The Janus Reprisal (9 page)

A
LOUD TRUCK
HORN
BLARED
from a nearby street. Smith jerked his head to look, but kept his hand with the phone in the same position. A searing pain entered his palm, piercing the flesh, and he reacted by dropping the phone. The bullet slammed into the metal dumpster to his right, and ricocheted off at an angle. Smith needed no further incentive to move. He sprinted to the entrance five feet in front of him, yanked the handle to swing open the door and tumbled through the opening. A second shot hammered into the metal panel. Smith kept moving, running down the narrow hallway and deeper into the hotel’s interior. The door slammed closed behind him.

Smith jogged through a warehouse area, past pallets of supplies and through another door. This one led to a quiet, carpeted hallway, with soft lighting. He slowed to a fast walk, shoving his bleeding hand into his jacket pocket, still clutching the small duffel with his other. His palm burned and he was sweating freely. He thought the presence of the cameras in the alley would keep the shooter from following him through the back area, but the lobby would be crowded and a perfect location for someone to slip up behind him and slide a knife into him before moving off.

The registration area lay before him, and he headed that way but kept sweeping his gaze around the lobby, looking for anyone suspicious. He scanned the area, looking for more security cameras, but found none. He figured he had a few minutes before the shooter made his way around the building and into the hotel. That is, if he intended to try a second time. Smith moved fast to the registration desk.

A young male employee smiled at him as he approached. Smith swallowed, and did his best to settle his jangling nerves and affect a pleasant, unconcerned attitude as he stepped up to the counter.

“Jon Smith, checking in. And I understand I have a package waiting for me?”

The young man greeted him, but Smith found it difficult to follow the conversation. He uttered some inane response to the clerk’s questions, and retrieved, one handed, a credit card from his wallet. He turned and leaned against the counter, bending his body to once again watch the room, but finding nothing out of the ordinary.

“Mr. Smith? Your keys and your package. Have a nice stay.” The clerk’s voice snapped Smith back to attention. He gave an absentminded nod and collected the room key and the small Federal Express box with his name on it. He looked at the room number.

“904? Is that on the ninth floor?”

The clerk nodded. “Yes. It’s our concierge level.”

Smith pushed the key back across the table to the clerk. “Could you give me a room on the second floor?”

The clerk got a puzzled look on his face. “But you’ve reserved a concierge level room.”

Smith gritted his teeth at the delay. “It’s a superstition of mine. Afraid the fire ladder won’t reach to the ninth floor.”

A look of understanding passed over the clerk’s face. “Oh yes. Of course. We saw the images from the Grand Royal. I do apologize. Let me just change that. I’ll put you in a suite instead.”

“But please use a different name. I don’t need a horde of reporters tracking down my room number.”

“Our system requires a name next to a room number. Is there any pseudonym you wish to use instead?”

“Robert Koch.”

Smith steered clear of the elevator, opting instead to take the stairs. When he entered the room, he crossed to the side of the window and closed the curtains, flipping on a light over the desk. He shrugged out of his jacket, taking care to keep the injured hand steady as he went to the bathroom to check the wound.

It was an angry red slash on the fleshy part of the palm, but not deep and not serious. The pain far outweighed the damage done. Smith washed it with soap and wrapped it in a washcloth. He returned to the desk and ripped open the box, revealing a lightweight laptop and a set of keys along with a valet ticket, presumably to the car. He logged onto the Internet and sent an immediate e-mail update, telling Klein about the attack and that for security purposes he might not spend the night at the hotel. As it was, he would be hard pressed to leave safely. He weighed the idea of taking the car now, before the shooter had time to move into a new position, but decided against it. He was safe enough for the moment, and he needed some time and access to the Internet. He propped the woman’s picture next to the screen, typed in Google’s webpage and got to work.

