State of War

34

Jay was working at his desk when Toni stuck her head into his office.

“Hey, Jay. You got a minute?”

“Always,” he said. “What’s up?”

Toni stepped into the office. She held up a mini-disk in her right hand and showed it to him. “This. It’s a surveillance vid of a guy who shot somebody in a biker bar in Atlanta.”

He took the silver-dollar-sized disk from her and slipped it into his station’s reader. “What’s the deal?”

“Well, it’s not really our business. At least nobody has asked us to do anything with it. I stumbled over this while I was looking for something else.”

The holoproj lit, and Jay saw it was from a cheap video recorder, a low-res cam set high on a wall. Sure enough, it was one of those dewdrop inn kinda of places, full of men in biker colors, women in garish eye shadow, and a lot of tattoos on both sexes. The angle was wide, showing much of the floor. Off to the right were four men, three in colors, one not wearing biker gear. The civilian suddenly jumped up. He started running, and as he did, he pulled two small handguns from under what looked like a fishing vest, and began shooting. There was no sound. The shooter raced out of the viewing field and was gone in a couple of seconds. The recording jumped, and a new scene appeared, a parking lot full of motorcycles, with a few cars.

As Jay watched, the guy who had done the blasting in the bar came into view from the right, ran to a car, hopped into it, and drove away.

The recording stopped.

He looked up at Toni. “Okay.”

“This was taken by the interior and exterior security cams at the Peach Pit,” Toni said, “a bar on the outskirts of Atlanta. Less than an hour after this was recorded, an Atlanta policeman was shot and killed at a traffic stop. Witnesses got a look at the car leaving, and it seems to be the same make. I just talked to a contact across the compound who says preliminary ballistics make the cop-killer’s guns the same as the one used by the shooter in the bar.”

“So unless he sold his hardware real quick, the biker bar guy shot the cop,” Jay said.

“Yep.”

“And what, exactly, is our interest in this?”

“I talked to Gunny at the shooting range. He thinks this guy has been shooting other folks recently. Including Congressman Wentworth out in California.”

“Really? The regular feebs know this?”

“Probably. But they don’t have Smokin’ Jay Gridley working it. It would be very nice to hand it to them on a platter. They’d owe us one.”

He smiled. “Hooyah,” he said. “It sure would. What do you want me to do?”

“I’ve sent you a file with other possible shootings by this guy. Enhance the image as much as you can, then start looking at car rental agency security cams around the times and places of those other killings. See if you can find anybody who looks like this guy renting a vehicle around then.”

Jay nodded. “I can do that. I could also check local motel and hotel cams while I’m at it. Would you sign off on an hour of mainframe time for the Super-Cray if I can get eight face-match points on him?”

She nodded. “Yeah. If we catch him, nobody will complain about that. If not, we’ll worry about it at the budget meeting next month.”

“I’m on it,” Jay said.

Toni nodded and left, and Jay started right in on it. Fiddling with his enhancement program, he used the holographic fill to zoom in and augment the features of the shooter. The man was dark, almost swarthy, had black hair, and, oddly enough, blue eyes.

Jay ran the stats, the ratio of forehead to nose, to eye spacing, ear proportions, all like that, trying for an ethnic tap, but it came up inconclusive. Still, he had nine pretty certain points on the Segura Facial Structures Grid, and he needed only eight to come up with a greater-than-seventy-five-percent match — if he could find other pictures as good as this one. The SFSG had been developed for use in airport and bank surveillance cams to catch robbers and potential terrorists. It wasn’t altogether accurate, but seven out of ten was more than enough for a field agent to start checking out somebody’s alibi.

The SFSG program on the Super-Cray routinely accepted and catalogued input from thousands of commercial surveillance cams in the U.S. every day. That translated into hundreds of thousands, even millions of pictures. The computer could compare the facial grids of a suspect against a day’s worth of those and spit out possible matches in ten minutes. With an hour’s worth of time, Jay could check six days of tapes. Of course, the bill to Net Force for the computer’s time would be more than he made in a month, but if he caught a guy who shot an elected federal official? It was congressmen who approved their budget, they wouldn’t kick over a few bucks to nail the guy who got one of their own.

If Jay limited himself to the days immediately before and after one of the shootings, he could check three of them. If he held it to just the day before, say, he could check six. He only needed to run four, according to the file Toni had e-mailed him. No sweat.

His system was on voxax mode. “Call the Super-Cray,” he told the computer. Boy, he loved saying that — that was real power.

Michaels was, figuratively, knee-deep in legal wranglings, and not pleased about it. When Toni came by, he was happy enough for any distraction.

“Hey,” he said, waving hard copy at her. “Have I mentioned that we really need a vacation?”

“I hear you,” Toni said, grinning. “Meanwhile, I have something interesting. You want to come to the conference room? Jay’s there.”

“Sure.”

At the conference room, Jay sat at the table, smiling like a cat who had swallowed a whole aviary full of canaries.

“What?” Alex said as soon as he walked in.

“Toni?” Jay asked, looking at her.

“Go ahead,” she said. “Shine.”

Jay grinned even wider. “Toni came across some information about that congressman who got shot recently,” he said. “Not really our case, in that the local cops and the regular feebs didn’t ask us in on it yet, but it seemed like a good idea to run with it.”

Michaels nodded. “And…?”

“And we got the shooter,” Jay said, trying for an offhand ease he didn’t quite pull off.

Michaels raised an eyebrow. “Got him?”

“Well, not exactly, but we know who he is.”

Both Jay and Toni looked inordinately pleased with themselves.

