Cutting Edge

56

The sun rose higher, cutting the chill morning air. DeBolt had taken up a bench in the Burggarten, half a mile from the Hofburg Palace. He’d selected the seat carefully, concealed between a pair of mature willow trees. In front of him an algae-laden pond stretched across the garden, a physical barrier to the busy avenues beyond. Reluctantly, he was learning.

DeBolt had reached one conclusion: simply showing up at Patel’s presentation was a last-ditch option. Delta would be there. Aside from presenting himself as a target, it might also endanger Patel, who, as far as DeBolt knew, was the only person alive who could explain what had been done to him. His goal, therefore, became clear: he had to find Patel before he arrived at the conference.

His original idea had been to hack into hotel registries. Unfortunately, there were a vast number to cover, and a comprehensive search might take hours. It also occurred to him that Patel could be staying in a group of rooms blocked off for convention participants, meaning his name might not be clearly listed. Then DeBolt had struck on a new plan. If he could locate Patel by CCTV, he might be able to intercept him before he reached the Hofburg.

To make it work, he combined two previous-used processes. He had uncovered a few basic facts on Patel, but still had no idea what the man looked like. To carry through on his scheme, he needed to find out. To that end, he’d flipped through the pages of the borrowed conference agenda to find the list of presenters. There, as hoped, he found a biography, and more importantly a photograph, of Dr. Atif Patel. While Matthias Schulze looked on curiously, DeBolt had concentrated intently on the photo in the brochure.

Once he’d captured the image, and sent the helpful German on his way, DeBolt was ready for the real work. He looked out across the placid garden, and phrased his request carefully, making every effort to avoid extraneous words — something he increasingly viewed as necessary to achieve timely and accurate results. The sparse prose of one computer talking to another: Recall image, Dr. Atif Patel.

The picture he’d seen in the brochure was reproduced on the screen embedded in his vision. It was a head shot, with reasonably good resolution. With some effort, DeBolt found he could manipulate the image, enlarging and cropping. Patel was clearly of Indian heritage, which was in line with his name.

Finally: Upload for facial-recognition analysis.

Less than ten seconds later, a minor victory.

The wait seemed interminable. DeBolt sat watching a pair of swans cruise the far side of the pond. Their white bodies were almost still, balanced and effortless, yet beneath the surface their webbed feet had to be motoring furiously. The unseen means of propulsion. He wondered where his request was being dissembled at that moment. Washington? Langley? The Pentagon? Some giant, anonymous data center in Utah? Were humans involved at all or was it a strictly automated process? He had so many questions. Today, perhaps, he would finally get answers.

He wasn’t even sure if this part of his plan was viable. Could he create, from a photograph in a conference brochure, a facial-recognition signature for Atif Patel, a man he’d never seen in person? Even if it worked, the second part of his scheme seemed an even greater reach. DeBolt was no expert on urban surveillance or metadata analysis … all the same, he knew what he had managed last night.

The cameras.

The genesis of his idea had been cued from a vague memory. Something he’d once read — although he couldn’t say where — describing how law enforcement agencies used software to match facial profiles to CCTV footage. It was a way of leveraging computers to crunch massive amounts of data, plucking a specific terrorist’s face from throngs of travelers in an airport or a train terminal. It seemed like a useful application, the kind of thing that would be developed because there was a practical need.

A message arrived.

DeBolt was not surprised by the lack of a match. Like everything else about Patel, his official record was a blank. But that wasn’t what he was after. He input: CCTV within one-mile radius of present position. Search facial profiles for unknown #1.

DeBolt did exactly that.