Dead Eye

TWENTY-EIGHT

Ruth Ettinger and her three-person team of targeting officers met at the Israeli Embassy in Stockholm, borrowed a black four-door Skoda from the Mossad motor pool, and then drove together to the Townsend safe house just set up on Sankt Ericksgaten Street. They parked their car in a snow-covered lot, slung their luggage over their shoulders, and headed up four flights of stairs.

The only two occupants of the flat were a two-man Townsend UAV team who had themselves only just arrived: a drone pilot named Carl and a sensor operator named Lucas who stopped unpacking their equipment just long enough to introduce themselves.

Ruth, Aron, Laureen, and Mike all moved into a large bedroom at the back of the flat, while the drone operators pulled mattresses off beds in another bedroom and dragged them into the living room so they could stay close to their gear at all times.

And they had a lot of gear. While the Townsend men got set up, Ruth and her team watched them install four laptops on tabletop rack mounts, attach and calibrate flight control joysticks, uncoil microphone headsets, and finally unpack three identical UAVs. They were microdrone quadcopters, an X-shaped design with a small enclosed rotary wing topping each of the four arms, and a bulb-shaped center that held the power, brains, and cameras. The three identical devices were only sixteen inches in diameter and each unit weighed less than five pounds.

Mike Dillman whistled. “We’ve got some cool stuff, but we don’t have those.”

Lucas put one of the devices on a charging station on the floor. “Cutting edge. We’ve played around with these back in the States, but we’ve never fielded this model before. No one has. It’s called the Sky Shark. Got it from DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the folks that build all the latest and greatest gadgets. They gave it to us to field-test it in an urban environment.”

“Sweet,” said Mike.

Laureen asked, “You plan to just fly this around downtown Stockholm and hope no one will see it?”

Carl answered this. “This thing is damn near silent, but it’s not invisible. We have some techniques to employ to keep it out of sight. Obviously we fly as high as we can, but this isn’t a Reaper or a ScanEagle where you can cruise at eight or nine miles up. With these you have to stay within a couple hundred feet of the target in a moving surveillance, so we fly behind the target in most cases, and we can use the sun, when there is sun around here to be had, so that our target won’t know he is being watched.”

Lucas added, “In the dark it’s better. The camera has night vision, of course.” He smiled. “Nobody’s going to detect this baby at night.”

Ruth asked to see the video the Townsend facial recognition software had identified as Court Gentry, and Carl brought up a still photo on one of the rack-mounted laptops. He explained that the image had been taken the previous day at an electronics store a few kilometers from where they now sat. The still photo was taken from the clearest image from the quick snippet of video.

Ruth leaned close to look at it, then raised an eyebrow. Townsend analysts had provided images of Gentry to her and all her team, and she called up a picture on her smart phone. She looked over a photo of Court Gentry wearing a suit and eyeglasses, then looked up to check the video still again. “Certainly not definitive.”

Carl shook his head, but said, “We put it at 60 percent prob.”

“How so? The photo isn’t clear and you can only see about two thirds of the face.”

“True, but the camera captured the periocular region, the area around the eyes, which actually has more biometrically identifiable features than fingerprints. And from the photographs of him we have on file we have built a virtual 3-D model of his face, and the reconstructed periocular region on that is close enough to this guy here to make the 60 percent assessment.”

This technology was not new to Ruth in theory — she tracked people for a living, after all — but she had never seen periocular data pulled from such a grainy, off-center image in the field.

The rest of her team looked at the photo on the laptop and compared it to the photos of Gentry on their smart phones. Aron and Mike thought they were looking at the same person, but Laureen and Ruth remained doubtful.

Ruth asked, “What’s your plan to find him, if he is in fact here?”

Lucas took his cue and said, “Babbitt wants you folded into our search, so this might be a good time to show you how we do it.”

Carl took one of the Sky Shark drones to the balcony and returned a moment later without it. He sat down at the flight controls while Lucas worked the laptop next to him for a moment.

“Ready.”

The drone took off from the balcony, lifting a few feet into the air and then drifting sideways. It climbed again, out of sight, and then Ruth and her team moved behind the two American UAV operators to watch several live images on the laptops. One of the cameras was positioned on the drone to show a straight-ahead view; a second was the rear view. A third camera was obviously below the craft, and it could be turned and zoomed by a toggle on the sensor operator’s console.

