comments. “You said you’d taken it further?”
Wyman brushed his hair behind his ears in a feminine gesture that was at odds with the facial hair and bitten nails. His fingers began pecking at keys. “We used a version of the Hough Transform, and the Fourier Transform. Did the Kim girl tell you about them? They detect relationships between pixels.”
“I’m not sure,” said Howard.
Wyman grinned. McDowall returned carrying a plastic cup of coffee. Howard took it. He noticed that it was black but didn’t say anything. McDowall leaned against a bench and watched Wyman stabbing at the keyboard.
The screen went blank and then the picture of the man with the walkie-talkie appeared, but this time it was as clear as if he’d been photographed from six feet away. Howard was stunned. “My God,” he breathed.
“Pretty good, huh?” said Wyman.
“How did you manage that?” whispered Howard, moving closer to the screen. The picture was as sharp as any he’d ever seen on a television. The man had black hair which was receding, and a thick, black moustache. If the FBI had the man on file, there would be no problems in obtaining a match and a positive identification.
“I told you he’d be impressed,” Wyman said to McDowall. He turned to look at the FBI agent. “I’m not surprised that your people didn’t know about this stuff — most of it is classified. We’ve been developing it for the military and it requires huge amounts of computing power. The program effectively analyses every single point on the picture and carries out several complicated calculations for it. We set it up on Friday and had it running over the weekend.”
“Don’t forget to tell him about the spatial-domain program,” said McDowall.
Wyman turned around in his seat, grinning. “You think he’d understand? Jeez, man, I barely understand it.” The two men sniggered like schoolchildren.
“We could explain about the spatial masks we generated from the frequency-domain specifications,” said McDowall. He giggled girlishly.
“Yeah, right,” laughed Wyman. Howard resented being the butt of their humour, but he knew he needed their specialist knowledge. “How many did you do?” asked Howard. He sipped his coffee and then pulled a face when he realised it had sugar in it.
“About a dozen,” said Wyman. “We picked out what we thought you’d want the most — the guys on the ground and the snipers. But if there’s anything else you want you can let us know and we’ll have it within a couple of days.” He pecked at more keys and the picture of the balding man was replaced by the young man with glasses. It was as sharp as the first image.
“Amazing,” said Howard, under his breath. Wyman went through the rest of the pictures he’d worked on: the woman, the snipers, the vehicles, the towers. All of them were perfectly in focus and the detail was phenomenal. He could clearly see a small, crescent-shaped scar on the cheek of one of the snipers. On the original video the sniper had been little more than a blur.
Wyman sat back in his chair, grinning proudly. “You should see some of the stuff we get,” he said. “They make your video look like a Hollywood movie.”
“Who else do you do this for?” Howard asked.
Wyman grinned. “Military, CIA, DEA, you name it, they all want what we’re developing,” he said. “They just don’t know it yet. We can pick a face out of a crowd at several thousand yards. We did some work for the LAPD after the riots. .”
“Yeah, but they wouldn’t let us near the Rodney King video,” interrupted McDowall, sniggering. “I never understood that.”
“Yeah, the video tape doesn’t lie,” sneered Wyman.
Howard frowned. The two computer experts were clearly on a different wavelength, possibly a different planet. “I don’t follow you,” he said.
The two men looked at each other as if deciding whether or not to let him in on a dirty secret. “What do you think, do you think he’d appreciate it?” asked Wyman.
McDowall shrugged. “He’s a Fed. He might tell.”
Wyman grinned. “We could delete the evidence. If a tree falls. .”
The two men laughed again. Eventually Wyman stopped giggling and waved Howard over to another terminal. “We shouldn’t be showing you this, but it might give you an idea of what video and computer imaging is capable of,” he said. “You’ll understand why you can’t believe the evidence of your own eyes any more. And why we think it’s so funny whenever anyone says that video can’t lie. Jesus, they go and watch
“Yeah, what about the Caroline Perot pictures, remember them?” said McDowall. “Ross Perot pulled out of the presidential race in July 1992 after he heard that pictures of his daughter were being circulated. We were given them to analyse. They were fakes, but good. Really good work.” He grinned at Wyman. “So good that we had a pretty good idea where they came from.”
Wyman nodded. “Didn’t matter whether they were fake or not. Perot knew that the great unwashed just believe what they see, especially when it’s printed in the supermarket tabloids.” He pressed a few keys and a picture flickered onto the screen. There were two men on the screen, one in a dark blue suit, the other in a military uniform. The two men embraced and shook hands. It was George Bush and Saddam Hussein. Howard’s jaw dropped and he looked at Wyman.
“It gets better,” said Wyman.
Howard looked back to the screen. A woman in a dark blue shirt and jacket walked into the room and Howard immediately recognised Margaret Thatcher, the former British Prime Minister. She kissed the Iraqi dictator on the cheek, then all three stood facing the camera, smiling and nodding.
“It never happened,” said McDowall, walking up behind Howard and putting a hand on his shoulder. “But it sure looks like it did, doesn’t it?”
Howard shook his head thoughtfully. “That’s dangerous,” he said.
“In the wrong hands,” agreed Wyman.
“In any hands,” said Howard.
“It gets better,” said McDowall, nodding at the screen.
The scene changed from an office to a bedroom, and the three world figures were naked on a king-size bed. Howard grimaced and leaned over to switch off the visual display unit.
“So, Special Agent Howard, I guess you want prints of them all,” said Wyman. “The snipers, I mean. Unless you want a few prints of our little threesome. I could put you in there with them if you want.”
“The snipers and the people on the ground will do just fine,” said Howard.
“I can give you close-ups of the faces, if you want.”
“Sounds good,” said Howard. “I’d like duplicates, too.”
McDowall walked over to a large printer and switched it on while Wyman pounded on the keyboard. A few seconds later the printer made a humming noise as it processed the first print. Wyman crushed his empty beer can and threw it into the wastepaper bin. “So, what sort of music does an FBI Special Agent listen to?” he asked.
Mary Hennessy took a cab from Baltimore-Washington International Airport to the city. It was a hot day but the driver, a big black man wearing mirrored sunglasses, hadn’t turned the air-conditioning on. Instead he’d opened all the windows and the draught blew Mary’s blonde locks backwards and forwards across her face. It was a pleasant feeling and she closed her eyes and moved her head from side to side, letting the breeze play across her face.
“You Australian?” the driver asked over his shoulder.
“British,” she replied. She hated having to hide her Irish origins but knew it was necessary.
“Yeah? I can never tell the difference,” said the driver laconically, his elbow resting on the open window. There were three lanes of highway heading north to the city and all the traffic was sticking religiously to the 55 mph speed limit. There was none of the lane switching and aggression she associated with driving on European roads, everyone seemed quite content to cruise along in their own lane. “First time in Baltimore?” the driver asked. He didn’t pronounce the ‘t’ in the city’s name. Bawlmore.
“That’s right,” said Mary. She looked out of the window at the lush, almost tropical, vegetation which lined
