power games, it was a small price to pay for the help the FBI was getting.
Clayton kept him waiting just ten minutes so Howard figured he’d got off lightly. Clayton also opened the office door himself and personally ushered Howard in.
“Sorry, Cole, I was on the phone to Tokyo.”
“Tokyo?” said Howard, puzzled. “I thought you were competing with the Japanese.”
“Product-wise, we are, but all the technology is the same and there are several firms over there who are interested in taking stakes in us. It’s the latest way of doing business with the Japs — they call it co-opetition — a combination of co-operation and competition.”
“Would the Government allow that?”
“What do you mean?” said Clayton, sitting behind his uncluttered desk. A photograph of Lisa beamed from a brass frame, next to a picture of Clayton’s second wife, Jennifer. The two women were surprisingly alike — blonde hair, fair skin, blue eyes — though Jennifer was the younger of the two by more than five years.
“Your defence work? Surely they wouldn’t want overseas investors to be involved.”
Clayton snorted and shook his head. “You think the Government gives a damn? There are no boundaries where business is concerned, Cole. Money is the universal language, the common philosophy. I tell you, the best thing that could happen to this country’s armed forces would be if we had Japanese-built jets flying off Japanese- built aircraft carriers, and we had our soldiers driving Japanese tanks and flying Japanese helicopters.”
“And using Japanese atomic weapons?” asked Howard, his voice loaded with irony.
“You mock, my boy, but it’ll come. I remember when the first Japanese motorcycles arrived in this country, and how we laughed at them. Sewing machines on wheels. You know what car I drive now? A Nissan, and there isn’t an American car can match it.”
Howard knew that Clayton was being economical with the truth — more often than not the industrialist was to be found behind the wheel of a Rolls-Royce.
Clayton opened one of his desk drawers and took out a cardboard folder. “Anyway, at the moment we’re just talking about a share stake. That’s confidential by the way. I’d hate to see you hauled in for insider trading.” He smiled to show Howard that he was joking and passed him the file. “This is what we’ve managed to do with your video.”
“I didn’t expect you to move so quickly,” said Howard, opening the file.
“I had a couple of PhDs who were dying to show me what they can do with the new $10 million computer I bought for them. I think you’ll be impressed.”
The top two photographs were of the cars, and Howard’s heart sank when he saw them because there wasn’t much more detail than in the ones Bonnie Kim had done for him. Clayton walked around behind him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Yeah, those were a disappointment, the angle was just too acute to be able to do anything with the tags. You’ll be more impressed with the faces.”
Howard put the car pictures on the desk. The next photograph was of the man who’d been holding the walkie-talkie. It was a close-up of his face, and it was a big improvement on the pictures Bonnie Kim had produced, though he doubted it was clear enough to make a positive identification.
“Pretty good, huh?” said Clayton.
The picture in Howard’s hands had little of the blurring that had made Bonnie’s prints so difficult to decipher. The man was middle-aged and balding, with a round, plump face and dark sunglasses, though his features were hard to define. “Much better,” admitted Howard. “But still not quite good enough, I’m afraid.” He handed the picture to Clayton. “It’s sharper than our versions, but there isn’t enough detail for us to get a match from file pictures. Is there anything else you can do?”
“Oh sure,” said Clayton confidently. “That’s just for starters. They did what your lab had already done, the median filtering thing, but they coupled that with a technique we use to remove the blur caused by motion. A large part of the blurring was caused by the movement of the camcorder, and isn’t a result of the distances involved. My boys ran the images through a program which compensates for the speed of the plane.”
“Did they try pixel aggregation?” Howard asked, remembering the term Bonnie Kim had used.
Clayton frowned. “I think so,” he said. His fingers began to tap nervously on his blotter and Howard suppressed a smile. “I know they’ve a few more ideas up their sleeves, it’s just that some of the techniques take longer to run. There are some quite complicated transformations involved.”
Howard nodded but he felt that his father-in-law’s explanation was somewhat disjointed and he wondered exactly how much of the technology the older man actually understood. He had the feeling that Clayton was trying to articulate ideas which he didn’t fully comprehend. He studied the face in the photograph. The features were flabby as if the man was used to living well and disdained physical exercise. The skin was olive coloured and Howard wondered if the man might be from the Mediterranean or the Middle East. The dark glasses hid the eyes and the nose was still pretty much a blur. The man could have had a moustache or it could just have been a shadow. Some of the photographs were full-length shots of the man. It was difficult to get an idea of how tall he was, but he was certainly broad in proportion to his height, with wide shoulders and an expansive girth.
The pictures of the younger man were slightly clearer. He had short, reddish hair and was wearing spectacles with small, round lenses. There was a picture of the three figures together and he was the shortest of the three, smaller even than the woman. The images of the woman were the least helpful — she was shading her eyes with her hand in most of the shots and in all but one of the pictures all that was visible was her blonde hair and the bottom of her face. Howard doubted that even the FBI’s photographic experts would be able to produce a match from their files for any of the pictures but he felt that Clayton was hoping for a more positive reaction. And gratitude. “These are good, Ted. Really good. Let’s hope that your men can improve them even more.” He passed quickly through the pictures of the dummies and on to the photographs of the snipers. They all had their faces close to the telescopic sights on their weapons and Howard’s heart fell.
“What’s wrong?” asked Clayton, leaning forward.
“The snipers,” said Howard. “I guess I was expecting more.”
“I know what you mean, but the computer can’t picture what isn’t there; it has to have something to work with. They’re still much better than the originals.”
“Oh sure, they’re a big improvement. But I doubt if we’ll be able to get an identification from them. There just isn’t enough detail.”
Clayton walked around Howard’s chair and stood behind him. Howard flipped through the photographs on his lap. He showed Clayton one of a sniper in the kneeling position. “Can you get a close-up on the rifle this guy’s holding?”
“That’s the sniper who was furthest away from the targets, isn’t it? We’re working on close-ups now. Incidentally, that’s one hell of a shot he’s trying to make. It must be two thousand yards.”
“I know,” said Howard.
“You’re right, though, it’s like no other rifle I’ve ever seen.” Clayton pointed at another photograph, also of a sniper with a rifle. “I think this is a Horstkamp, a German model. I actually have one in my collection. It’s a big gun, you could bring down an elephant with it. But this other one, it’s got a completely different profile. You should get your weapons experts to have a look at it. It might be easier to identify the weapon than the man.”
Howard nodded as he looked at the rifle. His father-in-law was right, the rifle was unusual.
“By the way, don’t forget about Sunday,” said Clayton.
“We’ll be there,” said Howard. “We’re looking forward to it.”
He left the office with his briefcase under his arm and a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach.
Joker flicked through the cable channels of the television in his room as he drank his way through the bottle of Famous Grouse. There seemed to be an unending stream of glitzy game shows, old situation comedies and Seventies police shows, punctuated with advertisements that insulted his intelligence. He waited until eight o’clock before leaving his room. Lights were going on around the city and the brightest of the stars were managing to make their presence felt in the darkening sky. He put up the collar of his pea jacket and hunched his shoulders against a biting wind that had begun to blow from the East River.
The file which the Colonel had given him to read in Hereford had included Pete Many on’s last report. Many on had been hanging around an Irish pub on the Upper East Side called Filbin’s while he was tracking Matthew Bailey, and Joker figured it was as good a place as any to start.
Filbin’s wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Dublin back street. It had small, leaded windows, a dark oak door and inside were wooden beams which ran the length of a narrow, smoke-filled room with a group of Formica
