some bloody good officers, I can’t deny that, but knowing which fork to use and what month to eat oysters in doesn’t carry any weight when you’re hanging around with the boys. They can spot a Rupert a mile away.”
“He was an experienced officer, Joker. He’d been with D squadron for almost three years.”
“How old was he?”
“Twenty-five.”
Cramer shook his head, almost sadly. “After what happened to Mick Newmarch, I’d have thought the SAS would’ve learnt its lesson.”
“I know how the NCOs feel about officers, but Manyon was different. His parents were Irish, his accent was perfect and he knew Belfast inside out. His cover was faultless, Joker.”
“So how did he get caught?” Cramer poured himself another whisky. He offered a refill to the Colonel but he shook his head. The question was clearly rhetorical and the Colonel didn’t answer.
“How are you these days, Joker?” The Colonel looked Cramer up and down like a surgeon contemplating a forthcoming operation. Cramer wondered if he looked like a man who’d lost his nerve.
“I get by,” Cramer replied. “Why do you ask? Is
“You sound bitter.”
“No, not bitter, Colonel. I can’t spend all my time looking back, there’s no profit in that. I just want to get on with my life.”
The two men sat in silence. Overhead they heard shouts and the sound of running feet. “You should let them try it with live ammo,” said the Colonel with a smile. “See how they like it.”
“Yeah,” agreed Cramer. “They’d piss themselves stupid the first time they used a real weapon.”
The Colonel looked at Cramer with unblinking eyes. “What about you? Could you face action again?”
Cramer started, the question catching him by surprise. He looked at his former boss, wondering if he was joking. “I’m Elvis, Colonel. You know that. Yesterday’s man.”
“You were right when you said the boys could spot undercover officers, Joker. We need someone who fits in, someone who doesn’t look like he’s just come off a parade ground. You know as well as I do that even when our men grow their hair and slouch around in torn jeans and Nikes, they still look like soldiers. Undercover work isn’t our speciality.” Cramer was already shaking his head. “We need someone who has lost his edge, Joker. No disrespect, but we need someone who doesn’t look as if he can handle himself, someone who has let himself go.”
“Thanks, Colonel. Thanks a bunch. You’re really making me feel good about myself.”
“I’m being honest, that’s all. Have you taken a look at yourself recently? You reek of drink, you’ve got broken veins in your cheeks that have been months in the making, and you’ve a gut on you that’d do credit to a Sumo wrestler. No-one in their right mind would ever suspect you of being in the SAS.”
“That goes for me, too, Colonel. Double.”
“We want Mary Hennessy, Joker. We want to take her out. A hard arrest, a shoot-to-kill operation, whatever you want to call it.”
“Revenge.”
“That’s as good a word as any, Joker. And you’re the man who can get it for us.”
Cramer finished his whisky and picked up the bottle. It was empty. Completely empty. He dropped it into the wastepaper bin by the side of his desk. “You’re asking me because of what happened to Newmarch, aren’t you? And because of what she did to me?”
“I’m asking you because you’re the best man for the job. The only man.”
Cramer shuddered. “I’ll have to think about it.”
“I understand that.” The Colonel stood up and held out his hand. Cramer shook it. “You know where you can reach me, Sergeant Cramer.”
“Yes, sir,” Cramer replied. The ‘sir’ slipped out naturally and the Colonel smiled. He left the office, leaving Joker deep in thought, staring at the empty whisky bottle.
Cole Howard caught the morning flight to Washington, DC. As he sat in the front row of the economy section he flicked through the pack of Trivial Pursuit cards he’d brought with him. “You like playing?” asked his neighbour, an elderly woman in a neck brace. “My nephews bought me a set last Christmas. I play it all the time.”
“I dislike the game intensely,” Howard answered. The woman looked shocked as if Howard had sworn at her and she buried her head in a magazine. Howard began to go through the cards, memorising the answers.
