Kent, and Fernandez.
Jay said, “I got the guy.”
Thorn said, “You sure?”
“Positive, Boss.”
“Run it down for us.”
Virtual Jay tapped a control on his virtual flatscreen. The images of the man they believed to be the man who’d shot him and later killed a suspected Russian spy appeared and floated holographically over the tabletop. A ’proj within a VR, nice.
“We came up empty on matches from any official government sites — no driver’s license or check-cashing ID, no service record, nothing from the passport folks, jails, prisons, like that. So either the guy hasn’t got any records there, or he’s wearing a disguise that hides enough facial features that the Cray can’t tag him. You might be able to tell, but the computer can’t.”
“That seems stupid of the computer,” Julio said.
Jay grinned. “Said the man who hates the things with a passion. It has to do with how a machine looks at something, which is different than how people do. You see a brand new Corvette tooling through an intersection, even if you’ve never seen it before, and you can’t read the name, and even if it isn’t the same size or design as last year’s model, you still know it’s a ’vette, right?”
“Sure.”
“How?”
“Because it looks like a ’vette.”
“Right, to you. There are design elements that give it away. But if the car is longer, lower, has slightly different angles, a computer matching it to last year’s model might not make the connection. It depends on what you give it for reference. Open the tolerances, factor in silhouette profile, and then maybe it does, or maybe it offers up the nearest match, like a search engine might give you. But if you give it last year’s stats and tell it to match, it will miss the new car.”
“So you’re telling me I’m better than a computer,” Julio said. “I already knew that.”
Jay grinned but let it pass. “In facial recognition software, you have numbers. Put a blob of mortician’s putty on the earlobes or the top curve, and the ears aren’t the same size anymore. Polarizing glasses hide eye color and spacing, and part of the nose. Plugs can make the nostrils wider. If you comb your hair down, you can screw up the forehead sizing. A thick moustache and beard hides the chin and lips. On and on — anybody who knows what the computer looks for can get around it. We have to assume this guy knows that. Whatever the reason, he isn’t in the system where we’ve looked.”
“But…?” Thorn said.
“But the guitar thing was the key. There aren’t that many classical guitarists in the country, relatively speaking — I’m talking hundreds of thousands, and that includes everybody from guys who make a living doing it to kids taking their first lesson.”
“Only hundreds of thousands?” Howard said.
“When it comes to computer work, that’s nothing,” Jay said. “Google or Gotcha! can scan what? Three, four million webpages in fractions of a second. And we’ve got better hardware.”
Howard shook his head. He wasn’t a big computer fan either, Jay knew.
“I did some fast research on the subject, talked in RW to an expert, and then I made some assumptions for a baseline.”
“What assumptions?” Thorn asked.
“One, that the guy was fairly serious, because according to those who know, players who aren’t serious usually don’t bother with the fingernail thing.”
Thorn nodded. “According to the FBI and cops who ran this thing, they say the guy is a pro, very careful. Only reason we found images off him is sheer dumb luck — he didn’t make any big mistakes.”
“One, anyway,” Julio said. “Jay’s still alive, isn’t he?”
Jay grinned. “Maybe he wasn’t planning to kill me. The more I think about it, the more I think maybe he might have wanted to kidnap me.”
“Based on?” Howard asked.
“If he’d wanted to kill me, there were fifty places better than the one he picked, and I’d have never seen it coming.”
“Kidnapping you on a major highway wasn’t a mistake?”
“We’d never have ID’d him from the eyewitnesses, would we? I think something happened. Maybe he didn’t even mean to shoot me in the head. Maybe he was just trying to scare me.”
Thorn said, “Go ahead, Jay.”
“Thanks. It doesn’t really matter what he had in mind, though — I just needed a place to set up shop.”
Thorn nodded. “We’re with you so far.”
“So, we assume he’s a good guitar player. That narrows it down to, say, ten thousand, people who practice a couple hours a day, at least. My expert says it’s actually probably fewer than that. I also assumed for the sake of the search that fairly serious classical guitarists not only study the instrument, they keep up with related material — magazines, either treeware or e-zines, sheet music sites, guitar competitions, concerts, guitar makers, and music stores, all like that.
“Then I gridded the country and checked by region. I’m thinking that the guy must be a local — living somewhere on the eastern seaboard.”
“Why?” Kent asked. “He could live anywhere, couldn’t he? We have quite a national transportation system. It sure seems you’re making a lot of assumptions, son.”
Virtual Jay glanced at virtual Thorn, who smiled. He was a player himself, and a good one. He knew the old researchers’ adage: Assumptions were the mothers of information.
Jay said, “You have to start somewhere. Did you ever work a hard crossword puzzle? Sometimes, you just have to put letters in, to see if it sparks anything. You can always erase and change things.”
“All right,” Kent said. “Stipulated.”
Jay continued: “When you strain classical guitar magazines, websites, UseNet groups, concert tickets, and luthiers — those are the guys who make guitars — you come up with plenty of duplicates, but now we’re down to a few thousand names who recur in three or four arenas. These are the serious folks. If we eliminate the women, those we can ID immediately as being too old or too young, and those outside of the east coastal states, we’re down to a few hundred serious guys. Running checks on their pix, using national, state, and local images we can access, gets down to twelve without easily found visual ID’s.”
“Twelve?” Julio asked.
“Yep. Then we dig a little deeper, checking guitar websites, high school yearbooks, newspapers — we have their names, so it’s easier — and we have four possibles left. Remember, we restricted the search to people who live on the east coast, but that’s just their permanent address, not their current one. It turns out two of the four are overseas right now. One is a soldier stationed in the Middle East, the other is a guy working in Japan.”
He paused, enjoying the drama of the moment.
“One of remaining two is in a wheelchair.”
He paused again.
“Jay,” Howard said.
Jay grinned. “And the last one…” He touched a control on the flatscreen. A third image, full-face and a close view, appeared next to the others, and it was obviously the same man.
“Tah-dah!”
Julio snorted. “Why didn’t you just show us the picture in the first place?”
Jay laughed. “It’s not enough just to get the
Julio shook his head and muttered softly. Jay didn’t quite catch what he said, but it didn’t exactly sound like a compliment.
Jay kept going: “This image was taken at a box office in Washington, D.C., two months ago, by a QuikTix machine that sold him the admission to a classical guitar concert. He paid with a debit card. We have the bank and the ID on the account. The name is fake — he calls himself ‘Francisco Tarrega,’ which is a giveaway — Tarrega was
