Stephen Leather - The Long shot

He’d caught the first flight from Washington with Andy Kim, who was now out in the desert with the men from the Sheriffs Department who’d been first at the scene. Howard had wanted to go with them but he knew it was important to get the video to Clayton now that he knew the limits of the FBI’s technology. He looked at his watch again and smoothed the creases of his trousers. After a while he stood up and walked over to a display case containing some of Clayton’s kachina dolls. The religious figures, carved from the roots of cottonwood trees by the Hopi Indians of Northern Arizona, were extremely valuable, and some of them dated back to the eighteenth century. Clayton was an avid collector of Native American art, and he enjoyed putting it on show, more as an exhibition of his wealth than his good taste.

“Mr Clayton will see you now, Mr Howard,” said the secretary. She stood up and opened the door for him. Howard knew that Clayton wouldn’t even consider walking to the reception area to greet him, and that when he entered his office the man would be sitting behind his big desk. He was right. Clayton waited until Howard was halfway across the large expanse of shag-pile carpet before getting to his feet and he adjusted the cuffs of his made-to-measure silk shirt before stepping around his antique desk. Clayton’s suits were made for him by a tailor in London’s Savile Row who flew over every six months for fitting sessions and they cost more than Howard earned in a month. Clayton was as well groomed as a TV weatherman and had the chiselled good looks to go with the wardrobe: brown hair greying at the temples, the sort of teeth that only serious money can buy, a light tan which suggested business trips overseas rather than vacations, and just enough wrinkles to imply maturity and confidence.

“Cole, Cole, sorry to have kept you waiting for so long.” Clayton’s apology and gleaming smile seemed as artificial as the plants in the fish tank outside. He slapped Howard on the back and guided him to a sofa in the corner of the office.

“Oh, I know how busy you are, Ted.” Howard sat down and put the briefcase on his knees.

“You said this was important?”

“Very,” said Howard.

“FBI business, or is there a problem at home?”

Howard felt himself flushing involuntarily. “No, Ted, there’s no problem at home.”

Clayton put a firm hand on Howard’s shoulder and squeezed. “Glad to hear it, Cole. Glad to hear it. So, what can I do for you?”

Howard opened the briefcase, took out the videocassette and handed it to the older man. “This is a recording of an incident out in the desert near the Havasu Lake Wildlife Refuge last week. A small plane was shot down by a group of snipers. We’ve gone as far as we can with our video equipment, and we need to know who the men are.”

“Snipers in the desert? What in God’s name would they be doing in the desert? Leaving aside the fact that it’s a wildlife refuge, there’s nothing worth hunting out there. I should know.” Theodore Clayton was an avid hunter and had a large trophy room in the basement of his home, where he insisted on taking Howard at regular intervals. Howard hated the glassy-eyed stares of Clayton’s victims but humoured him for his wife’s sake.

“We think they were rehearsing an assassination,” said Howard.

Clayton’s eyebrows leapt up. “You’re joking!” he exclaimed.

Howard shook his head. “I wish I was. There are three of them at different distances and heights from four dummies which we assume represent the target. We think the plane was shot down because they inadvertently stumbled on the rehearsal.”

“Cole, this almost defies belief. Who on earth would go to the trouble of rehearsing an assassination in the middle of a desert?”

“The rifle sights have to be calibrated, the timing has to be practised. Assuming they’re only going to get one chance, they’d obviously want to do a dry run somewhere secluded. They chose the site carefully. The only major highway anywhere near is 93 and that’s the other side of the Hualapai Mountains.”

Clayton held up the cassette. “And they recorded the whole thing?”

“No, one of the passengers had a camcorder. It survived the crash.”

“Fortuitous,” said Clayton.

“Depends on your point of view,” said Howard, thinking about Mrs Mitchell trying to calm her son as the plane plunged to the ground.

“So, what is it exactly that you want me to do with this?”

“We can’t make out the faces of the men in the video. There are three with rifles, and three more who seem to be organising the rehearsal. There are several vehicles there; we can see what make they are but we’d like to pick out the licence plates.”

“You’re not asking much, Cole!” laughed Clayton.

“Can you do it?” asked Howard.

“Depends,” said the older man, walking back to his desk. “Depends on how detailed the tape is, depth of focus, quality of the lens. There’s a whole series of factors at work. I’ll have to get my people to take a look at it before I can give you a verdict.”

“But you are doing work on this sort of tape analysis, aren’t you?”

“We sure are,” said Clayton, sitting down in his high-backed leather chair. “And the Government’s picking up most of the bill, too, so I’d be more than happy to help out the FBI. It’ll help us when it comes time for appropriations.”

“What’s Uncle Sam’s interest in video technology?” Howard asked.

Clayton smiled and beat a tempo on the top of his desk with his palms. “It’s not just Uncle Sam, Cole. Image processing is big business in medicine, physics, astronomy, biology, you name it, there’s hardly a scientific field not involved. We’ve only begun to scratch the surface. The day’s going to come when machines will read and analyse X-rays and Cat-scans, without any humans being involved at all. Diagnosis by machines. It’s coming.”

“That would explain why MIT would get involved, but not Clayton Electronics,” pressed Howard, recognising his father-in-law’s familiar evasion technique. He’d long ago learned that when Theodore Clayton was being flexible with the truth, his hands tended to betray his lips.

“Well, I can’t deny there are certain military applications which we think will be particularly profitable,” said Clayton. “But there’s a big future in the commercial computer processing of satellite photographs — things like crop monitoring and weather assessment. And there are opportunities in all sorts of quality control operations — computers can make interpretations on the basis of mathematical equations and statistical moments, with none of the distractions that make human decisions so unreliable.” Clayton’s fingers were tapping silently on the desk blotter. He looked levelly at his son-in-law and his voice was as steady as a judge pronouncing sentence, but Howard knew that he was hiding something. “You tell me, whose judgment would you most trust — a computer which has a one hundred per cent record of accurate diagnosis of cancer from X-rays, or a radiologist who has just broken up with his wife and had his BMW vandalised?”

“No contest, I guess,” said Howard. He wondered what Clayton was hiding. Howard crossed his legs and looked out of the window to the side of Clayton’s desk. It overlooked the parking lot and he could see Clayton’s pristine Rolls-Royce gleaming in the afternoon sun. Theodore Clayton hadn’t got to where he was by working to help further the cause of medical science, he’d made a fortune on the backs of a series of multi-million dollar defence contracts including night sights, heads-up displays and computerised video surveillance equipment.

Howard realised that his father-in-law was talking to him. “Well?” said Clayton.