Tom Clancy - Locked On

“Yeah?” said Wills. “Well then, your boy is a Khalid Mir, aka Abu Kashmiri, a known operative for Lashkar-e-Taiba over in Pakistan. They are nasty, and Khalid Mir used to be one of their big shots.”

“Used to be?”

Ryan answered before Wills, “One of Kealty’s drone attacks supposedly took him out in Pakistan, about three years ago. That was about the same time LeT started branching out and sending its operatives against Western targets. Before that they had been almost exclusively a Kashmir-based terror group who struck India and only India.”

Dom Caruso spun around and looked at Rvelyan. “No offense, Junior, but aren’t you supposed to know all these guys on sight?”

Jack shrugged. “If this guy was LeT fighting against India, and he died three years ago, he wasn’t exactly on my threat matrix for dangerous Western terrorists.”

“Makes sense. Sorry.”

“Not at all.”

Granger looked at Driscoll now. “Sam? You aren’t saying anything. Dom thinks this is the guy you saw in Cairo.”

Dom answered for his partner: “Sam pegged the guy at the time as a military officer.”

Driscoll nodded. “I was sure of it, but this photo does look like it could be the same guy.”

Gavin Biery smiled. “You thought he was a military officer, huh? Well the recog software says there is a ninety-six percent chance you are right.” He made a few more clicks of his mouse. The photo of Khalid Mir’s passport disappeared and was replaced by a grainy photo of a man in an olive green uniform crossing a street, carrying a briefcase and papers under his arm. This man looked older and fuller in the face than the passport photo of Khalid Mir.

Driscoll nodded forcefully. “ That is the guy from Cairo.”

“I’ll be damned,” muttered Sam Granger. “Who is he, Tony?”

“He is Brigadier General Riaz Rehan.”

“General of what?”

“He’s in the Pakistani Defense Force. He is also the current director of Joint Intelligence Miscellaneous of the ISI. A shadowy figure, even though he’s a department head and a general. There are no known photos of the man other than this one.”

“But wait,” Clark said. “If this is Cairo guy, can Khalid Mir be Cairo guy, too?”

“Could be,” said Biery, but he didn’t clarify.

Tony Wills admonished him. “Gavin, we talked about this. No dramatics, please.”

Biery shrugged. “Damn. We IT guys never get to have any fun. Okay, here’s the thing: Both of these pictures, the ISI guy and the LeT guy, have been in the database the CIA uses for facial recognition for a long time, but they were never matched with one another.”

“Why not?” asked Clark.

Gavin seemed glad to be asked this question. “Because facial-recognition algorithms aren’t perfect. They do better when the faces being compared are photographed from the same angle with the same light values. By using facial metrics, that is to say the distance between key landmarks, like eyes and ears and such, the software determines a statistical probability that it is looking at the same face. If there are too many anomalies, either because the faces don’t match very well or because the photographs are taken at different resolutions or one of the pictures is registering some movement of the subject, then the match probability goes down precipitously. We can solve for these external discrepancies somewhat by using something called the active appearance model, which removes the shape of the face and only uses the texture as a comparison.”

Dom Caruso said, “Sorry, Gavin, but we have to be back upstairs in ten minutes. Can you cut to the chase?”

“Dom, let’s indulge him for another minute, okay?” asked John.

Dom nodded, and Biery addressed Clark directly now, as thoughnowlge the other men were not in the room. “Anyway, the picture of Khalid Mir on his passport and the picture of Riaz Rehan crossing the street in Peshawar are just too different for current facial-recognition software to connect, because there are too many variances in angle, lighting, type of equipment used for the photograph, and of course Rehan is wearing sunglasses, which is not as much of a problem as it used to be before a newer software design began being used, but it sure doesn’t help. So these two pictures”—he drew his cursor back and forth between the two older pictures on the monitor—“do not match.” Then he took the cursor over to the Cairo picture taken three days earlier. “But both of these two pictures do match this picture, because it retains just enough of the characteristics of the other two. It’s in the middle, so to speak.”

Chavez asked, “So all three shots are definitely the same guy?”

Biery shrugged. “Definitely? No. We don’t like to use that term when discussing mathematical probabilities.”

“Okay, what is the probability?”

“It’s about a ninety-one percent chance Cairo dude, general dude, and dead dude are all the same dude.”

All eyebrows in the room raised high. Ryan spoke for the group: “Holy shit!”

“Holy shit indeed,” said Wills. “We have just learned that a known terrorist for LeT is not only not dead but is now a department chief for Pakistani intelligence.”

And Granger said, “And this department head for the ISI, who is, or was, an LeT operative, is now meeting with a known bad guy in Cairo.”

“I hate to state the obvious,” Dominic said, “but we need to learn more about this Rehan guy.”

Granger looked at his watch. “Well, that was the most productive lunch break we’ve had in a while. Let’s head back up to the conference room.”

Back upstairs, Granger filled Hendley in on the developments. Immediately the discovery made by Tony Wills and Gavin Biery superseded the Paris operation as the main focus of the meeting.

“This is big,” said Hendley, “but it’s also all very preliminary. I don’t want to jump the gun on this and leak intelligence to CIA or MI6 or anyone else that isn’t one hundred percent solid. We need to know more about this general in the ISI.”

Everyone agreed.

Hendley said, “How can we check this out?”

Ryan spoke first. “Mary Pat Foley. The National Counterterrorism Center knows as much about Lashkar as anyone. If we can find out more about Khalid Mir, before he became Riaz Rehan, maybe we can use that to link the two guys together.”

Hendley nodded. “We haven’t paid a visit on Mary Pat in a while. Jack, why don’t you give her a call and take her to lunch? You can run on down to Liberty Crossing and show her the Mir-Rehan connection. I bet she’ll find that very interesting.”

“I’ll give her a call today.”

“Okay. Keep our sources and methods under your hat, though.”

“Understood.”

“And Jack? Whatever you do, don’t mention that you just got back from Paris.”

The conference room erupted in tired laughter.

Sixty-one-year-old Judith Cochrane’s rental car came with in-dash GPS, but she did not set it for the forty-mile drive down from Colorado Springs. She knew the way to 5880 State Highway 67, as she had been here many times to visit her clients.

Her rented Chrysler pulled off South Robinson Avenue, and she stopped at the first gate of ADX Florence. The guards knew her by sight but still they looked over her documents and identification carefully before letting her pass.

It wasn’t easy for an attorney to see a client at Florence; it was harder still for an attorney to see a client housed in H Unit, and a Range 13 client was nigh on impossible to meet with face-to-face. Cochrane and the Progressive Constitution Initiative were in the later stages of drafting a lawsuit to address this issue, but for now she had to play by the rules of supermax.