on-screen.
“Speak of the devil,” she said, then clicked on the envelope and quickly scanned the e-mail. “Looks like we’re in business, gentlemen. He found a match.”
She clicked again, opening the e-mail attachment, and a new image filled the screen. Jack frowned, thinking there must be some mistake.
“This can’t be right,” he said quietly.
It was a black-and-white rendering of a lion and a unicorn flanking a coat of arms. The lion was wearing a crown.
The image was one that Jack was all too familiar with.
It was the seal of the British embassy.
16
Jack stared at the two images side by side—the blowup and the e-mail attachment—and the only conclusion he could draw from this was that the parking sticker had come from the local British consulate. And that raised more questions than it answered.
“How accurate is your friend’s software?” he asked.
Max gestured toward the screen. “Pretty damn accurate, I’d say.”
Tony nodded. “That’s definitely a match.”
“So whoever drives that Escalade works for the San Francisco BC?”
“Unless it was stolen,” Max said.
Jack shook his head. “I doubt it. And judging by the guy in the sunglasses, we aren’t talking about office drones.” He looked at Tony. “What do you think? Consulate security?”
“Hard to say. Could be full-on Security Services. MI6 or special ops. I trained with some of those guys in the eighties and I can tell you firsthand they mean business.”
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Jack said. “Why would the Brits be involved in this?”
“Maybe these guys are freelancing, borrowed the company car,” Tony suggested.
Jack thought about this, then looked at Max. “How are your friend’s hacking skills?”
“Nonexistent,” she told him. “He’s strictly a software tech.”
“What about that guy you said you dated a few years ago? Made a living hacking college transcripts.”
“Dave Karras? Genius and loser, all rolled into one. Why do you think I dumped him?”
“You still have his number?”
It took Max a moment to realize what Jack was asking of her, and her expression soured. “Uh-uh, no way. Not gonna happen.”
“Come on, Max, I want to see what we can find out about these guys.”
She shook her head. “Forget it, Jack. I’m not contacting that freak.”
“Not even for me?”
Max turned to Tony. “You want to help me out here, stud?”
“Are you kidding?” Tony said. “I’m on his side.”
* * *
From all appearances, Dave Karras was a freak.
He came to the door wearing a ratty bathrobe and boxer shorts, with three days’ worth of stubble on his chin and unruly black hair in serious need of a shampoo and rinse.
The cramped apartment behind him was barely a step above Jua
nita Thomas’s, and Jack thought if he ever saw the guy on the street, he’d be carrying a cardboard sign: WILL HACK FOR FOOD.
Karras was what Max had described as a grad school dalliance, memorable for all the wrong reasons. And Jack had a difficult time picturing the two of them together.
Maybe he’d been a little more presentable back then.
“Where’s Maxie?” Karras asked, looking crestfallen when he didn’t see her standing in the hallway with them.
Max had finally agreed to set up the meet but had declined to be part of it. She’d told Jack she wasn’t interested in taking a trip down memory lane and had wished them luck.
“She sends her regards,” Jack said, then pushed his way into the apartment, Tony at his heels.
“Okay. Fair enough. Whatever.” Karras stepped aside, a small frown on his face. “Make yourself at home.”
The words were laced with mild sarcasm, but even if they’d been genuine Jack couldn’t imagine how anyone would ever manage it. This was not exactly a homey environment. There was little furniture to speak of, and the center of the room was dominated by a large, cluttered computer desk sporting three monitors, one of which was open to a Web site featuring several busty women playing topless beach volleyball.
In their brief phone conversation, Jack had learned that Karras was now making the bulk of his living hacking gambling sites and giving himself modest winnings at Texas Hold’em. Judging by Karras’s environment, Jack felt he should give himself a few more royal flushes. That, Karras explained, would raise automatic red flags. Which might explain why he’d agreed to meet with them.
Jack and Tony surveyed the room for a place to sit, but the old, deflated bean bag chairs didn’t look particularly inviting so they both opted to stand.
After closing the door behind them, Karras got straight to the point. “Max says you’ve got a job offer.”
“That’s right,” Jack said.
“My services start at two grand, cash only, and I don’t do banks, military defense, or intelligence agencies. Too much of a risk. That work for you?”
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