Payback

68

The security procedures seemed almost routine to Hernes Jackson now, and he donned a benign smile for the security people as he passed through their checks. Down in the Desk Three bunker, he found that he remembered the sign-in procedure for the computer networks without having to resort to the prompts or call the librarian for assistance.

A message popped up on the screen with a new assignment for Rubens: did any of the Peruvian guerrillas seem interesting in any way?

Amused by the broad, open-ended query, Jackson began paging through the accumulated files on the terrorists, including video clips from the discovery of the bomb and the attempted post office takeover several days before.

Nothing jumped out at him beyond the obvious: the guerrillas were more organized than the Peruvian intelligence service believed. The car bombings alone showed a great deal of coordination across a wide geographic distance.

Far more interesting, Jackson thought, was the fact that the warhead was a fake. Had it started that way? Had its weapons kernel been removed?

Taking a weapons core from a nuclear bomb was not technically difficult — if you were a nuclear weapons expert. Did the guerrillas have access to those kinds of people? A number were college-educated, but their majors were in subjects like literature. Someone could have been hired, perhaps. Jackson spent about an hour learning how to use a watch list as a cross-reference before giving up. There were plenty of potential experts, most of them Russian, but no direct link to Peru or Ecuador that he could find.

But working with the lists gave Jackson another idea: how to determine who Sholk was. Jackson found the list immediately after Iron Heart and began comparing it with other watch lists, including several intercepted ones from foreign governments (allies as well as enemies). By fishing through the lists and several passenger manifests from the Middle East, he found four candidates. Only one was unaccounted for at present (two were in jail; another had committed suicide), and he happened to be Russian: Stephan Babin.

Babin was mentioned in a Department of Defense Intelligence Agency report from the early 1990s as a Russian military officer who might be worth cultivating. He was apparently serving as a liaison in Bosnia at the time. The NSA had Russian military files, but Jackson couldn’t figure out how to access the special database. He called the librarian for help, but the man had gone out for a late lunch.

Was it lunchtime already?

Discovering Sholk’s identity felt like a personal triumph, but Jackson didn’t stop there. If there was a weapons expert with the rebels, it might very well be Babin.

Jackson paged through information on the encounter during which the bomb had been found by the Peruvian army. There was no list of the guerrillas taken. Nor did Babin’s name show up in any of the lists of known or suspected guerrillas compiled by SIN, Peru’s intelligence service.

If names were out, what about photos?

He’d need to find a picture of Babin in the Russian data; he wasn’t sure whether one would exist or not. In the meantime, he brought up photos of the guerrillas, thinking he might be able to narrow down possibilities on the basis of age.

But there were almost no photos of the people connected with New Path. The best he could find were photos of a few of the dead bodies. Jackson tried a wider search and got names and photos from the post office takeover by the guerrillas a few days before in Lima, along with some additional incidents.

Still waiting for the librarian to return, Jackson opened the system’s facial features tool — it used several hundred specific points to match faces — and began playing with it, capturing faces and applying searches to familiarize himself with the program. The tool was extremely easy to use. He moused a box around a face, “capturing” it, then simply clicked one of the search buttons on the toolbar and waited while the computer checked the face against a database. Of course, behind the scenes, the program went through a billion gyrations, computing and checking, but to Jackson the process seemed no more difficult than using the primitive drawing program one of his neighbor’s little girls had shown him at Christmas.

The first search came back with what the computer called “no definites.” However, it did give him about ten possible matches, none of which actually looked close when he opened the window under the dialogue box on the screen. He tried again, selecting the same face. This time the computer beeped immediately and gave him an error message: he was repeating the search against the same database. He opened the list of searches and saw that the computer had helpfully highlighted several databases that he might be interested in, based on the terms of the first search. Jackson carefully looked through the list, but it didn’t include Russian military files. It did have Peru’s, however, and he checked those off along with the computer’s other suggestions. The computer returned with no match.

He moved the cursor to another person and repeated the search. This time he got a hit — the suspected guerrilla was an army lieutenant who, according to the small bio that popped on the screen, was still on active duty.

And in the same division that had discovered the nuclear warhead.