Jay said, “Toni gave me a security tape of a guy who shot some people in a bar in Atlanta, then a cop. I entered his face into the Super-Cray and ran it through SFSG. Got a match on a guy renting a car in California the same day the congressman got hammered. Also got a match on a rental in D.C. the same day a cop in Baltimore was killed.”

Jay passed over a trio of hard-copy photographs. In one, a man wearing a cowboy hat and sunglasses stood in front of a counter. In the other, a man wearing a baseball cap and a large moustache occupied the picture from a similar angle. The last one, from the scene in the Atlanta bar, showed a man with guns in both hands, with people in the background ducking for cover.

“Same guy in all three pix,” Jay said. “Nine point match on two, eight on the last one — the fake moustache hides the upper lip. Of course, he used a different name and ID for all the rentals, and they were pretty good — ID thefts that checked out on first hits.”

“So you have a man who rents cars and wears a false moustache. Doesn’t prove anything.”

“Well, if that’s all we had, him being in the area, that’d be pretty circumstantial. But that’s not all we’ve got.”

He slid a fourth picture across the table. Michaels could see it was the same man, and the image appeared to be an ID photo. It had that ugly driver’s-license look to it.

“Marcus ‘Junior’ Boudreaux,” Jay said. “We got a visual match from Louisiana penal records — he did a stretch at the state prison, Angola. He’s a legbreaker, general all-around thug, and professional bad guy. Arrested once for killing a man, but he got off. He fits the profile.”

“Well, I’m impressed. I’m sure our brothers and sisters across the compound will appreciate it.”

“Oh, but that’s not all,” Jay said. “You have to figure that a guy like Junior wouldn’t just go off and start shooting congressmen on his own, for no reason. He’s got to be working for somebody.”

“And…?”

“And so we ran Junior’s picture and various fake IDs through some other places. Since he’s a shooter, we hit all the public gun clubs we could find in and around his last known place of residence, which was, by the way, in the District of Columbia. Up and down the east coast.”

Jay paused dramatically.

“Okay,” Alex said when he didn’t go on immediately. “Are you going to drop that shoe or stand there holding it all day?”

Jay grinned. “We found that Junior is a member at four shooting ranges, including one in New York City. Under different names.”

“Uh-huh. Get on with it.”

“And so we ran membership lists of those clubs, with the idea that maybe we might come across a name of somebody else we recognized there. Just on the off chance.”

“Come on, Jay—”

Jay slid another sheet of hard copy across the table. On it was a list of names, one of which was highlighted in yellow.

Michaels looked at the highlighted name. “No,” he said. He shook his head. “No way.”

Both Toni and Jay grinned like baboons.

Jay was gone, and Michaels sat at the conference table with Toni. Something was nagging at him, but he was still distracted enough with all the legal paperwork he was dealing with that he was having a hard time coming up with what it was.

He stared at the hard copy. “It’s just a coincidence,” he finally said. “It doesn’t mean anything. Why would a guy like Ames stoop to something like this? He doesn’t have to.”

“Somebody hired our boy Boudreaux,” Toni said. “I don’t know why he’d be shooting up biker bars and cops, but Congressman Wentworth was leading the fight against CyberNation on the House side, wasn’t he?”

“Hon, that’s a stretch on the order of the Golden Gate Bridge.”

“Maybe. But what if it’s true? You have to check it out.”

“Come on, Toni. You know what that will look like? Us going after the lawyer who is suing us over wrongful deaths for a Net Force operation?”

“Well, we’d have to be careful.”

He laughed. “Careful? This is a guy who can subpoena our records, e-mail, phone logs, everything! If we start snooping into his background, we have to tell him.”

“No, we don’t. Technically, all he can ask for is material regarding operations against CyberNation. Investigating him for potential conspiracy charges doesn’t necessarily fall into that category. Maybe he hired Junior for something else. We wouldn’t know until we got there, would we?”

Michaels shook his head again. “One misstep and we’d be drawn, quartered, and our heads mounted on pikes on the city walls.”

“So we watch where we put our feet.”

He thought about it. It probably was nothing more than coincidence. The shooter belonged to four clubs. Between them, the memberships at those four clubs totaled more than two thousand people. He didn’t have to have any connections to any of them. But — what if he did? And what if Ames was the connection?

It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy, as far as Michaels was concerned. Maybe Toni was right. At the very least, they should check it out, right?

“If we can find this guy Boudreaux,” Toni said, “and persuade him to talk to us, that would be good.”

“And how are we going to do that?”

“Jay is working on it even as we speak,” she said. She smiled.

In that moment, he was very glad she was on his side. There was something of a hungry she-wolf in that expression.

Alex nodded. Something was still nagging at him.

He glanced at the list of names again, looking at the one that was highlighted. “Oh,” he said. “Of course.”

“What?”

He shook his head, thinking. “Hon, can you bring up that hacker’s statement?”

Toni went to the flatscreen computer on the conference room’s table. She hit a few keys, inputting her login code, and then called it up.

“Got it,” she said.

“Read his description of the guy who hired him.”

There was a pause while Toni scanned for that section and then read it. A moment later her eyebrows shot up.

“Alex,” she said. “It’s Mitchell Ames.”

Alex nodded. “Or his twin,” he said. “Get some photos down to that hacker, and include one of Ames in the mix. See if he picks him out of the batch.”

“I’m on it,” she said, already heading for the door.

“Oh, and Toni?”

She paused and turned back to face him.

“Good work, hon. And tell Jay I said so.”

She flashed him a big grin, nodded, and went out the door.