Silent Assassin(104)

CHAPTER 59


Boston, March 10





“What the hell were you thinking, Morgan?” Bloch asked.

Bloch’s office, opaque glass, being chewed out. Nothing new for Morgan.

“Do you really believe we would simply have let him go?” asked Bloch. She was sitting close to him, facing him with those cold blue eyes of hers.

“Yes,” said Morgan. “I really do.”

“We had a helicopter standing by. We would have used satellite surveillance.”

“And still he would have gotten away, like he got away before.”

“Maybe,” Bloch admitted. “But even so. Do you think he was working alone? There’s something bigger behind this. And Edmund Charles was our only link to it. He was valuable even out of our grasp. Something lost can be found. But now he’s dead, and we have no way of tracing whoever is behind him.”

“Somehow, I can’t be too sorry to have killed a mass murderer,” said Morgan. “His bosses can wait. We’ll come for them too.”

“If we ever find out who they are,” said Bloch. “You’re not off the hook for this, Morgan. But luckily for you, this isn’t over yet. We still need to find Novokoff. It seems Shepard has something he wants to show us.” She hit the button on the intercom. “Shepard. War room.”

Morgan and Bloch walked down to the war room and sat at the table. Shepard waltzed in seconds later. “You’re gonna like this one,” he said.

“What is it?” asked Bloch.

“It’s a system I devised.” He clicked something in his hand, and the screen lit up. It showed a picture of a face. “It uses existing facial recognition software, which is itself pretty amazing.” Red dots appeared on different points of the face, including the cheekbones and the corners of the eyes and lips. “It uses a multipoint system to extrapolate a 3-D model of the—”

“Shepard,” said Bloch. “Focus.”

“Okay. So. This face recognition can be completely automated, and a powerful enough computer can analyze hundreds of faces per second. But the problem is, then, what are you going to analyze? Traffic and surveillance cameras are generally still too grainy, the definition isn’t good enough for the program. But.”

“But?” prodded Bloch.

He clicked the device again, and brought up a screen capture of a page from a popular social networking site. It showed the personal picture gallery of a person Morgan didn’t know. “What we have is photographs. An unprecedented volume of photographs being uploaded and shared on the Internet, out there where everyone—or at least, I—can see. But that, of course, isn’t enough. Every picture has embedded in it a good amount of metadata, including the date and time it was taken. More importantly for us, pictures taken on GPS-enabled phones can pinpoint the exact location where the photograph was taken as well.”

“So if a picture gets taken with Novokoff in the background—”

“We will know the location and time when it was taken, and so get an estimated position on him,” Shepard concluded.

“On a day like St. Patrick’s in New York, people are going to be taking pictures left and right. This might actually work.”

“And that,” said Shepard, “is why it pays to have a genius on your side.”





CHAPTER 60


New York City, March 17





It was a beautiful clear day in the Northeast and New York City was all clad in green. People caroused on the streets, bringing the city to life. The atmosphere was electric, joyous. The parade would go down Fifth Avenue from Forty-fourth street all the way to the Metropolitan Museum. Somewhere along that line, Nikolai Novokoff would strike.

Morgan, Bishop, Spartan, and Diesel had each been outfitted with a Kawasaki Ninja—sleek black sports bikes, which were far better than cars for navigating the crowds around the parade. He was carrying his usual Walther with a combat knife hidden on his ankle. In his pocket was an FBI badge that would fool any police officer and even turn up as legitimate in a computer search, courtesy of well-placed Zeta Division contacts. Morgan rode slowly down Seventh Avenue, eyes peeled, waiting for anything on Novokoff.

“How’s your system working, Shepard?” Morgan asked.

“The concept is sound,” said Shepard.

“Yeah, well, let’s just see how it performs in its first field test.”

Morgan wove smoothly and slowly through traffic and the jaywalkers who filled the streets. He stopped at a light. He watched the people crossing the street, many of them in green, some with painted faces. Young and old, men and women. So many people. So many for Novokoff to hide among, and so many he could kill.