For the next hour he stared at the display, tapping in the word “Dattar” with a list of others and reading the first few pages in the search result. He looked into the woman’s eyes in the photo. Her serious expression appeared intelligent and powerful. Her clothes—a navy suit, white shirt open at the throat, the hint of a chain around her neck, and diamond studs—gave the impression of understated wealth. Smith worked with medical professionals, biologists, and PhDs every day of the week, and this woman looked nothing like them. The female scientists that he knew had massive brain power matched with a scientific bent. Most donned lab coats for their daily uniform, and as a result they often wore simple shirts and slacks underneath. The woman in the photo was a part of the corporate world, Smith would put money on it, and while her brain power looked as massive, it appeared powerful as opposed to academic.

He picked up the phone, ordered room service, and kept typing, switching it up to Google images every time a woman’s name was highlighted next to Dattar’s. Another forty-five minutes passed with no success. His conviction that Dattar was somehow involved in the attack at the Grand Royal was faltering. Perhaps the timing of the attack and Dattar’s escape was a coincidence.

Frustrated, he started searching for software that could apply face recognition to the Internet. He found a commercial website claiming that it was testing a program that could read an image and then search the Internet for every place in which that image appeared. The software was in the beta testing stage and available only by invitation. Smith clicked the link, asked to be included, and then called the company. When a woman’s friendly voice answered the phone, he asked her to speed his inclusion.

“May I ask why you need this information?” The woman’s voice now carried a slight hint of suspicion.

“I’m a member of the United States Army looking for a business contact given me by a friend of a friend. I have the photo of her, but not her name, and my friend can’t remember her name either.”

Smith waited, hoping his white lie would be swallowed. It wasn’t.

“I’m sorry, we do have to be careful about who we allow to use the software. We have already had an incident in which a stalker contacted us and was attempting to locate a woman he was under orders to avoid. We never granted him access, thank goodness, but you can see the problem.”

“I can, but why bother to have a trailer on the Internet and invite users if you don’t intend to allow them access?”

“We’re building our subscription list to make the company attractive for a possible stock offering. We’re unable to grant access at this moment, but hope to in the next year; those on the list will get priority.”

“Would it help if I had a member of the military police contact you? I assume your company could trust them to use the information in a positive manner.”

“I’m sorry, but no. We’re in negotiations with the Department of Homeland Security to allow them to access the software, but those negotiations are ongoing. The fee has yet to be determined, and until then we are not granting access to any law enforcement authority.”

“All right, well thank you for your time.” Smith hung up and called Martin Zellerbach, the one man he knew who could hack into any computer, anywhere, any time.

“Hello, Jon, how nice to hear from you.” Marty’s voice sounded formal, and the sentence was delivered in a stilted voice lacking any real warmth, but Smith was pleasantly surprised. Marty suffered from Asperger’s, a high-functioning form of autism. He’d never really learned the social cues that most people took for granted, and if he answered the phone at all he often answered with an inappropriate greeting.

Smith pulled up a mental picture of the small, plump, green-eyed man sitting in the house that he rarely left, surrounded by his beloved computers. Growing up, Smith had protected Marty from the schoolyard bullies and taunts that often came his way as a result of his Asperger’s and at times was forced to protect others against Marty when he lashed back in a manner far in excess of the perceived wrong. Marty stood too close to others, sometimes thrusting his face into theirs, or made hurtful comments about them. People shied away from him and his strange, intense manner, and the man was isolated as a result. He’d never married, had few friends, and over the years had grown increasingly out of touch.

“You sound good, Marty.”

“Thank you. I’ve been working on a new form of therapy. I saw you almost died in Europe. I’m happy that you didn’t.”

Smith smiled. Marty recited the words in an almost bored fashion and didn’t sound as though he believed what he was saying for a moment, but once again, Smith appreciated the effort.

“How did you see me? I thought television gave you a headache,” Smith said.

Marty snorted. “The clip was on CNN’s website. I’ll bet you got a few hundred thousand views. Do you need my help?” Now Marty sounded eager.

