Killer Instinct

by Patterson, James

  An operative or anyone else doing reconnaissance before taking out a mark wouldn’t bother using Halo. She would assume she didn’t need to.

  “How the hell can anyone go back and identify her without having seen her face?” asked the detective Elizabeth had called on our way to Bergdorf’s. She’d had him on speaker. He was peeved that she’d interrupted his dinner, especially because the file was only supposed to be viewed on the department’s encrypted server.

  “You’re a detective, figure it out,” snapped Elizabeth. She wasn’t digging the guy’s attitude. “In the meantime, just send the damn file to the following address.”

  Doug checked his email again. It hadn’t arrived the first time he looked. Two’s a charm. “There it is,” he said. “Got it.”

  But there was still more to do before using it. After filming Elizabeth in the Louboutins, he also had to film her barefoot to create a baseline. After all, it’s not like our mystery woman would’ve worn her Malefissimas while doing her reconnaissance.

  She did scout the hotel, right? She had to have done a walk-through before the night she returned with Darvish. Otherwise, we were wasting our time.

  A lot of time.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to go home and get some sleep?” asked Doug as he began the task of singling out every woman who could be seen in the surveillance footage from the hotel, over a hundred hours’ worth.

  We were hardly about to bail on him, though.

  “We’ll sleep when you sleep,” I said. It was the least we could do. Or, at least, try to do. By about 3:00 a.m., Elizabeth and I had both dozed off on a couch behind Doug’s console. Had he actually known we were asleep he probably wouldn’t have yelled. But I’d never been so happy in my life to be jolted awake.

  Doug had been at his keyboard for six hours straight and looked every minute of it. His eyes were bloodshot, his hair the full-on Johnny Depp from Edward Scissorhands. Yet all I could really see was his smile. It was the same one he’d flashed when we first met him. Only wider. Much wider.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “Impossible, my ass,” he said.

  CHAPTER 30

  IT TRULY was a thing of beauty.

  In nerd terms, Doug had overlaid an algorithm onto every single frame of the footage, identifying and measuring all movement against an extrapolation of how the mystery woman would walk in every heel size using the baselines of Elizabeth both in the Louboutins and barefoot.

  In non-nerd terms? He crushed it.

  From over a thousand possible women, Doug had narrowed the field down to five.

  The first two were white, albeit with either slightly darker complexions or tans—most likely the spray-booth variety.

  “Is that one Hispanic?” asked Elizabeth, pointing at the third.

  “Could be,” I said. “She could also be a Filipina.”

  “What about the last two?” Elizabeth leaned toward Doug’s main monitor. “Can we zoom in on them?”

  Doug punched some keys. The more he zoomed in, though, the more pixelated the image got.

  “Hard to tell,” I said. “She could be South American, Indian, Middle Eastern, none of the above? Take your pick.”

  “Not that it makes a difference,” said Elizabeth.

  We all could agree on that. Knowing the woman’s ethnicity was a long way from knowing her name and address.

  “What now?” asked Doug.

  “That depends,” I said. “Porterhouse or bone-in rib eye?”

  “Huh?”

  “The steak dinner that I’m going to buy you.”

  “Thanks, except you still don’t know who your woman is.”

  “No, not yet,” I said. “If only she could’ve been your exgirlfriend with the Louboutin obsession, right?”

  He smiled, but it was half-hearted. To say he was now fully vested in the outcome was an understatement. Who could blame him? He’d gotten us so close. Even if he’d narrowed the choice down to one, though, it wasn’t as if we could immediately identify her.

  I was pretty sure that realization was settling over him when he suddenly snapped his fingers. He’d answered his own question.

  “Facial recognition software,” he said. “That’s what’s next.”

  I nodded. “Yep.”

  The next step was seeing how many of these women we could identify through either mug shots or driver’s license photos. Both the NYPD and the FBI had the facial recognition software sophisticated enough to accomplish that.

  But there’s a difference between taking the next step and being a step ahead. Already this was feeling like a chess match.

  What were the chances that our mystery woman was really going to show up in either DMV records or a criminal database?

  Sometimes the best covert agents and operatives are the ones who hide in plain sight. No one knows who they are because no one ever suspects that they’re anything different from what they want you to believe.

  Other times it’s the exact opposite. The best are the ones who are so far off the grid it’s as if they’d never existed.

  All I knew was that we had to allow for both possibilities.

  Or maybe worse. Neither of the two.

  What if this woman was a category all to herself?

  CHAPTER 31

  I HATED doing what I did next. But it had to be done.

  Elizabeth and I cabbed it back to Tracy’s and my apartment. She was due at work in less than four hours and needed every minute of sleep she could get until then. “Is it weird if I wear the Louboutins to bed?” she joked before saying good night.

  As far as she knew I was crawling into bed, too, equally as exhausted. I’d even said something on the way up in the elevator about needing to be quiet so as not to wake up Tracy.

  But I never went into our bedroom.

