Full Force and Effect

27

By the time Ryan, Caruso, and Biery returned to Alexandria, Virginia, from their mission in the Czech Republic, the rest of the Campus operational staff had relocated to New York City to begin looking into the operation of Duke Sharps.

Dom and Jack would have loved to have joined their cohorts in Manhattan, not just so they could get to the bottom of the operation that had nearly cost them their lives, but also to avoid going back into their office and facing Gerry Hendley.

They had briefed Gerry over the sat phone during the long flight back to the States, and to say he was displeased was an understatement. Gerry wasn’t a field operative himself, so normally he demurred and left the “hot wash” aspects of the after-action reports to John Clark, but when he learned IT director Gavin Biery had been given an overwatch role during a covert breach, and Biery’s failure to warn the team about an approaching threat had resulted in the near death of two of his operators, the death of the target, and the deaths of somewhere to the tune of a half-dozen North Korean aggressors, all in the middle of a major European city, Gerry had told his two operators that as soon as their plane landed they needed to get themselves down from Baltimore and into Hendley Associates, and by then they better have some sort of an explanation.

Dom didn’t feel like he and Jack were at fault. As far as he was concerned Gavin was the one who screwed up, and Gavin should have taken most of the heat that was now focused on him and his cousin. But Jack understood Gavin couldn’t be blamed for not being a trained field operative. Just as Dom wouldn’t get grief from Hendley for failing to hack into an opposition computer server, Biery got a pass for his inability to execute his forced role in a covert entry.

But Gavin had not excused himself, far from it. He was nearly beside himself with shame for his mistake. By the end of the flight Dom had gotten to the point where he was no longer furious with the IT director, and Jack had told Gavin all along that the blame lay at his own feet, not Gavin’s, but the big man remained inconsolable.

This morning, while Dom and Jack were in Gerry’s office trying to explain what the hell had happened in Prague, Gavin sat sullenly at his desk, though he was working. He’d taken Karel Skála’s laptop, retrieved in Prague by Dom and Jack, and he did a deep search of deleted files on the hard drive. It didn’t take him long to find what he was looking for: five images sent to Skála three weeks earlier, just one week before Colin Hazelton died in Vietnam. There was no question that these were the five pictures used for the documents; they were typical passport pictures of four men and one woman, and they’d arrived at the right time. So Gavin uploaded the images into his facial-recognition application, and now the software ran on the machine in front of him.

While Gavin sat and sulked, the images were in the process of being measured hundreds of ways, from the width, height, depth, and shape of the periocular region of the face to the precise spatial relationship between the nose and the upper lip. The tabulated scores of each of the measurements were added together to create a numerical value for each face, which was then compared with millions of images of faces culled from virtually every source on the Internet, as well as the databases of the “Five Eyes” intelligence agencies of the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia. Any image with a significantly different numerical value from the unknown images was instantly discarded by the computer, but those close in value were then compared more carefully.

The computer checked through the individual measurements for additional matches. If the ears were the same distance from the nose, the computer went on to the periocular depth. If that was similar to the unknown image, then the score measuring shape of the jawline was compared. If that panned out, then the computer moved on to the shape of the lips.

In this fashion, millions of images were compared with the unknown image. The process took some time, of course. Although all faces are different — even identical twins have differing measurements when evaluated as precisely as the facial-recognition software did — many faces of people who do not appear to the naked eye to be that similar actually have value scores that are nearly alike.

Gavin expected it would be another few hours before he knew if he would be able to put names to any of the five faces from Skála’s computer.

While Gavin’s monitor spun images faster than a slot machine, he leaned forward with his face between his elbows. He felt like shit. There was no getting around the mistake he made in Prague. Jack Junior, to his credit, had tried to tell Gavin it wasn’t his fault, but Gavin knew he’d blown it. His own actions, or inactions, had led to the death of an important witness and nearly caused the death of his two friends and colleagues.

Gavin Biery had no idea how he would ever redeem himself for his error.

Just then a computerized female voice startled him.

“Match found.”

Gavin lifted his head and stared at his machine in astonishment. He couldn’t believe an identity had been determined so quickly.

