Джеймс Паттерсон - Killer Instinct

“So this echo mapping is your way around that?”

“An eleven-foot ladder for a ten-foot wall,” said Julian. “From a series of still photos I can essentially animate you. If I can do that, I can be you.”

“And empty my Swiss bank account?”

He grinned. “If need be.”

“Good to know if I actually had one,” I said. “Even better would be knowing how this is going to help me identify the five women.”

Julian looked down at my phone. “These are still frames from surveillance footage, right? So, what I need is the footage.”

I felt like a Boy Scout handing him the flash drive I’d made with all the recordings. I’d come prepared.

Julian began downloading the files, and I was starting to get the picture, so to speak. Julian was a hacker, not a programmer. This wasn’t his program, but he was well equipped to reverse engineer it and tinker with its application. In doing so, the possibilities were literally endless. Forget about only being able to search mug shots and driver’s license photos. Now you could identify almost anyone using the internet, and not only by their photos. That was the true innovation. All videos were now in play. Snapchat. YouTube. You name it.

The times, they were indeed a-changing.

As fast as I’d appeared, I was now gone from Julian’s walls. In my place were the five women, one shot after another, amid the barrage of red bursts. It felt like the room was exploding.

Then, it all suddenly stopped.

“Winner, winner, chicken dinner!” said Julian with a clap of his hands.

I spun around on my heel, my head craning to look at every wall. “Which one?”

“Right shoulder, three o’clock,” he said.

I turned. Fittingly, I was staring at a still frame taken from a video. She was standing at a podium. It was as if she were staring right back at me. “How do you know it’s her?” I asked. “How do you know she’s the one?”

He made a few taps on his keyboard. “Because of this,” he said.

Chapter 33

SHE DIDN’T have a mug shot, and according to the motor vehicle departments in all fifty states, she didn’t have a driver’s license either. But she did have a job.

Julian enlarged the description underneath the video he’d found. It was from the website of New York University. Professor of Philosophy Sadira Yavari speaking at the Great Thinkers Summit, it read.

Before I could even ask for it, Julian pulled up her bio from another page on the website that listed all the NYU faculty.

Sadira Yavari was an Iranian-born professor who had taught philosophy at the university for seven years. Her focus was epistemology, the study of knowledge and justified belief.

“It can’t be a coincidence,” said Julian.

“Which part?” I asked. “That she and Darvish are both Iranian or both professors?”

“Both,” he said.

On the one hand, he was right. The fact she was Iranian was proof enough for me that she had been the one with Darvish at the hotel. That she could also claim to be a professor only further explained how she was able to get close enough to him to end up in his room.

On the other hand, “Do you notice something odd about her bio?” I asked.

Julian read it again. He nodded. “Seven years.”

That’s how long Yavari had been teaching at NYU. An operative would never be in one place for that many years. Two was the norm. Three, max. Never as long as seven. My stint at Cambridge lasted thirty months. Coincidentally or not, I got made after twenty-nine.

“Of course, there is a simple explanation,” I said.

“A civilian recruit? It rarely happens,” said Julian, “and even less so with a woman.”

“Rarely, but not never.”

Sadira Yavari could’ve been recruited by the Agency for a specific assignment because she matched a unique profile that was needed—in this case an Iranian-born professor, and a very attractive one at that. But recruiting civilians fully entrenched in their civilian lives is a hard sell. Like ice-to-Eskimos hard.

And Julian was right—it’s even harder with women. As opposed to men, women don’t secretly harbor thoughts of being James Bond.

“Is it possible? Sure,” said Julian. “Think limited scope. Maybe all she had to do was cozy up to Darvish and set the table for someone else to kill him.”

“With a heart attack? And a bottle lodged up his—”

“Yeah, I read the report. You can spare me the details.”

Regardless, it prompted a question: had the two professors previously known each other? “What do we have for phone records?” I asked.

I watched Julian work his keyboard, his fingers a blur. He had both cell and landline numbers for Darvish and Yavari within seconds. Just as quick, he cross-checked all their billing statements for the past couple of years.

“No calls or texts between them,” he said.

“It makes sense. A one-night stand.”

Julian eyed Yavari again on the wall. Actually, it was more like ogling. She truly was gorgeous. Long dark-brown hair and high cheekbones. She looked a bit like Amal Clooney. “A one-night stand would’ve certainly worked for me,” he said.

Julian clicked on the video of her from the NYU website so we could hear her voice. Sure enough, she sounded as good as she looked. Poised. Intelligent. In complete control.

She was telling a funny anecdote about taking the wrong subway all the way out to Queens when she first moved to Manhattan. The point being, as much as she believed she knew where she was going, the truth was that she had no idea. It was a parable for epistemology.

“But what if I had guessed right?” she asked the audience. “Does taking the right subway unto itself prove that I knew where I was going?”

On cue, the person filming her lecture turned the camera on the audience. Some heads were nodding; others were bobbing as if pondering the question. Everyone was fully engaged. Sadira Yavari had the room, as they say. They were hanging on her every—

“ Wait! Hold it,” I said.

Julian paused the video. “What is it?”

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. “Third row, second from the right. Do you know him?”

“No, but you obviously do,” said Julian. “Who is he?”

“I’m not exactly sure, but I’ve met him. He’s even been inside my apartment.”

“And you don’t know his name?”

“No,” I said. “But I know what his name definitely isn’t. Benjamin Al-Kazaz .”

Chapter 34

ELIZABETH’S SUNGLASSES were pulling double duty as she opened the door to the Starbucks around the corner from Dylan and Tracy’s apartment. In addition to shielding her from the press in the wake of the Evan Pritchard video, the dark-tinted lenses were concealing the Samsonite-sized bags under her eyes on the heels of less than four hours of sleep.

She was exhausted. She was also running late. Pritchard had scheduled an early briefing with all agents assigned to the Times Square bombings. It started in twenty minutes. Her Uber was due out in front of the Starbucks within moments.

“I’ll take a large coffee, please.”

“We don’t have large,” said the girl with the purple-dyed hair behind the counter. “Did you mean a venti ?”

Elizabeth could count on two fingers how many times she’d ever set foot in a Starbucks. She always preferred her coffee from diners. So did her wallet. But there was no time this morning. “Sure, I’ll take a venti—whatever your largest size is,” she said.

“Well, our largest size is actually a trenta. It means thirty in Italian. As in, ounces. Venti means—”

“Yeah, venti means twenty. As in, ounces. I get it,” said Elizabeth.

“So which one do you want, a venti or a trenta? If you haven’t noticed, there’s a line behind you.”