Deliver Us From Evil

72

YOU DID NOT use the company jet, correct?” asked Kuchin.

“No. Like you said to, I rented a private plane under one of the corporate shells we have. Untraceable to you or me.”

“And you have stayed outside of the city in the safe house?”

“Yes. Just as you instructed. I’ve conducted business through secure phone and computer lines.” He paused. “You think people are after me?”

“No, they’re after me, but they can use you to help in that search. I could have killed you or kept you under wraps. I chose the latter.”

Rice looked like he might be sick.

Kuchin gripped his arm. “Now your report.”

“It was quite fascinating how we were able to crack this. The technology is really remarkable. We started with using-”

Kuchin raised a cautioning hand. “Alan, get to the point.”

“We found nothing on the data banks we could get into. No doubt if we had access to some of the Americans’ files or even Interpol’s it would have been a different story. But we don’t and thus we had to turn to other things. Now, in these alternative venues the data streams were immense and the server access protocols were complex, but-”

“The point,” snapped Kuchin.

Rice hurried on. “The thing we turned to was aftermarket surveillance feeds.”

“Aftermarket surveillance feeds? Explain this.”

“These days there are observational cameras everywhere. I’m not talking about people running around with their cell phones snapping away when a celebrity does something stupid and it gets posted online. I mean cameras at ATM sites, along streets, office buildings, courthouses, airports, train stations, and millions of other places. Hell, London is one big camera, particularly with the congestion charge enforcement requirements. The result is there are literally trillions of bytes of images out there and it ends up on enormous servers. It’s made the cops’ job easier. With just about any crime, at least in a public area, there’s a decent chance it was captured on film somewhere.”

“But how does that help us? Were there such cameras in the ancient town of Gordes?” Kuchin said skeptically.

Rice opened up his laptop and set it on a wooden coffee table. “No, we went at it from a different angle. You have to understand that a lot of this data is not locally stored. The capacity just isn’t there, particularly for smaller firms and average-size municipalities, and it’s hugely expensive to store and maintain even for megafirms and large cities. So what do folks do when confronted with a need that they are not equipped to handle or is too capital-intensive to take on alone?”

“They outsource it to firms who specialize in that area.”

“Exactly. So much of this data is stored centrally at gigantic server complexes around the world. Think of it as massive file cabinets organized by countries, states, cities, towns, suburbs, or divided tactically into government buildings, banks, commercial office properties, even military facilities, and dozens of other subcategories. The images are typically saved for years, or even in perpetuity. It’s not like you’ve got billions of photos stacked somewhere. It’s all digital. The storage footprint is relatively small.”

“And you never know when some of this data might have value?”

“Exactly. Let’s say there’s an image of an employee meeting outside a building with the same person for weeks. It might not mean anything then, but two years from now when business secrets are stolen it might very well aid in building a corporate espionage case against that employee.”

“I see. Go on.”

“Years ago entrepreneurs saw opportunities in this fledgling field and took advantage to build substantial global businesses from the fact that we really have become a Big Brother society. Now, here is the key for our purposes. Certain people within some of these companies quickly realized that the stored images had value to many others besides the original client. This is so because a camera captures many things outside of the original intent of why it was placed in a certain location. For example, aside from anything to do with the client who put the camera there, if you know someone was at a certain place at a certain time and you want a compromising picture of that person, chances are very good there was an electronic eye there and that the feed exists on some server.”

“So in effect employees of these companies are selling the images to people who want them for reasons unrelated to why the surveillance was conducted in the first place?”

“Exactly. They let it be known discreetly that they can run checks for the right price and the picture is delivered for a fee. Some have gone a step further and the actual companies that collect this data and store it are also selling images to third parties. Apparently the law is vague in some countries, or at least inconsistent enough about the uses that can be made of the stored information to allow sufficient wiggle room for the companies to do this. And the original clients either don’t care or more likely are unaware of these additional uses of the data.

“And that’s where we came in. We sent one well-known server platform covering a number of countries in Europe the digitized images taken from your drawings and the photo of the woman. They ran it through every file they had. We didn’t get a hit the first go-round, but we did the second.”

“And the hit?”

Rice keyed in some commands on his computer and turned the screen around for Kuchin to see. “It was only one hit, but it was better than nothing. Zurich. Outside a hotel, seven months ago,” Rice explained.

Kuchin sat forward and studied the picture. That was the tall man all right.

“But who is he?”

“We don’t know yet.”

Kuchin slapped the table with his palm. “Then this is useless to me.”

“Wait, Evan, please, there’s more. Look at the woman beside him.”

Kuchin did. She was tall, slender, and blonde. Then he noted that the woman’s arm was touching Shaw’s hand. He shot a glance at Rice. “They are together?”

“Apparently so, yes. We checked with the hotel. They would give out no information on either of them, so we next ran her photo through the image data banks.”

“And you got a hit?”

“More than that.” Rice handed him a file. “I know you prefer paper to digital.”

Kuchin took the file, but did not open it. “Her name?”

“Katie James.”