Line of Control

TWENTY-SIX

"We may have something!" Stephen Viens declared.

Gloria Gold was leaning forward in her chair. The excitement in Stephen Viens's voice came through clearly on the computer audio link. He was right. After methodically scanning the terrain for hours the cameras had detected a promising image.

"Hold on," Viens said. "Bernardo is switching us to infrared. The changeover will take about three minutes."

"I'm holding," said Gloria Gold. "Nice work," she added.

"Hold the back-patting," Viens said. "It still could be just a row of rocks or a herd of mountain goats."

"That would be a flock of mountain goats," the fifty-seven-year-old woman pointed out.

"Excuse me?" Viens said.

"Herds are domesticated animals," she said. "Flocks live in the wild."

"I see. Once a professor, always a professor," Viens teased. "But who will have the last laugh if we find out it's goats being led around by a Sherpa with a crook?"

Gloria smiled. "You will."

"Maybe we should bet on it," Viens said. "Your microcam against my lapel pin."

"No go," Gloria said.

"Why not?" Viens asked. "Mine has the range."

"And mine has the substance," she replied.

The NRO recon expert had once showed her the MIT lapel pin he had customized. It contained a dot-sized microphone made of molecules that resonated one against the other. It could broadcast sound to his computer audio recorder up to two hundred miles away. Her microcam was better than that. It broadcast million-pixel images to her computer from up to ten miles away. It was better and it was much more useful.

"Okay," Viens said. "Then let's bet dinner? The loser cooks? It's a fitting deal. Infrared image, microwave meals—"

"I'm a lousy cook," said Gloria.

"I'm not."

"Thanks, but no," said the thrice-divorced woman. For some reason Viens had always had a crush on her. She liked him too but he was young enough to be her son. "We'll make it a gentleperson's bet," she said. "If you found the Pakistanis, we both win."

Viens sighed. "A diplomat's deal. I accept, but under protest."

Tall, slender Gloria Gold smiled and leaned back in her chair. She was sitting at her glass-topped desk in Op-Center's technical sector. The lights of her office were off. The only glow came from the twenty-one-inch computer monitor. The halls were silent. She took a swig from the bottle of Evian water she kept on the floor. After knocking over a bottle and shorting her computer the night after she first came to work here, Gloria had learned not to keep anything liquid on her desk. Luckily her boss, Assistant Director Curt Hardaway—"the Night Commander," as they called him — admitted that he had once done that as well. Whether he had done that or not it was a nice thing to say.

The levity about the bet had been welcome. She had only been at this an hour but Viens had been working all day. And the elements in the image-feed from the NRO did look very promising. They were at five-meter resolution, meaning that anything down to five meters long was visible. The computer's simultaneous PAP — photographic analysis profile — had identified what it thought could be human shadows. Distorted by the terrain and angle of the sun, they were coming from under an intervening ledge. Infrared would ascertain whether the shadows were being generated by living things or rock formations. The fact that the shadows had shifted between two images did not tell them much. That could simply be an illusion of the moving sun.

The Op-Center veteran watched and waited. The quiet of night shift made the delay somehow seem longer.

The tech-sec was a row of three offices set farthest from the busy front-end of the executive level. The stations were so thoroughly linked by computer, webcam, and wireless technology that the occupants wondered why they did not just tear down the walls and shout to each other, just to make human contact now and then. But Matt Stoll had always been against that. That was probably because Matt did things in private he did not want the rest of the world to know about. But Gloria Gold knew his dark secret. She had spied on him one night using her digital microcam hidden on the door handle of his minirefrigerator.

Four or five times a day, Matt Stoll washed down a pair of Twinkies with Gatorade.

That helped to explain the boundless energy and increasing girth of Op-Center's favorite egghead. It also explained the occasional yellowish stains on his shirt. He chugged the Gatorade straight from the bottle. Even now, while Stoll was supposed to be resting on his sofa, he was probably reading the latest issue of NuTech or playing a hand-held video game. Unlike his former classmate Viens, Matt Stoll, with his sugar and Gatorade rush, defined the word wired.

Gloria's mind was back on the screen as the feed from the National Reconnaissance Office was refreshed. The mostly white image was now the color of fire. There were a series of yellow-white atmospheric distortions radiating from hot red objects along the bottom of the monitor.

"Looking good," Viens said. "Whatever is making the shadows is definitely alive."

"Definitely," Gloria said. They watched as the image refreshed again. The red spot got even hotter as it moved out from under the ledge. The bloblike shape was vaguely human.

"Shit!" Viens said. "Bernardo, go back to natural light."

"That's no mountain goat," Gloria said.

"I'm betting it isn't a Sherpa either," Viens added.

Gloria continued to watch as the satellite switched oculars. This changeover seemed to take much longer than the last. The delay was not in the mechanical switch itself but in the optics diagnostics the satellite ran each time it changed lenses. It was important to make certain the focus and alignment were correct. Wrong data — off-center imaging, improper focus, a misplaced decimal point in resolution — was as useless as no data.

The image came on-screen in visible light. There was a field of white with the gray ledge slashing diagonally across the screen. Gloria could see a figure standing half beneath it. The figure was not a goat or a Sherpa. It was a woman. Behind her was what looked like the head of another person.

"I think we've got them!" Viens said excitedly.

"Sure looks like it," Gloria agreed as she reached for the phone. "I'll let Bob Herbert know."

Bob Herbert was there before the next image appeared.

The image that clearly showed five people making their way along the narrow ledge.