Douglas Preston - Gideon’s Sword

The DVD then cut through a series of rapid frames, one after another, showing Wu walking down the terminal, entering passport control, waiting in the interminable NON-US-CITIZEN line, going through passport control, breezing through customs, then walking out and down the escalators.

“Hey. There’s you!” said Jackson. “Like a deer in the headlights.”

“Very funny.”

The DVD ended outside, with the Escape driving off.

Gideon rubbed his eyes. He felt like a damn fool, taking such a risk at the airport — a risk that might well come back to haunt him — for nothing.

“I’m tired,” said Jackson. “I’m jet-lagged, I didn’t sleep a wink last night, thanks to you. Do you mind?”

Gideon was staring at the image of the car, frozen on the screen. “There’s just one thing I’d like to look at again—”

“Out.”

“No, really. Something I’d like to see again. Right at the beginning.”

“What?”

“When Wu walks through those waiting people. Did you see there was an Asian woman there with a boy?”

“There were a lot of Asians.”

“Yes, but — I want to see it again.”

She sighed, turned back to the screen. They watched it again.

“There!” said Gideon abruptly, causing her to jump.

“I didn’t see anything.”

“Watch again.” He retracked the video and went through it in slow motion.

“I still didn’t see anything. Trust me, our experts have examined this tape in detail.”

“Quiet and watch… There! ” He froze the frame. “A classic sleight. A reverse palm-out manip.”

“A what?”

He felt himself blush. “I studied magic.” He didn’t go into the reasons why he had studied magic. “You learn how to manipulate smallish pieces of paper. Magicians call such moves ‘manips.’ Usually they’re for cards.” He backed up the DVD and went through it again, frame by frame. “Check it out. The boy drops the teddy bear as Wu approaches…she leans over to pick it up…anyone watching would be following her hand picking up the teddy bear. But look at her left hand…you see her left palm is facing out, wrist straight…Then Wu goes past, and afterward her left hand is closed and the wrist slightly bent.”

He ran it through it yet again, frame by frame.

“I think I saw it,” she said doubtfully. “He passed her something.”

“No, no ! It’s a reverse — she passed him something. And she did it in a way to hide it from anybody watching from any angle.”

“Why would she pass him something?”

“No idea.” Stopping the replay and getting a small piece of hotel notepaper, he demonstrated the move.

“I’ll be damned. But if she passed him a piece of paper, where is it?”

“Who knows? I expect he destroyed it when he realized he was being pursued.”

“That woman,” said Jackson, “is key. We’ve got to find her.”

Gideon nodded.

She turned to him. “We’ll split up the job. You look for the boy, I’ll look for the woman.”

“How in the world could I find the boy—?” But then he stopped, having noticed something else in the video; something that she, and everyone else, had apparently overlooked.

Jackson was already putting on her coat, gathering her wallet. “Call me if you find anything. I’ll do likewise.”

Tom O’Brien’s stubbled face slipped away from his supporting palm, and he awoke with a jerk. He glanced blearily over at the clock: just past ten. He’d been asleep at his desk for several hours and both his legs were tingling. It had happened again: he’d gotten so engrossed in the Python data-handling extension he’d been coding that he’d “wrapped around” the previous night and totally forgotten to sleep.

He stood up with a groan and massaged his legs. Food: that would wake him up.

Sliding a Sacramentum CD into the player and cranking it up, he padded into the kitchen. Pushing away piles of dirty dishes to make a work space, he pulled a baguette from its paper sheath and cut it lengthwise. Quickly he assembled a sandwich: peanut butter, sliced banana, mini marshmallows. A few slices of deli pickle added the final touch. He pressed the two halves of the sandwich together, tucked it under one arm, plucked a liter bottle of Dr Pepper from the fridge, and headed back toward his office.

He neighed in surprise and dismay at the sight of a man in his living room. Bottle and sandwich fell to the floor in unison, marshmallows and pickles flying everywhere. Then he saw it was Gideon Crew.

“Stop doing that!” he yelled at his friend. “If I die of a heart attack, who’s going to solve your little problem?” He knelt down and began reassembling the sandwich, picking cat hairs off the pickles.

“Don’t tell me you’re still eating peanut-butter-and-pickle sandwiches,” Gideon said. “Not interested in living to enjoy your Social Security, I guess.”

“Don’t you worry about me. I’m not the one being chased by half the spooks in Langley.” He scowled. “I haven’t had time to do any more work on those numbers.”

“No? Why not?”

“Unlike some people, I have to work for a living.”

“Yeah. Assistant lecturer at Columbia. When are you going to stop being a perennial grad student and actually earn that degree?”

“And face the real world?” He took a bite of the sandwich and headed into his office, Gideon following. “Look, it’s not just my work. It’s the nature of your problem. I told you, it’s like having a recipe without the ingredients. Three tablespoons of X, two ounces of Y, and a pinch of Z. Without the ingredients, I can’t do squat!”

“There’s something else I need your help on.”

“Do I get another thousand?”

Gideon ignored this, reaching into his coat and pulling out a DVD. “There’s a video capture on this. I need you to blow up and enhance an image for me.”

O’Brien took it and felt his face light up. “Oh. That’s easy.”

Gideon pointed at the music player with a pained expression. “Before we get started, mind turning that off? If any music could be carcinogenic, that’s it.”

O’Brien glanced at him in mock horror. “You don’t like blackened death metal?”

“Not even when it’s the blue plate special.” Gideon looked around for a place to sit, but there was only one chair in the tiny, impossibly crowded office and O’Brien was already in it. “I’ve never seen so much junk crammed into so little space. When are you going to clear some of this crap out?”

“Junk? Crap?” O’Brien sniffed as he turned down the volume of his player. “Everything in here is absolutely necessary to my work. For instance.” And wheeling his chair around, he plucked a gray metal device the size of a shoe box from its precarious perch atop an ancient UNIX terminal, placed it on his desk, plugged it in, and attached it to his PC.

“What’s that?” Gideon asked.

“It’s a VDT.”

“I repeat: what’s that?”

“A virtual digital telecine. Normally used to transfer different kinds of video stock from one format to another. But this particular model is very useful for forensic video work.” Turning it on, he pressed a few buttons on the tiny LED screen, then slid Gideon’s DVD into the slot. As the machine whirred, he took a huge bite of his sandwich, double-clicked an icon on the computer desktop. “I’m firing up the VDT’s host application.”

A large window appeared on the screen, surrounded by several smaller windows that included fine-grained transport controls, gamma correction, and utilities for image manipulation. “Where is it?”

“Just start playback. I’ll tell you when you reach the target image.”