Джеймс Паттерсон - Killer Instinct

I was pretty sure that realization was settling over him when he suddenly snapped his fingers. He’d answered his own question.

“Facial recognition software,” he said. “That’s what’s next.”

I nodded. “Yep.”

The next step was seeing how many of these women we could identify through either mug shots or driver’s license photos. Both the NYPD and the FBI had the facial recognition software sophisticated enough to accomplish that.

But there’s a difference between taking the next step and being a step ahead. Already this was feeling like a chess match.

What were the chances that our mystery woman was really going to show up in either DMV records or a criminal database?

Sometimes the best covert agents and operatives are the ones who hide in plain sight. No one knows who they are because no one ever suspects that they’re anything different from what they want you to believe.

Other times it’s the exact opposite. The best are the ones who are so far off the grid it’s as if they’d never existed.

All I knew was that we had to allow for both possibilities.

Or maybe worse. Neither of the two.

What if this woman was a category all to herself?

Chapter 31

I HATED doing what I did next. But it had to be done.

Elizabeth and I cabbed it back to Tracy’s and my apartment. She was due at work in less than four hours and needed every minute of sleep she could get until then. “Is it weird if I wear the Louboutins to bed?” she joked before saying good night.

As far as she knew I was crawling into bed, too, equally as exhausted. I’d even said something on the way up in the elevator about needing to be quiet so as not to wake up Tracy.

But I never went into our bedroom.

After taking a peek at Annabelle—she looked so adorable snuggled up in her crib—I was back in the elevator and heading to the garage down the block for my motorcycle. I reattached my license plate with some tape. I hope it holds because it’s time to break some speed laws…

I’d already sent the text, asking if he was still awake. It was a formality. Julian and Dracula kept the same hours. I didn’t want to show up unannounced, though. The secret to a lasting friendship? Don’t abuse it.

“What have we gotten ourselves mixed up in now?” asked Julian in his thoroughly British accent, greeting me at his steel door that was ten feet behind another steel door that was past the security gate to a warehouse for a medical supply company in Fort Lee, New Jersey, that nobody had ever heard of, primarily because it didn’t actually exist.

“ Mixed up? Do I look like I’m mixed up in something?” I asked.

“It’s past four in the morning,” he said. “You bloody well better be.”

I followed Julian back to his office, smiling at the familiar sight of his giant desk made from the wing of an old Fokker Eindecker, the first German fighter plane.

“Is that Vegas?” I asked.

All the walls still doubled as seamless projection screens carrying a live feed from Julian’s latest hacking conquest. I was looking at a busy casino poker room through its own security cameras.

“No, it’s Macau,” said Julian. “I’m trying to pick up some tells on a couple of regulars. I’ll be there next month.”

“I didn’t think you took vacations.”

“You’re right, I don’t,” he said. “But enough about me, right?”

That was Julian’s version of Don’t ask, don’t tell . I shouldn’t bother asking why he was going to Macau because there was no way he was telling.

“Here,” I said instead, handing him my phone. “There are five women in total. You’re looking at the first. Swipe left to see the other four.”

“You came here in the middle of the night to show me how Tinder works?”

“Yeah, like I would actually know.”

Julian looked at all five screenshots from the hotel’s surveillance footage. Once, then twice over. “Okay, now what?”

“Does one of them look familiar to you?” I asked.

“Before I answer that, answer this,” he said. “How did you get involved in whatever this is?”

“You remember Elizabeth, right?”

Julian rubbed his chin sarcastically. “You mean, the pretty detective and only unauthorized person—other than yourself, of course—to ever set foot in this office? Oh, and the woman who was just all over the news for saving her boss’s life? Nope, can’t say I recall her.”

“Yeah, well, Elizabeth is why I’m here.”

“Interestingly enough, though, she’s not. I’m guessing that’s because of the possible identity of one of these five women. You’re thinking she might be CIA. Elizabeth might even be thinking that, too. But if one of them actually is an operative, Elizabeth can’t know her identity.”

I once saw Julian solve a Rubik’s Cube in less than fifteen seconds. With one hand, no less.

“Okay,” I said. “Go ahead and say it. If you recognized one of these women as being an operative, you sure as hell couldn’t tell me, right?”

Julian smiled. “Still, here you are asking…”

“I don’t have to anymore,” I said. “You don’t recognize any of them.”

“How do you know?”

“Your shoulders are relaxed. They tense up whenever you lie.” I motioned to the wall and the casino in Macau. “Like a player who’s bluffing.”

“Remind me never to play poker with you, Reinhart.” Julian glanced at my phone again. “No, I’ve never seen any of those women before. Then again, it’s not like the Agency puts out a yearbook. And if you’re about to ask me to hack—”

“Into the Agency’s files? No, of course not,” I said. “But I do need to identify all five of them.”

“I’m guessing that would require something beyond DMV and criminal databases. In other words, the kind of facial recognition software that doesn’t officially exist.”

“You tell me,” I said. But he already had.

As only Julian could.

Chapter 32

I TURNED to look at one of the walls again. Gone was the poker room in Macau. In its place was me. Everywhere.

I was so busy watching Julian’s shoulders I hadn’t seen his hands. He’d opened all the photos on my phone, transferring some of them to his computer. His entire office was now covered with different shots of me. Me with Tracy. Me with Annabelle. All three of us together.

“That’s a nice one, all of you there in Central Park,” said Julian, pointing.

Yes, it was a nice shot. Some woman had offered to take it after telling us in true Upper West Side fashion that she supported gay adoption 110 percent.

Only looking at the picture now I was barely recognizable. My face was contorted, and that was just for starters.

“What’s with all the red explosions?” I asked.

“I know,” said Julian. “It sort of looks like a pimple commercial.”

“Yeah, if it was directed by Michael Bay,” I said. Red spots were blowing up all over my face, one after another in rapid-fire succession. “That looks like more than measuring going on.”

“It’s called animatronic echo mapping. The next step in biometrics. It can predict muscle movement based on fixed intervals.”

Facial recognition software generally relies on measurements between key features: the eyes, ears, mouth, and nose. Its limitations derive from the inability to account for different facial expressions. But what four-star general smiles when he gets his face scanned before entering the launch room at NORAD? In other words, the limitations haven’t been too limiting. Until now, apparently.

“The times, they are a-changing, Dylan,” said Julian. “It used to be I could hack into any facial recognition system by simulating a single expression. A freeze-frame. Now it’s all about movement. Instead of passwords, most Swiss banks have recently switched to using sentences, and not just for a voice match. Every move of the mouth for each vowel sound has to match as well.”