“I do. I’m trying to get access to a software company’s beta test. It’s an image-reading search software.” Smith filled Marty in on the problem, using the same innocuous story that he was looking for a colleague. “Have you heard of this? Can Google images do this as well?”

“I’ve heard of it, and that company’s work is very exciting. And no, Google images won’t do that. Google searches the Internet for keywords in text and then shows you where that text is located. So if I put up a picture of us on a blog site and I caption the photo with our names, Google images will read the text under the photo, not the photo itself. But the software you mentioned will read the image’s actual pixels and then search the Internet for a pixel match. Great stuff.”

Smith felt a small surge of hope. “So it’s almost like reverse engineering. If I have a name but no photo I search Google images to obtain one, but with a photo and no name I use this software to locate the photo and then find the name.”

“Yes. Is that what you need?”

“That’s exactly what I need. Do you think you can do it? I’m sending you a jpeg of the photo that I need analyzed.”

“Let me work on it and get back to you.”

Smith crawled into the shower, loving the feel of the hot water cascading down his back. He closed his eyes and, unbidden, thought of the woman and her air of determination. She reminded him of another determined woman he knew. He turned and held his face up to the spray. A series of images ran through his mind’s eye. Russell grinning at him as they climbed into a vintage car that Peter Howell drove, Howell himself wearing a disguise as he chauffeured them around, Russell standing over him as she fired back at a double agent bent on killing him, Russell piloting a helicopter. The thought came to him, what if the woman in the photo was an agent herself? Perhaps MI6, or other? That would explain the Internet’s complete lack of information on her. He switched off the water and stepped out, grabbing at a nearby towel.

Ten minutes later he was back at the computer, keying in “Dattar” and the names of security agencies the world over when his cell phone rang. He picked it up to hear the excited voice of Marty.

“I’m in! I cracked their passwords.”

Smith felt a surge of excitement. “And? Did you find the photo?”

“The software is wonderful! A piece of art.”

Smith did his best to keep the frustration from his voice. “Okay, but I need to find the woman. Did you run the photo?”

“Yes, but it didn’t get a hit. The photo is too blurry. Worthless actually. And the software only scanned 450 million images, though, so only a tiny portion of the Internet. The lag is understandable. They’re working on inputting more, but it’s time consuming.”

Smith was surprised at the depth of his disappointment. The image-search software was his only hope. “Is that software looking for the entire photo?”

“Yes. I told you, it looks for a pixel match.” Marty sounded slightly frustrated himself at Smith’s ignorance.

“Can you focus it on her face and search for that section alone?”

Smith heard Marty’s raspy breathing through the phone. “The software does that already.”

“Can you make it search for her photo in areas that aren’t already included in their database?”

“Maybe.”

“Can you try?”

“Okay, but I’m going to have to alter the registry. That’s going to take some time.”

“I really need this. I’m afraid the woman is in danger. There must be a photo of her face on the Internet, just not this particular photo.”

“She looks like she runs a company or something,” Marty said. “I really like her face, but she looks angry.”

“Maybe ‘determined’ is a better word?”

“No. Angry. Like she’s mad about something. She’s not smiling. Women usually smile a lot.” Marty surprised him again. As long as Smith had known him he hadn’t commented on the social aspect of anyone else. Yet he still had it wrong. The woman did not look angry.

“Thanks for helping me.”

“I always help you,” Marty said, in a matter-of-fact way.

Smith hung up feeling a bit more optimistic than before. He abandoned his search, logged into his e-mail, and read a note from Russell informing him that the refrigerator swab had arrived at George Mason. He called her. “Care to join me? We can look at the swab together.”

“You’re on.”

“Can you pick me up at the Four Seasons? In an armored car? I’m surrounded by reporters all waiting to get my photo.”

“I’ll be happy to pick you up, but how about I leave the armored car parked and use my own. Last I heard no one needed bulletproof glass to ward off a camera.”

“I’d really appreciate it if you came in an armored car.”

Russell was silent a moment. “Want to tell me what’s going on?”