colors and shapes rendered based on a specialized enhancement program, the REG.
It looked like the same man to Thorn, but the big thing was that the Cray thought so, too. It had a much higher accuracy rating than Thorn’s eyes.
“List facial feature matches, normal tolerances.”
A pair of grids showing sizes blossomed, one under each image. The computer brought the two grids together into one image in the middle. All the features that were plus or minus a millimeter lit in flashing red for a beat, then locked. There were twelve matches of the eighteen factors scanned.
Same size nose, same size right ear, same distance between pupils, same ratio of forehead to ear height to chin angle…
Thorn didn’t need to go any further. Once you hit five major facial points, it was either the same guy or his twin brother, and Thorn didn’t think that was likely.
This was the guy who had bugged Jay’s car, shot him, and who had killed the Russian spy. Thorn was sure of it.
“Ha!” he said. “You are
Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be that easy. He searched the rest of the file, but there was no obvious way to identify the man — at least none that the Super-Cray had been able to come up with. The Cadillac in the foreground blocked the bottom of the car the shooter had been in, so there was no license plate visible. No other images of that car were in the traffic cam, and if the Cray hadn’t seen him elsewhere in its strain, then it wasn’t like a set of human eyes would do any better.
“Print images,” he said.
Thorn passed out hard copies of the holographs to General Howard, Colonel Kent, and Lieutenant Fernandez.
“This is the guy?” Howard said.
Thorn nodded. “I believe so, yes. What’s the word on Jay?”
Fernandez said, “He’s checked himself out of the hospital and gone home. We have guards watching the house. Saji says he’s planning to head back into VR and start looking.”
Thorn frowned. “VR? I would think the doctors would want him to stay out of that for a while.”
Howard nodded. “They do, but Jay’s more stubborn than they are.”
Thorn said, “I’ll call him and pass this along when we’re done. “I’ve run the driver’s license databases from all fifty states through the mainframe. The Super-Cray is checking all military photo records, current passports, and federally incarcerated prisoners — nothing yet. NCIC and CopRec databases are matching the image through local and state jail and prison systems, and that will take a while even with big crunchers. If he’s in the system, we’ll find him. Eventually.”
“You want us to go out on the streets looking?” Fernandez asked.
Thorn smiled. “The regular FBI is doing that already. They’ve got agents flashing these pictures in the vicinity of the spy store, the area where Jay was shot, and in the dead Russian’s neighborhood.”
“Good. At least that’ll give them something to do,” Fernandez said. “What’s this on his fingernails?”
Thorn frowned. “What?”
Fernandez pointed at the picture. “Looks like he is wearing nail polish on his right hand, see?”
The picture was too small to see more than a little gleam.
Thorn tapped the computer console on the conference table, called up the ATM image, and had it focus on the right hand — the left was behind him and out of sight. The computer enlarged and enhanced the hand.
A little fuzzy, but sure enough, it looked like the guy had fairly long fingernails, neatly manicured, and they did seem awfully shiny. Kind of an odd, slanted shape, angled to one side. That didn’t mean anything to Thorn, though.
“What’s the other hand look like?” Kent said.
“Can’t see it,” Howard said. “Miz Halter Top there is blocking it.”
Thorn called up the other picture, in the car. The man’s left hand was on the car’s steering wheel, at about ten o’clock. He had the computer magnify and enhance the image. It was grainy, not as sharp as the ATM image of the right hand, but it appeared as if the nails on that hand were much shorter and duller. Odd…
“He’s a guitarist,” Kent said.
“What?” Thorn said.
“I have a nephew, in Tucson, Arizona, my sister’s oldest son, who teaches music at the local U. He plays classical guitar, and that’s what his hands look like. Nails on his right hand are long, polished, and angled, and the ones on his left are clipped short — it’s how you play the instrument.”
The others looked at him.
“You pluck the strings with your nails, but if you have long nails on the other hand, the strings buzz when you fret them — at least that’s what my nephew told me.”
“So maybe he’s a country-western guy, or bluegrass or folk music player,” Fernandez said. “Even a rock star.”
Kent said, “Could be, but rock stars mostly flat-pick, and acoustic guitars have steel strings. Fingernails simply don’t hold up against those, so those guys wear curved finger-picks or have fake nails. Classical guitars have nylon strings.”
“How do you know all this?” Thorn asked.
“When I was stationed outside Atlanta, one of my sergeants was a serious blues guitarist. I used to go and listen to him play at local clubs, and I picked up a few things here and there.”
“And you remembered it?” Julio asked.
Kent looked at him. “Not everybody older than you is automatically senile, Lieutenant.”
“No, sir,” Fernandez said. “Point demonstrated and taken.”
General Howard grinned.
“Does this help us?” Kent asked.
Thorn nodded. “Absolutely. If nothing else, it’s another place to look. And something tells me there are not a lot of classical guitarist hit men around.”
Jay sat in the command chair of the
He tapped instructions on the keyboard and the deep-sea submersible tilted to the right — starboard — and headed toward an odd-looking pile of silt. At this depth there wasn’t much moving except him. Vaguely nautical- sounding music played out over the stereo, and there were odd creaks and groans from the structure around him caused by intense pressure from the ocean.
Except that he just didn’t
He frowned and shook his head.
Even as he thought it, he knew that it wasn’t true. He’d wanted it to work, but he hadn’t really believed it would.
He sat in the media room of the apartment he and Saji lived in, the 270-degree panorama projection screens at one end of the room lit up with images from his VR simulation. He was looking for a Spanish treasure fleet lost in the late 1500s. But when he leaned back, he could feel the upholstery of the chair, and hear the purr of the ventilation system. He even thought he could hear Saji rattling around in the kitchen, though that could be his imagination.
He frowned again.
After spending subjective months inside his head, in a world similar to VR but not as controlled, he found that he was loathe to leave reality. No, more than that. He was
He’d devised a non-VR metaphor to break the code that had put him in the hospital. He’d built a simulation he could run from a flatscreen, a remotely operated vehicle sim that searched the ocean floor while he sat in his desk.
