Jeffery Deaver - Watchlist

“Translation, please,” said Connolly.

“Meaning the facial-recognition software is still crap and the images are still fuzzy, but now we can all feel good about how much money we’re throwing at the terrorists.”

“And that’s in our favor… how exactly?” she asked.

He pointed to the steel shelves lined with video monitors. “Once the Bureau realized how crappy the facial-recognition system is, they were forced to sink more money into toys for boys like me to play with. Remember the Super Bowl?”

She groaned. The FBI had put in an extensive surveillance system at the Super Bowl in Tampa in 2001 in order to scan the faces of everyone passing through the turnstiles and match them against the images of known terrorists. The ACLU pitched a fit-this was before 9/11, when people listened to the ACLU-but the whole scheme was a resounding flop anyway. The Bureau had rounded up a couple of scalpers and that was it. “You’re telling me the technology’s no better now?”

“Oh, it’s better,” Ardsley said. “Well, a little better.”

Her phone chirped, and she excused herself and stepped out into the hallway.

“Connolly.”

“Hey, M. T., it’s Tanya Jackson in Technical Services.”

“That was fast,” she said. “You got something?”

She’d called the FBI’s Technical Services unit and asked them to run a locater on Middleton’s cell phone to find out where he was at that very instant. Most cell phones these days, she knew, contained GPS chips that enabled you to pinpoint its location to within a hundred meters, as long as it was turned on and transmitting a signal.

“Well, not exactly,” Jackson said. “There’s sort of a procedural problem.”

“Procedural?…”

“Look, M. T.,” Jackson said apologetically, “you know we’re no longer allowed to track cell phone users without a court order.”

“Oh, is that right?” Connolly said innocently. Of course, she knew all about the recent rulings. Now you had to get a court order to compel a wireless carrier to reveal the location of one of their cell phones. And to get a court order, you had to demonstrate that a crime was in progress or had occurred.

But Jackson had done her favors before. She’d located cell phones for Connolly without the necessary paperwork. Why did she all of a sudden care about the legal niceties?

“Tanya,” she said, “what’s going on?”

There was silence on the other end of the line.

“You’re getting heat on this, aren’t you?” Connolly said.

Another beat of silence, and then Jackson said, “Five minutes after you called me, I heard from someone pretty high up in the Bureau. He reminded me that it was a felony for me to locate a cell phone without a court order. I could go to jail.”

“I’m sorry I put you in that position,” Connolly said.

“I just wanted you to understand.”

“Tanya,” Connolly said. “Was it Emmett Kalmbach, by any chance?”

“I-I can’t answer that,” Jackson said.

But she didn’t have to.

“You’re in luck,” Bruce Ardsley said. He was beaming.

“Dragan Stefanovic is the shooter?”

He nodded.

“How certain can you be?”

“Ninety-seven percent probability of true verification.”

“Bruce, that’s fantastic.” Take that, Kalmbach, she thought.

“The probability on the other one’s lower, though.”

“The other one?”

“Maybe seventy-eight percent probability.”

“Which other one are you talking about?”

Ardsley swiveled around in his chair, tapped at a keyboard, and a large photographic image came up on the flat-screen monitor mounted on the wall in front of her. It was a close-up of a dark-haired man in his 40s wearing a dark, expensive-looking business suit. He had flat, Slavic facial features.

“Where was this taken?”

“A surveillance camera outside a men’s room in Concourse D at Dulles.”

“Who is it?” she said.

“Nigel Sedgwick.”

“Who?”

Ardsley struck another key, and a second photo popped onto the screen next to the first.

“A British businessman. From Bromsgrove, in Worcestershire. That’s England. Or so his passport said. Here in D.C. on a buying trip for his hot-tub business.”

“Looks like it was taken at passport control,” she said.

Ardsley turned around, shrugged modestly, smiled. “Right.”

“How’d you get it?”

“I hacked into Homeland Security. Well, not hacked, really. Just used a backdoor into Customs and Border Protection’s database.”

“So who is this guy really?”

A third image appeared on the screen next to the other two. She immediately recognized the photo as one of the mug shots of Agim Rugova’s men that Padlo had emailed her.

“Vukasin,” she said.

“He entered the country last night on a British Airways flight from Paris. Using a British passport.”

Connolly nodded. “I guess Homeland Security doesn’t have facial-recognition software, huh? Or they’d have stopped him.”

“Oh, they have the software, believe me,” he said. “Plus, this guy Vukasin is on one of their watch lists.”

“Maybe their software isn’t as good as ours.”

“Or maybe someone knew who he was and let him in anyway.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” she said.

“A lot of what Homeland Security does makes no sense,” Ardsley said.

“What are you saying-you think he was flagged as a bad guy but let through anyway?”

“Yes,” Ardsley said. “That’s what I think. But I’m only a video tech, so what do I know?”

“Jesus,” she breathed.

“So let me ask you something,” he said.

She turned away from the flat-screen. “Go ahead.”

“You ever free for a drink?”

“You don’t give up, do you?” Connolly said.

He pointed at the ripped motivational poster on the wall. “Persistence,” he said with a sheepish smile.

As Connolly approached her cubicle, she saw from a distance that a man was sitting in her chair. Another man was standing next to him.

The man in the chair was Emmett Kalmbach. The man standing beside him was tall and wiry, with horn-rimmed glasses and a receding hairline. She had no idea who he was.

Then the standing man noticed her, muttered something, and Kalmbach turned slowly around.

“Agent Connolly,” Kalmbach said, getting to his feet. “Allow me to introduce Richard Chambers from DHS.”

She shook hands with the man in the horn-rimmed glasses. His handshake was cold and limp.

“Dick Chambers,” the man said. He didn’t smile.

“M. T. Connolly.”

“Dick is a Regional Director of Homeland Security,” Kalmbach said.

“A pleasure to meet you.” Connolly kept her tone and face neutral, as if she’d never heard of him. But in fact she had. His background was almost clichéd diplomatic track: Yale, OCS, and then State Department. He’d been posted to some of the worst hotspots in the world. After September 11, he’d gone to Homeland Security, resolved that no terrorist would ever show his face in the Mid-Atlantic region of the country. Chambers wasn’t popular among the feds-an abrasive façade over an ego that wouldn’t quit-but he was a man who took on fires that nobody else wanted to go near. And, without any hesitation to risk his own hide, he got them extinguished. That he was involved made her uneasy. Real uneasy. “Now will someone explain to me what’s going on?” she asked.

“We can talk in the conference room,” Kalmbach said.

“Agent Connolly,” the man from Homeland Security said, “we seem to have a communications problem that I hope we can all work out in person.” He’d taken a seat at the head of the mahogany conference table, wordlessly indicating his place in the hierarchy.