“We weren’t sloppy.”
“So he was just lucky?”
“No. Worse than that. He knew what he was doing.”
“You saying he’s somebody with a history?”
“Yeah.”
“Local, state, or federal history?”
“He took out a team member, neat as you please.”
“So he’s had a few lessons beyond the local level.”
Roy turned right off Sunset Boulevard onto a less traveled street, where mansions were hidden behind walls, high hedges, and wind-tossed trees. “If we’re able to chase him down, what’s our priority with him?”
Summerton considered for a moment before he spoke. “Find out who he is, who he’s working for.”
“Then detain him?”
“No. Too much is at stake. Make him disappear.”
The serpentine streets wound through the wooded hills, among secluded estates, overhung by dripping branches, through blind turn after blind turn.
Roy said, “Does this change our priority with the woman?”
“No. Whack her on sight. Anything else happening at your end?”
Roy thought of Mr. and Mrs. Bettonfield, but he didn’t mention them. The extreme kindness he had extended to them had nothing to do with his job, and Summerton would not understand.
Instead, Roy said, “She left something for us.”
Summerton said nothing, perhaps because he intuited what the woman had left.
Roy said, “A photo of a cockroach, nailed to the wall.”
“Whack her hard,” Summerton said, and he hung up.
As Roy followed a long curve under drooping magnolia boughs, past a wrought-iron fence beyond which a replica of Tara stood spotlighted in the rain-swept darkness, he said, “Cease scrambling.”
The computer beeped to indicate compliance.
“Please connect,” he said, and recited the telephone number that would bring him into Mama’s arms.
The video display flickered. When Roy glanced at the screen, he saw the opening question: WHO GOES THERE?
Though the phone would react to vocal commands, Mama would not; therefore, Roy pulled off the narrow road and stopped in a driveway, before a pair of nine-foot-high wrought-iron gates, to type in his responses to the security interrogation. After the transmission of his thumbprint, he was granted access to Mama in Virginia.
From her basic menu, he chose FIELD OFFICES. From that submenu, he chose LOS ANGELES, and he was thereby connected to the largest of Mama’s babies on the West Coast.
He went through a few menus in the Los Angeles computer until he arrived at the files of the photo-analysis department. The file that interested him was currently in play, as he knew it would be, and he tapped in to observe.
The screen of his portable computer went to black and white, and then it filled with a photograph of a man’s head from the neck up. His face was half turned away from the camera, dappled with shadows, blurred by a curtain of rain.
Roy was disappointed. He had hoped for a clearer picture.
This was dismayingly like an impressionist painting: in general, recognizable; in specific, mysterious.
Earlier in the evening, in Santa Monica, the surveillance team had taken photographs of the stranger who had gone into the bungalow minutes prior to the SWAT team assault. The night, the heavy rain, and the overgrown trees that prevented the streetlamps from casting much light on the sidewalk — all conspired to make it difficult to get a clear look at the man. Furthermore, they had not been expecting him, had thought that he was only an ordinary pedestrian who would pass by, and had been unpleasantly surprised when he’d turned in at the woman’s house. Consequently, they had gotten precious few shots, none of quality, and none that revealed the full face of the mystery man, though the camera had been equipped with a telephoto lens.
The best of the photographs already had been scanned into the local-office computer, where it was being processed by an enhancement program. The computer would attempt to identify rain distortion and eliminate it. Then it would gradually lighten all areas of the shot uniformly, until it was able to identify biological structures in the deepest shadows that fell across the face; employing its extensive knowledge of human skull formation — with an enormous catalogue of the variations that occurred between the sexes, among the races, and among age groups — the computer would interpret the structures it glimpsed and develop them on a best-guess basis.
The process was laborious even at the lightning speed with which the program operated. Any photograph could ultimately be broken down into tiny dots of light and shadow called pixels: puzzle pieces that were identically shaped but varied subtly in texture and shading. Every one of the hundreds of thousands of pixels in this photograph had to be analyzed, to decipher not merely what it represented but what its undistorted relationship was to each of the many pixels surrounding it, which meant that the computer had to make hundreds of millions of comparisons and decisions in order to clarify the image.
Even then, there was no guarantee that the face finally rising from the murk would be an entirely accurate depiction of the man who had been photographed. Any analysis of this kind was as much an art — or guesswork — as it was a reliable technological process. Roy had seen instances in which a computer-enhanced portrait was as off the mark as any amateur artist’s paint-by-the-numbers canvas of the Arc de Triomphe or of Manhattan at twilight. However, the face that they eventually got from the computer most likely would be so close to the man’s true appearance as to be an exact likeness.
Now, as the computer made decisions and adjusted thousands of pixels, the image on the video display rippled from left to right. Still disappointing. Although changes had occurred, their effect was imperceptible. Roy was unable to see how the man’s face was any different from what it had been before the adjustment.
For the next several hours, the image on the screen would ripple every six to ten seconds. The cumulative effect could be appreciated only by checking it at widely spaced intervals.
Roy backed out of the driveway, leaving the computer plugged in and the VDT angled toward him.
For a while he chased his headlights up and down hills, around blind turns, searching for a way out of the folded darkness, where the tree-filtered lights of cloistered mansions hinted at mysterious lives of wealth and power beyond his understanding.
From time to time, he glanced at the computer screen. The rippling face. Half averted. Shadowy and strange.
When at last he found Sunset Boulevard again and then the lower streets of Westwood, not far from his hotel, he was relieved to be back among people who were more like himself than those who lived in the monied hills. In the lower lands, the citizens knew suffering and uncertainty; they were people whose lives he could affect for the better, people to whom he could bring a measure of justice and mercy — one way or another.
The face on the computer screen was still that of a phantom, amorphous and possibly malignant. The face of chaos.
The stranger was a man who, like the fugitive woman, stood in the way of order, stability, and justice. He might be evil or merely troubled and confused. In the end, it didn’t matter which.
“I’ll give you peace,” Roy Miro promised, glancing at the slowly mutating face on the video display terminal. “I’ll find you and give you peace.”
FIVE
While hooves of rain beat across the roof, while the troll-deep voice of the wind grumbled at the windows, and while the dog lay curled and dozing on the adjacent chair, Spencer used his computer expertise to try to build a file on Valerie Keene.
According to the records of the Department of Motor Vehicles, the driver’s license for which she’d applied had been her first, not a renewal, and to get it, she had supplied a Social Security card as proof of identity. The DMV had verified that her name and number were indeed paired in the Social Security Administration’s files.