There was a queue for taxis when he arrived at Washington Dulles International Airport but he took the wait good-naturedly. The FBI laboratories were half an hour’s drive from the airport, during which time he worked his way through another two dozen cards. On arrival, he clipped his FBI badge to his breast pocket and flashed his identification at the security guards at reception. He was told that the lab he was looking for was on the second floor. There he asked for Dr Kim. He wasn’t surprised when a woman came out to meet him, because they’d spoken several times on the phone, but he was surprised at how young and attractive she was. She was Oriental, with waist-length hair which she wore as a single braid. She had razor-sharp cheekbones and a small, delicate mouth and oval eyes which narrowed almost to slits when she smiled. “Dr Kim,” said Howard, as they shook hands. His hand seemed to dwarf hers. It was as delicate as a six-year-old’s, with nails painted a deep red.
“Call me Bonnie,” she said. “My lab’s this way.” Her high heels clicked on the tiled floor as they walked. Even with the heels the top of her forehead barely reached his shoulders, and Howard was only a little over six feet tall. She took him past several doors and into a long, thin laboratory which had white benches lining the walls and a small cubbyhole of an office at the end. On the benches in the lab were several IBM computers and racks of VCRs and monitors. One of the VCRs had been opened up and she’d been doing something with a circuit board and a soldering iron. The iron was still on and she pulled out the plug.
She poured him a cup of coffee from a percolator and sat on a swivel chair facing one of the monitors. She opened a drawer under the bench and handed him a pale blue file.
“These are prints of what I’ve been able to achieve so far,” she said. “But I wanted you to see the video with me, too. I have some suggestions which might help.”
Howard sipped his coffee as she started the video. By now he knew every second by heart, and he could watch it without emotion. He no longer grieved for the dying family, and he could listen to the woman’s last words of comfort to her son without cringing inside. They watched it together, in silence.
“This is the original video,” she said, “the same version you’ve seen in Phoenix. I’ve taken the signal on the tape and programmed it into the computer, then used it to boost the definition several-fold. To see it we’ll need a very high-definition television monitor, this one here.” She flicked a switch on a console and the video played again on a wider television screen. Howard could see the improvement immediately. Bonnie kept her hand on the pause button and as the camera panned to the ground below she pressed it. The frozen picture was much sharper than on a standard video-recorder, too; there was no fuzzy line or flickering. On the screen was one of the towers, and Howard could clearly see a figure with a rifle. The face was still blurred.
“The quality is much improved, but there are limits to what we can do with analog methods,” said Bonnie. She let the video play on. “We can get better results by digitising the video and storing it on a CD.” She patted one of the computers, an unimposing white box. “This is our image processor, which takes the video signal and digitises it. We call it a frame grabber. It can digitise images in real-time — about one-thirtieth of a second each — and save them into storage. Then we use a computer to handle and process the data. Once we’ve processed the images and cleaned them up, we can choose the frames we want on the monitor, and print them on a film recorder. That gives us much better definition. That’s what’s in the file — computer-generated pictures.”
Howard opened the file and looked inside. There was a stack of more than twenty glossy eight-by-tens. He went through them. There were photographs of the towers, and close-ups of the snipers. None was clear enough to make out their faces, however.
“That’s the best I can do with my equipment,” Bonnie said as she saw his face fall. “Not much help, I’m afraid. Though you can see that they’re better than the images we had on the screen.”
“What have you done to them?” Howard asked.
“I tried neighbourhood averaging first, but that wasn’t too helpful,” she said. “Those pictures are after I used a technique called median filtering. I could probably enhance them more if I used pixel aggregation, but that’s going to take me more time.” She smiled as she saw the deep furrows appear on Howard’s forehead. She took a sheet of paper and a pencil, and drew a square box with deft strokes. “Imagine this is a tiny piece of the screen,” she said. “That unit is as small as you can go. It’s indivisible. We call it a pixel. The camcorder in the plane was a Toshiba
