Maden Mike - Tom Clancy Firing Point

No, it was clear. The Bluetooth Blonde had no idea that bomb was going to explode.

Jack backed the tape up to the moments just before the explosion.

His eyes fell on Renée. She was talking to the bartender, probably ordering a drink just as the bomb exploded. He backed it up. Froze the image one frame before the explosion. The last moment of her short life. He enlarged the image. His heart broke all over again.

He started to touch her face on the screen but stopped short. Now was not the time to grieve.

He shook it off.

What am I missing?

Aleixandri watched Jack leave. Why? Was she waiting for him to leave? Why would she do that?

Damn it!

No reason. No reason at all—if the bombing wasn’t about him.

Then why was she watching him leave?

Jack ran the tape again. Funny how the thriller movies never tell you how boring this work really is.

He watched himself head out the door. She’s watching him leave . . . and . . . she’s still watching him leave—even after he’s gone.

Wait. One more time.

Yeah. He leaves. She seems to still be watching the door. Why? To make sure he’s really gone?

Holy shit.

—

That guy.

The one that bumped into him. Short, tortoiseshell glasses, long hair. An American. Or at least an English speaker. “Sorry, man,” he said when they bumped into each other.

Aleixandri was watching him . Sorry Man.

Jack toggled the arrow keys, advancing the video by individual frames, back and forth, back and forth.

Instead of watching himself leave, he focused on Sorry Man.

Sorry Man takes a couple of steps into the restaurant.

Renée orders a drink at the bar.

Aleixandri is speaking.

The room erupts in an explosion.

The camera dies.

Jack grabbed the best image of Sorry Man’s face he could and uploaded it onto The Campus cloud drive.

From the same drive, Jack opened up The Campus facial-recognition program.

Besides having access to the U.S. government’s vast database of over seven hundred and fifty million faces, Gavin’s program hacked several other foreign government facial-recog databases. This expanded Gavin’s program’s reach by orders of magnitude. China alone had recorded each of its 1.4 billion people and probably every tourist, business executive, exchange student, or any other wàiguó rén that had entered the country, legally or otherwise.

Jack initiated The Campus facial-recog program and sat back. It could take several hours to do its thing using the 2-D image he uploaded. In the near future, more and better cameras producing true 3-D and thermal images, along with gait, skin, and even hair analysis, could make facial recognition both ubiquitous and nearly infallible.

The program suddenly alerted.

The alert snapped Jack back to reality. A reality that, at times, sucked. Especially now.

According to the nearly infallible software, Sorry Man didn’t exist.

19

BARCELONA, SPAIN

Jack killed the software alert telling him that Sorry Man didn’t exist in any database that The Campus had access to.

He could choose to believe the software or his own lying eyes. Of course Sorry Man existed. But he existed in the same kind of space that Jack did. A man who wasn’t supposed to be found.

That fact alone told him Sorry Man was an important part of the puzzle. Maybe the most important part. Certainly the missing part.

A FaceTime window from Gavin opened up on his screen.

“Dude, you look thrashed.”

Jack grinned. “Let me guess. They were running Fast Times at Ridgemont High at the Bijou Theater again.”

“Better still, laser disc. It’s a classic.”

“What do you have?”

Gavin grinned ear to ear. “I found your perp’s cell-phone store. Even have the date and time stamp.”

An encrypted zip file popped up on Jack’s screen. He opened it. He watched a high-angle view of Aleixandri walking into an Orange telecom store on Ronda de Sant Pere, a tree-lined street located just steps from the Urquinaona metro stop. Convenient.

“Can you get a shot of her inside making the purchase?”

“You’re killin’ me, Smalls. I can’t work miracles.” Gavin took a long swig from a Big Gulp cup just slightly smaller than a kitchen trash can.

“You’re selling yourself short, Gav.”

“I was lucky to find this traffic camera shot. By the way, here’s another one.”

Another file popped up on Jack’s screen. The time stamp showed it was taken thirteen minutes later. Aleixandri exited the store with an Orange branded plastic bag, presumably with a prepaid phone inside since it only took her a few minutes to get it.

“Okay, that’s good enough for me. Great job. Seriously.”

“No big deal.” Gavin shrugged, slurping on his straw. “Anything else? I’ve got time to kill before the next Battle Royale tournament.”

“Well, since you’re offering. There’s this.” Jack sent over a file of Sorry Man. “Can’t find this guy on our face-recog software.”

“You sure?”

“Ran it twice.”

“Huh. That’s interesting. He looks like a couch-surfing goober.”

He looks just like you, Gav, only twenty years younger, Jack thought, biting his tongue.

“What do you think?”

“I think I’ve got two hours before I suit up for war. I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thanks, buddy.”

“You staying out of trouble, Jack? I mean, I don’t mind looking into this stuff, but you’re on your own over there and you’re not authorized to do anything. I don’t want you to get into the middle of something you can’t get out of, especially without any backup around.”

“Just trying to scratch an itch, that’s all. The locals seem to be a little shorthanded, so I figure we should help them out so they can do their jobs and I can get home.”

Gavin frowned. Jack wasn’t sure if it was out of concern for his safety, or because his mouth was wrapped around the straw, sucking out the last, rattling gurgle of the empty Big Gulp.

“‘Head on a swivel,’ Clark always says,” Gavin said just before he logged off.

“You, too.”

—

Jack was grateful Gavin was on his team. He’d hate to have the middle-aged computer genius coming after him, and worse, he’d hate to not have Gavin as a resource. He tried to imagine Clark back in the day, racing around the ancient capitals of Eastern Europe crumbling behind the Iron Curtain without benefit of cell phones or high-speed Internet. How did those old guys do it with just a pocketful of change and one of those old paper phone books for comms?

Crazy.

Jack stared at the photo of Aleixandri leaving the Orange telecom store. He had the address. Should he pay a visit? What could he do? The clerk wouldn’t divulge any personal information about the woman, assuming she gave him an authentic name and ID, which Jack doubted. And breaking in after hours made no sense. He needed access to the electronic records that would identify the phone—an electronic serial number, system identification code, or mobile identification number, and, ideally, all three—and those wouldn’t be located inside the store.

But he couldn’t just sit on this, either.

The only person who could help him was Brossa. It would make an excellent bargaining chip, too.

He picked up his phone and called her, hoping to catch a late-night meeting. But she didn’t pick up, so he left a voicemail.

“I know how to find the bomber.”

20

BAVARIAN ALPS, GERMANY

She leaned the motorcycle hard right into the steeply winding mountain curve, her heart racing faster than the brushless DC three-phase electric motor accelerating between her thighs.