and a Cherokee Laredo, and when Bonnie Kim opened the front door and let him in he could see that the interior was just as all-American. It wasn’t what Howard expected at all. He’d always assumed that Koreans stuck closely to their heritage, but the Kims seemed to want it made clear to everyone that they were Americans through to the core.
Andy Kim had a round, smiling face and a mop of black hair which was continually falling over his eyes. He was as tall as Howard, but much thinner, and his horn-rimmed spectacles gave him a bookish appearance. He shook hands with Howard and asked him if he wanted a beer. Howard said he’d prefer an orange juice and Andy led him through to the living room while Bonnie went to the kitchen. Bonnie had changed from her working clothes into a floral print dress with a white collar and she’d let her hair loose so that it flowed around her shoulders and down her back. She looked impossibly young and he realised that she probably adopted the more severe look in the laboratory in order to be taken more seriously. She’d lost the high heels too and now stood just a little over five feet tall.
Howard sat down on a long sofa and looked around the room. One wall was lined with bookshelves, a mixture of scientific books, romances and thrillers, all of them in English. On a coffee table were copies of
“Do you want to watch the game?” Andy asked.
“I’m not a big football fan,” replied Howard.
“Really? I love it. There’s a lot of mathematics in football, you know?”
Bonnie came into the room carrying a bottle of Budweiser for her husband and a tall glass of orange juice for Howard. “Dinner’s ready,” she said, “come on through.”
Before he’d stepped into the house, Howard had expected that Bonnie would cook Korean food for him and that he’d have to deal with chopsticks but having seen the interior he wasn’t in the least surprised to see that Bonnie had prepared steak, french fries and ears of white corn. After the meal, Bonnie served them coffee and all three of them went into the study, a wood-panelled room with several workbenches which were stacked high with electrical equipment and computers. Andy sipped his coffee as he switched on one of the machines. “I’ve done a little preparatory work already,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“No problem,” said Howard, sitting on a stool and watching as Andy’s fingers played across the keyboard.
“These graphics are really simple, but they’ll give you an idea what I have in mind,” said Andy. Two circles appeared on the screen, green on a black background. Andy pressed another series of keys and the circles were replaced by two figures, one a man with a rifle, another a standing figure. “Okay, suppose we have one sniper, and a target. And suppose the distance between them is five hundred feet, and the angle is ten degrees.” His fingers tapped at the keyboard and the picture became three-dimensional, with a dotted circle above the target. “We know that the sniper must be somewhere along this line,” Andy continued. “Now, if we superimpose the sniper’s possible positions on a city plan. .” Several square and oblong shapes appeared on screen in various colours. “I know, they don’t look like buildings, but you get the drift,” he said.
Howard smiled. “I’m trying,” he said.
Andy flicked his hair from his eyes and pushed his spectacles higher up his nose. “Okay, so now we can see which of the buildings are the right height and position to contain the sniper. And you can tell which floor he must be on to shoot at the required angle. Now, with only one sniper there are several positions which satisfy the position requirements.” He pointed to four positions on the three-dimensional map where buildings coincided with the circle. “But, if we increase the number of snipers, we restrict the number of options.”
Andy bent over the keyboard and began pressing keys quickly. The shapes disappeared from the screen and he added two more snipers, each linked to the target with a dotted line. “With three points to work with, the positions become more fixed, each has a spatial relationship with the others, and with the target. This time we don’t get a circle, we have a tetrahedron. .” A three-dimensional four-sided shape appeared on the screen, like a knifepoint sticking into the ground. “Now it becomes much more difficult to fit this shape into the model of the city.” He called up the coloured blocks again. “See, all three points representing the snipers have to be in the correct position. There is only one solution.” He pointed to the three places where the sniper positions coincided with the buildings.
Howard drank his coffee. “How long did it take you to set this up?” he asked.
Andy beamed. “About three hours, but this model is really simplistic. A true working model will be much more complicated.”
“But possible?”
“Of course.”
“How long would it take?”
Andy shrugged. “The snipers and target model would take a few hours, but getting the measurements and angles is the hard part. I’d have to go out to the desert and I’d need to give the video a thorough analysis.”
“You haven’t seen it yet?”
“Of course not,” said Andy. “Bonnie wouldn’t dream of bringing FBI work home with her. She’d stay in the lab all night, but bring work home? Never.”
“I can arrange for you to see it at the lab,” said Howard.
“Okay, and I’ll have to go out to Arizona. I’ll need the best part of a day there.”
“That’s no problem,” said Howard. “You can come back with me, tomorrow morning. You can watch the video when you get back. And I already have a list of places where the President is going to be. We can use them to see if your system works. Can I ask you something, though? What do you get out of this? I mean, the FBI will cover expenses, and I guess we could come up with some consulting fees, but there’s still a lot of work involved.”
Andy looked at his wife and she nodded encouragement. “What I’d like, if it’s okay with you, is to do a paper on it, if it works. Most of my research is pretty dry stuff, all very academic, and this is a real sexy application of my computer modelling. It’d be a great paper, it’d really get people talking.”
Howard thought about Andy’s proposal. “We’d need approval of the text,” he said eventually.
“Sure. No sweat.”
“And we might want to hold out some of the details, you realise that?”
“It’s the mathematics I’m interested in, mainly.”
“And you’ve got to realise that if this goes wrong, we’ll have to keep the lid on it. You might not get the chance to publish anything.”
“I’ll take the risk.”
Howard nodded. “It’s a deal, then.” Andy grinned and Bonnie leaned over and hugged him.
Joker caught the afternoon train down to Hereford. He’d lost his licence six months earlier after a police car had pulled him over on the M25 with a blood-alcohol level almost twice the legal limit. It was a sunny day, but cold, and he was wearing a Navy pea jacket and black wool trousers. He spent the journey deep in thought, his shoulders hunched and his eyes focused in the middle distance as he stared at the countryside which rushed by the train window.
He’d vowed never to return to the SAS Sterling Lines barracks and hadn’t even replied to the Regiment’s invitation to attend its fiftieth anniversary celebrations in 1991. His time with the SAS had been one of the most challenging, and exciting, periods of his life, but it had also changed him forever. It went above and beyond being a soldier: the SAS had taught him to kill, and part of that training had been a dehumanising programme which left him with a cold, hard place where his conscience used to be. It was only after he’d left the Regiment that he’d realised what he’d lost. What they’d taken away from him.
The daylight was starting to leach from the sky as he walked away from the station and he thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his jacket. He’d taken the day off from the paintball arena, but he hadn’t made up his mind yet whether or not to work with the Colonel. There were things he had to get straight in his head first, and for that he needed someone to talk to. A friend. He kept his head down as he walked, but his feet took him unerringly to a pub he used to frequent, set in the middle of a row of brick cottages with leaded windows and old, warping oak doors. There were two barmaids pulling pints and wiping glasses, one of whom he recognised. Her name was Dolly and she served him with a smile but no hint of recognition, leaving Joker in no doubt as to how much he’d changed over the last few years.
He ordered a Famous Grouse, a double. Two young soldiers stood together at a video game in one corner of the bar, feeding it coins as they drank pints of lager. They had the crew-cuts and thick moustaches that marked