  After taking a peek at Annabelle—she looked so adorable snuggled up in her crib—I was back in the elevator and heading to the garage down the block for my motorcycle. I reattached my license plate with some tape. I hope it holds because it’s time to break some speed laws …

  I’d already sent the text, asking if he was still awake. It was a formality. Julian and Dracula kept the same hours. I didn’t want to show up unannounced, though. The secret to a lasting friendship? Don’t abuse it.

  “What have we gotten ourselves mixed up in now?” asked Julian in his thoroughly British accent, greeting me at his steel door that was ten feet behind another steel door that was past the security gate to a warehouse for a medical supply company in Fort Lee, New Jersey, that nobody had ever heard of, primarily because it didn’t actually exist.

  “Mixed up? Do I look like I’m mixed up in something?” I asked.

  “It’s past four in the morning,” he said. “You bloody well better be.”

  I followed Julian back to his office, smiling at the familiar sight of his giant desk made from the wing of an old Fokker Eindecker, the first German fighter plane.

  “Is that Vegas?” I asked.

  All the walls still doubled as seamless projection screens carrying a live feed from Julian’s latest hacking conquest. I was looking at a busy casino poker room through its own security cameras.

  “No, it’s Macau,” said Julian. “I’m trying to pick up some tells on a couple of regulars. I’ll be there next month.”

  “I didn’t think you took vacations.”

  “You’re right, I don’t,” he said. “But enough about me, right?”

  That was Julian’s version of Don’t ask, don’t tell. I shouldn’t bother asking why he was going to Macau because there was no way he was telling.

  “Here,” I said instead, handing him my phone. “There are five women in total. You’re looking at the first. Swipe left to see the other four.”

  “You came here in the middle of the night to show me how Tinder works?”

  “Yeah, like I would actually know.”

  Julian looked at all five screenshots from the hotel’s surveillance footage. Onc
e, then twice over. “Okay, now what?”

  “Does one of them look familiar to you?” I asked.

  “Before I answer that, answer this,” he said. “How did you get involved in whatever this is?”

  “You remember Elizabeth, right?”

  Julian rubbed his chin sarcastically. “You mean, the pretty detective and only unauthorized person—other than yourself, of course—to ever set foot in this office? Oh, and the woman who was just all over the news for saving her boss’s life? Nope, can’t say I recall her.”

  “Yeah, well, Elizabeth is why I’m here.”

  “Interestingly enough, though, she’s not. I’m guessing that’s because of the possible identity of one of these five women. You’re thinking she might be CIA. Elizabeth might even be thinking that, too. But if one of them actually is an operative, Elizabeth can’t know her identity.”

  I once saw Julian solve a Rubik’s Cube in less than fifteen seconds. With one hand, no less.

  “Okay,” I said. “Go ahead and say it. If you recognized one of these women as being an operative, you sure as hell couldn’t tell me, right?”

  Julian smiled. “Still, here you are asking …”

  “I don’t have to anymore,” I said. “You don’t recognize any of them.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Your shoulders are relaxed. They tense up whenever you lie.” I motioned to the wall and the casino in Macau. “Like a player who’s bluffing.”

  “Remind me never to play poker with you, Reinhart.” Julian glanced at my phone again. “No, I’ve never seen any of those women before. Then again, it’s not like the Agency puts out a yearbook. And if you’re about to ask me to hack—”

  “Into the Agency’s files? No, of course not,” I said. “But I do need to identify all five of them.”

  “I’m guessing that would require something beyond DMV and criminal databases. In other words, the kind of facial recognition software that doesn’t officially exist.”

  “You tell me,” I said. But he already had.

  As only Julian could.

  CHAPTER 32

  I TURNED to look at one of the walls again. Gone was the poker room in Macau. In its place was me. Everywhere.

  I was so busy watching Julian’s shoulders I hadn’t seen his hands. He’d opened all the photos on my phone, transferring some of them to his computer. His entire office was now covered with different shots of me. Me with Tracy. Me with Annabelle. All three of us together.

  “That’s a nice one, all of you there in Central Park,” said Julian, pointing.

  Yes, it was a nice shot. Some woman had offered to take it after telling us in true Upper West Side fashion that she supported gay adoption 110 percent.

  Only looking at the picture now I was barely recognizable. My face was contorted, and that was just for starters.

  “What’s with all the red explosions?” I asked.

  “I know,” said Julian. “It sort of looks like a pimple commercial.”

  “Yeah, if it was directed by Michael Bay,” I said. Red spots were blowing up all over my face, one after another in rapid-fire succession. “That looks like more than measuring going on.”

  “It’s called animatronic echo mapping. The next step in biometrics. It can predict muscle movement based on fixed intervals.”

  Facial recognition software generally relies on measurements between key features: the eyes, ears, mouth, and nose. Its limitations derive from the inability to account for different facial expressions. But what four-star general smiles when he gets his face scanned before entering the launch room at NORAD? In other words, the limitations haven’t been too limiting. Until now, apparently.

  “The times, they are a-changing, Dylan,” said Julian. “It used to be I could hack into any facial recognition system by simulating a single expression. A freeze-frame. Now it’s all about movement. Instead of passwords, most Swiss banks have recently switched to using sentences, and not just for a voice match. Every move of the mouth for each vowel sound has to match as well.”