They watched the screens as the drone flew over the buildings in the neighborhood, made a series of turns, and then descended between two buildings to hover over a pedestrian shopping street. The sensor operator picked out a young woman strolling along; she wore a fur coat and a matching mink hat, and her arms were laden with shopping bags.

While they worked, Lucas said, “As technology improves, it gets harder and harder for runners like Court Gentry to hide.”

“Because of biometrics?” Ruth asked.

“Exactly. It’s a biometric ID world now. Just a few years ago facial recognition software was nonexistent or unreliable. But as it improves, guys like Gentry are dinosaurs, waking up to the cold.

“The biometric database for CIA employees is quite extensive now, but Gentry was lucky to get out before most of it started being harvested. There is no soft biometric profile, which is his gait, the way he stands, stuff like that. All we have is an iris scan and fingerprints on file for him, which is useless in this situation. But the facial recog we are using should get the job done.”

Carl spoke now as he flew the UAV with the joystick and toggle throttle. “From the cam image in the electronics shop we know what he is wearing: the coat, the hat, the shades. We know how tall he is and how much he weighs. All that goes into an algorithm, and the Sky Shark camera goes out and records everyone it sees moving on the street and passes the images back to these computers. The software can evaluate over two hundred individuals a minute—”

Lucas spoke up here. “When it’s working right.”

“Yeah,” Carl allowed, “when it’s working right. Ninety-nine percent of the individuals are going to get tossed out immediately. Wrong height, wrong weight, different coat, female form, whatever. But anytime the computer finds someone that needs a second look it will let the drone know, and the drone will take another shot. The second look will go back to the computer for evaluation, as well. And a third look, to narrow it down more.”

“After that?” Aron asked.

“After that any image that is deemed a possible match will pop up on the screen. Those have to be weeded out manually.”

Lucas said, “I do that while Carl concentrates on not slamming the Sky Shark into a wall.”

Ruth said, “And if you find him? What then?”

Carl answered. “That’s another cool part. If I see him in one of the images, I just tell the computer to let the drone know we have a match. At that point the Sky Shark goes from hunting mode to tracking mode. It remembers where the individual was, goes back and relocates him, and locks on like a dog on a scent.”

“This is impressive,” Ruth admitted. “What are the drawbacks?”

Carl had an answer ready. “The electric engines use a ton of juice. Sky Shark can loiter only about a half an hour before we have to bring it back for a recharge. It shouldn’t be too much of a problem; we’ve got three, so we can keep circulating them.”

As the Townsend UAV team began what they freely admitted could be a lengthy hunt, Ruth sent Mike and Laureen to the electronics store where Gentry bought the computer. They would interview the salesman, branch out and check hotels nearby, and keep their eyes peeled.

Ruth called in to Yanis to let him know they were up and running here in Sweden.

“How are the Americans treating you?”

“Like we’re part of the team. CIA is desperate to get this guy.”

Yanis heard something in her voice. “You are, too, right?”

“So far, I’m more curious. It’s obvious the Americans want us to help, but it is not obvious at all to me that Gentry has any interest in taking out the PM. I can’t stop thinking about all the good this man has done, on his own initiative, while on the run.”

“Good guys do bad things. No reason bad guys can’t do good things once in a while, too.”

“I guess so. I’ve got an open mind on this, but I’m not sharpening my dagger just yet.”

Yanis said, “This is time critical. The likelihood of any danger to Kalb right now is only increased by the fact that he will be more vulnerable over the next two weeks during his travel. You don’t have the luxury of spending too much time on building a perfect target folder. I need you to find him, identify him, and monitor the Townsend people to make sure they stay on target. If they want to send their hitters to go in and kill him, they have their reasons, and you stand back and let them do it. Whether he’s a threat to Ehud Kalb will become a moot point if the Americans eliminate him.”

“I understand, Yanis,” she said, but still, there was reticence in her voice. “But when did we become the hunting dogs for the CIA?”

“When the fox started sniffing around our hen house, Ruth.”

“Right,” Ruth said.

“Get to work, but be careful. CIA conducted a teleconference briefing with us this morning about the Gentry case. He is a slick bastard, well trained to spot a tail. Find him, but stay loose.”

“Thanks for the concern, Yanis, but I’ll be fine.”

“Of course you will.”