It was the woman, the redhead who looked to be in her mid-forties. The monitor displayed the image used in her passport photo in the Czech Republic on one side of the screen, and on the other was another picture of her. Here she stood at a lectern; apparently she was speaking to an audience. Several other photos, all identified by the facial-recog software as the same woman, were tiled under this photo.

Gavin saw why the software identified the redhead so quickly. She was apparently quite prominent in her field, and there were a lot of images of her on the Internet.

He worked another few minutes to double-check the woman’s name and biography with his own Internet search, then snatched up his phone’s receiver and dialed Gerry’s extension.

He supposed this could wait until Gerry’s meeting with Dom and Jack broke up, but Gavin thought it possible this bit of good news just might help the two cousins out of their predicament.

Hendley answered on the first ring. “Yeah, Gavin?” He sounded annoyed, and Gavin read that to mean he was annoyed not just at the two young men sitting in front of him, but also at the man on the other end of the line.

Gavin said, “Sorry to bother you, Gerry. But we have a match on a face we got from Karel Skála.”

Hendley sighed. “Okay. You’d better come up.”

Gavin swallowed. He wanted to take some of the heat off the cousins, but he didn’t want to go up there and sit with them while they got yelled at.

“Um… sure. I’m on the way.”

A few minutes later Gavin entered Hendley’s office and found Dom and Jack sitting quietly in front of the ex-senator’s desk. Hendley sat in his chair behind the desk, but unusual for him, he did not stand when Gavin came in.

An empty chair sat next to Jack.

Gerry said, “Come in, shut the door, and tell us what you’ve got.”

Gavin sat down. “I have an ID on the redheaded woman. The software is still trying to identify the other four images.”

Gerry Hendley waited for a moment, then he sighed. A little irritated. “Well, who is she?”

“Oh, sorry. Her name is Dr. Helen Powers. She is Australian. A geologist.”

Jack and Dom stared at each other. A geologist? They had been expecting the five mystery travelers to be nuclear engineers or rocket scientists.

Gavin said, “She’s a big deal in Australian geology, apparently, lots of pictures of her at conferences and such. She’s involved in the search for rare earth mineral deposits, mostly in the Australian outback.”

Dom said the thing the others were thinking. “Why the hell are all these people getting killed over geology?”

Gavin left a minute later, and Gerry turned his attention back to the two men in front of him. “Jack, Dominic. Prague was a disaster. You are lucky to have survived, and any chance that that target of yours might have been able to pass on more intelligence about whatever the North Koreans are planning was lost when he was killed.

“The fact that the last two men that The Campus has gone into the field to watch over have both turned up dead within hours of our arrival makes me wonder if we need to reevaluate what the hell we are doing.”

Jack and Dom just nodded. They’d been doing a lot of that over the past hour. Now wasn’t the time to argue with the director of The Campus. But even taking that into consideration, Jack felt like he needed to get Gerry on another topic.

Jack said, “I guess this is not the time to ask. But I was wondering if there was any chance we could go up and support Clark’s operation in New York. He’s thin up there with just three guys.”

Gerry turned to Caruso. “Dom, I want you up there by this evening.”

Dominic sat up, surprised. Gerry said, “You are John Clark’s subordinate, don’t go thinking for yourself on this one. Let John use you for surveillance.”

Dom was too happy to be offended. He had pictured himself sitting at his desk for the next few months while Clark and the others got to delve into this mystery in the Big Apple, so he was thrilled to get the chance to go.

He said, “You’ve got it, Gerry.”

Jack raised an eyebrow. Was he going to be punished with desk duty?

Gerry said, “And as for you, Jack. That was your operation in Prague, there was a poor result, so you take the brunt of the heat.

“Let’s put you at your desk to remember what it’s like to do straight analytical work for a while. Go to work on Dr. Helen Powers. Find out what the hell is going on involving mines that is getting people murdered on multiple continents.”

“Okay, Gerry,” Jack said. He and his cousin stood to leave soon after.

Out in the hallway Dom put his hand on Jack’s shoulder. “Not fair, cuz. I pushed you to do the sneak-and-peek on Skála’s place.”

Ryan shrugged. “Gerry’s putting both of us where we need to go right now. You go up there and get some dirt on Sharps. I’ll stay here and figure out what the next piece to this puzzle is.”