  “So this echo mapping is your way around that?”

  “An eleven-foot ladder for a ten-foot wall,” said Julian. “From a series of still photos I can essentially animate you. If I can do that, I can be you.”

  “And empty my Swiss bank account?”

  He grinned. “If need be.”

  “Good to know if I actually had one,” I said. “Even better would be knowing how this is going to help me identify the five women.”

  Julian looked down at my phone. “These are still frames from surveillance footage, right? So, what I need is the footage.”

  I felt like a Boy Scout handing him the flash drive I’d made with all the recordings. I’d come prepared.

  Julian began downloading the files, and I was starting to get the picture, so to speak. Julian was a hacker, not a programmer. This wasn’t his program, but he was well equipped to reverse engineer it and tinker with its application. In doing so, the possibilities were literally endless. Forget about only being able to search mug shots and driver’s license photos. Now you could identify almost anyone using the internet, and not only by their photos. That was the true innovation. All videos were now in play. Snapchat. YouTube. You name it.

  The times, they were indeed a-changing.

  As fast as I’d appeared, I was now gone from Julian’s walls. In my place were the five women, one shot after another, amid the barrage of red bursts. It felt like the room was exploding.

  Then, it all suddenly stopped.

  “Winner, winner, chicken dinner!” said Julian with a clap of his hands.

  I spun around on my heel, my head craning to look at every wall. “Which one?”

  “Right shoulder, three o’clock,” he said.

  I turned. Fittingly, I was staring at a still frame taken from a video. She was standing at a podium. It was as if she were staring right back at me. “How do you know it’s her?” I asked. “How do you know she’s the one?”

  He made a few taps on his keyboard. “Because of this,” he said.

  CHAPTER 33

  SHE DIDN’T have a mug shot, and according to the motor vehicle departments in all fifty states, she didn’t have a driver’s license either. But she did have a job.

  Julian enlarged the description underneath the video he’d found. It was from the website of New York University. Professor of Philosophy Sadira Yavari speaking at the Great Thinkers Summit, it read.

  Before I could even ask for it, Julian pulled up her bio from another page on the website that listed all the NYU faculty.

  Sadira Yavari was an Iranian-born professor who had taught philosophy at the university for seven years. Her focus was epistemology, the study of knowledge and justified belief.

  “It can’t be a coincidence,” said Julian.

  “Which part?” I asked. “That she and Darvish are both Iranian or both professors?”

  “Both,” he said.

  On the one hand, he was right. The fact she was Iranian was proof enough for me that she had been the one with Darvish at the hotel. That she could also claim to be a professor only further explained how she was able to get close enough to him to end up in his room.

  On the other hand, “Do you notice something odd about her bio?” I asked.

  Julian read it again. He nodded. “Seven years.”

  That’s how long Yavari had been teaching at NYU. An operative would never be in one place for that many years. Two was the norm. Three, max. Never as long as seven. My stint at Cambridge lasted thirty months. Coincidentally or not, I got made after twenty-nine.

  “Of course, there is a simple explanation,” I said.

  “A civilian recruit? It rarely happens,” said Julian, “and even less so with a woman.”

  “Rarely, but not never.”

  Sadira Yavari could’ve been recruited by the Agency for a specific assignment because she matched a unique profile that was needed—in this case an Iranian-born professor, and a
very attractive one at that. But recruiting civilians fully entrenched in their civilian lives is a hard sell. Like ice-to-Eskimos hard.

  And Julian was right—it’s even harder with women. As opposed to men, women don’t secretly harbor thoughts of being James Bond.

  “Is it possible? Sure,” said Julian. “Think limited scope. Maybe all she had to do was cozy up to Darvish and set the table for someone else to kill him.”

  “With a heart attack? And a bottle lodged up his—”

  “Yeah, I read the report. You can spare me the details.”

  Regardless, it prompted a question: had the two professors previously known each other? “What do we have for phone records?” I asked.

  I watched Julian work his keyboard, his fingers a blur. He had both cell and landline numbers for Darvish and Yavari within seconds. Just as quick, he cross-checked all their billing statements for the past couple of years.

  “No calls or texts between them,” he said.

  “It makes sense. A one-night stand.”

  Julian eyed Yavari again on the wall. Actually, it was more like ogling. She truly was gorgeous. Long dark-brown hair and high cheekbones. She looked a bit like Amal Clooney. “A one-night stand would’ve certainly worked for me,” he said.

  Julian clicked on the video of her from the NYU website so we could hear her voice. Sure enough, she sounded as good as she looked. Poised. Intelligent. In complete control.

  She was telling a funny anecdote about taking the wrong subway all the way out to Queens when she first moved to Manhattan. The point being, as much as she believed she knew where she was going, the truth was that she had no idea. It was a parable for epistemology.

  “But what if I had guessed right?” she asked the audience. “Does taking the right subway unto itself prove that I knew where I was going?”