Stephen Hunter - I, Sniper

I am so close, he thought.

And when his cell rang and he looked at the caller ID and saw a Rochester area code, he thought he might have a heart attack. It had to be the lab. He’d appended a note with his number, asking for notification. He knew he just couldn’t face opening a FedEx package with no idea in hell what it contained, especially as the whole office would be secretly watching.

“Banjax.”

“Mr. Banjax, hi there, it’s Jeremy Cleary up at Donex, in Rochester.”

“Oh, hi” was what David came up with, so lame, his heart tripping off in his chest.

“Yes, you’d sent us a note; you’d asked for a call with our preliminary findings, before we sent out the final report?”

“Yes sir. Yes, I did. Do you have information for me?”

“I do.”

“Well, gee, let’s have it, Mr. Cleary.” He felt his heart bounce into overdrive.

“We find nothing.”

That was it?

What, nothing?

“I don’t understand. I’m not sure of your nomenclature. Is that good or bad? Is it real or not? Is it authentic or what?”

“Oh, you don’t know much about this, I see.”

“No, not a thing. Is nothing good or bad? There’s a lot riding on this.” He had not told them he was with the Times because he didn’t want that influencing their interpretation. Instead, he was just a David Banjax, of the given address of the bureau, Washington DC.

“Well, what we do is track fractal discrepancies. We examine by electron microscope, infrared scanner, spectroscope, even digitally break it down to sound waves and look for noise. That’s what your money buys you.”

“Okay, well, nothing would mean… authentic, right?”

He held his breath.

“We don’t operate in terms of ‘authentic’ or ‘inauthentic.’ What you get from us is a report of a digital forensics inspection. We look at a number of things: the smoothness of the images, patterns of relationship between adjacent pixels in the images. Altered images have distinct differences between the edges of the images and the original area next to them. We look at the length of the shadows, the color consistency; we measure the lighting to see if it is consistent in various parts of the image. We look deeply in the eyes of the people to see the reflections that appear there and determine if they are consistent with the rest of the photo. We search for clone-stamped areas of an image-parts that are so similar to each other as to make them suspect of having been the same image from the original area. The lab also assumes that all original photographs have ‘noise’ to some extent, and the noise has a certain consistency. Introducing a piece of another photo will give a different noise level and pattern that cannot be detected by the naked eye. If we had the original neg, we would be able to analyze much more information.”

“Did you have enough to make a call?”

“Well, our technicians don’t make calls. They measure, they tabulate, and they issue a finding. In this case, the finding was nothing.”

“So nothing is good?”

“Nothing means we can detect under various of our testings no indication of the presence of fractal discrepancies which would suggest photo manipulation techniques have been employed. Is it genuine? Well, that’s the kind of contextual decision you have to make. That’s about history, provenance, even trust. Not our department. What I’m telling you is that we will issue a bonded statement, and defend it in court if so required, that we discovered no meaningful evidence of photo manipulation in the photo you sent us. If that’s your definition of ‘authentic,’ then you have your ‘authenticity,’ Mr. Banjax.”

“Nobody doctored it?”

“You’ll never get me to say that. What you will get me to say is that at the level of detail of which our laboratory is capable-the best in the country in commercial use-there is no tangible evidence of fractal discrepancy.”

“To me, that would be authentic.”

And to the Times , that would be authentic too.

Suddenly the air was sweet and chilled, and oh so much fun to breathe.

I did it, he thought. I got him. I got Nick Memphis.

It was not a good day, but then there’d been few good days for Task Force Sniper since the suspension of Nick and the arrival of the Robot. The Robot had a name but no one ever said it; he was, it was alleged, human, just as they all were; he just never showed it. He was the director’s designated enforcer, who was sent to trouble spots in the Bureau with instructions to make the trouble go away and make all the people who were making the trouble go away as well. His means were generally not pleasant. Like his namesake, he accomplished this task with mechanistic grinding and trampling; it was said that he could walk through walls and that heat rays burst from his fists when necessary.

It wasn’t that the Robot was on the warpath. He was never not on the warpath, the warpath being the state of his life and career. It was that this particular day, he himself had gotten a prod in the butt from the director about the Task Force Sniper report, and since it fell to the team of Chandler and Fields to write it, and since Fields was a bum writer, it fell really to Chandler, and she felt everything grinding downward upon her.

“You can’t move any faster?” the Robot demanded.

“Sir, it’s writing. It’s more nuanced; you have to find the best ways of saying things; you have troubles and problems and you have to reconcile conflicting evidence on nearly every page. It’s not like something you can just do.”

“It’s not a novel. It doesn’t need a style. It’s not supposed to fly along. Nobody’s publishing it except a Xerox machine.”

“Yes sir, and I’m not Agatha Christie either, but it’s got to make sense, be smooth, hang together, and give its readers a clear view of the case and our conclusions. That takes time.”

“Is your support up to par?”

Of course it wasn’t. The problem was Ron Fields, a brilliant operator, a former SWAT hero with more than a few gunfight wins to his credit, an up-and-comer of the Nick school, decent and true and modest and funny, but… he seemed kind of dumb. He was certainly no writer. A giant in the professional world, as her coauthor he became a kind of erratic junior member, lazy and mysteriously absent, and his warrior’s reputation made it difficult for poor new girl Starling to cope.

On the other hand, she had a terrible crush on him, as she did on Nick, and she was never going to be one of those headquarters snitch bitches who rises on complaints of others’ ineptitude.

“Agent Fields is a fine collaborator, sir.”

“There are a lot of people in Washington who want this thing on their desks yesterday. I only tell you what you know, but I tell it in a loud voice in case you’ve forgotten it. If you need help, sing out. I’ll get you interns, secretaries, typists, the works. I’ll even hire John Grisham.”

“I’ve just got to get it right.”

“I know you liked Memphis. Everybody liked Memphis. But you can’t let any affection for him frost your efforts for me and your job on this assignment. I’ve heard it said that the task force agents are dawdling because they want to see Memphis cleared of these charges and are waiting to see if someone on the new suspect list takes the investigation in another direction. Tell me that’s not true.”

“Sir, I’m just working as hard as I can, that’s all.”

“Okay, okay, get back to it. Why are you wasting time on me?” And with that the Robot lurched onward, looking for another target to destroy, slightly frustrated because the girl had not crunched under as he’d thought she might.