Games of State

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

It was nicknamed the Kraken, after the fabled, manytentacled sea monster. And it was set up by Matt Stoll when he was hired as one of Op-Center's first employees.

The Kraken was a powerful computer system which was linked to databases worldwide. The resources and information ranged from photo libraries to FBI fingerprint files, from books in the Library of Congress to newspaper morgues in every major city of the United States, from stock prices to air and rail schedules, from telephone directories around the world to troop and police strength and deployment in most cities at home and abroad.

But Stoll and his small staff had designed a system which not only accessed data, it analyzed it. An ID program written by Stoll allowed researchers to circle a nose or an eye or mouth on a terrorist's face and find it anywhere it appeared in international police or newspaper files.

Landscapes could likewise be compared by highlighting the contour of a mountain, horizon, or shore. Two full-time day and night operators were stationed at the Archive, which could handle over thirty separate operations at once.

It took the Kraken less than fifteen minutes to find the photograph of Deputy Foreign Minister Hausen. It had been snapped by a Reuters photographer and published in a Berlin newspaper five months before, when Hausen had arrived to give a speech at a dinner of Holocaust survivors.

When he received the information, Eddie couldn't help but resent the cruelty of the juxtaposition of this particular image in the game.

The landscape behind Hausen took a little longer to identify, though here the programmers got lucky. Instead of asking for a worldwide check, Deirdre Donahue and Natt Mendelsohn started with Germany, then moved to Austria, Poland, and France. After forty-seven minutes, the computer found the spot. It was located in the south of France.

Deirdre located a history of the view, wrote a complete summary, and added it to the file.

Eddie faxed the information to Matt. Then the long, powerful tentacles of the Kraken rested as the monster went back to watching, silently, from its secret lair.