The Long shot mc-1

by Stephen Leather

  “Robotics?” queried Howard.

  “Robotics companies are big on artificial intelligence, and that’s the sort of expertise you’ll need. The pictures can be cleared up further by the application of algorithms using what are called the Hough Transform and Fourier Transform, and I can tell you which experts would be able to do that. A computer with some form of artificial intelligence could compare adjoining pixels and correct for abnormalities based on an assumption of what it’s looking for.”

  Howard frowned. “I don’t follow.”

  “Well, if the computer knows it’s looking at a face, it will know that an eye has a certain shape, so has a nose, so has a chin. It has to know whether a dark patch is a moustache, a nostril, or the pupil of an eye. It has to know that human bodies are made up of curves, but that mechanical objects are usually flat surfaces. If it’s looking at a licence plate, for instance, it must know to look for numbers and letters and not abstract shapes. I’m sorry, Agent Howard, I’m not explaining this very well.”

  “Cole,” he said, “please call me Cole. And you’re doing just fine. Actually, I know someone who has access to the sort of technology you’re talking about.”

  “Really?” she said. “Who would that be?”

  “Clayton Electronics.”

  Bonnie raised her eyebrows. “They’re good. Of course, their head office is in Phoenix, I’d forgotten. Why didn’t you go to them first?”

  Howard stacked the photographs together and slid them back into the file. “We wanted to keep it within the FBI as much as possible. You’ve seen the video, you know what the implications are.”

  Bonnie lowered her eyes and her cheeks reddened like a guilty schoolgirl. Howard wanted to ask her what was wrong but felt that she’d shy away from such a direct approach. He waited for her to tell him what was troubling her.

  “I had an idea,” she said, still avoiding his eyes. “Well, not my idea, really. It was my husband’s.”

  “Your husband?”

  She nodded and raised her head. “He’s a mathematician. A PhD. He specialises in computer graphics.”

  Howard was bemused, but he listened attentively. Bonnie Kim was clearly very intelligent and anything she had to offer on the case could only be of help.

  “I was explaining about the video, about the three men with rifles and the towers, and he said it would make an interesting computer model. You could program the coordinates of the men and the targets, and get a 3-D structure representing their positions.”

  Howard understood why she’d been embarrassed. She’d told her husband about the video, and was now worried she’d breached security. He wanted to tell her that it was okay, but he didn’t want to interrupt her. Her eyes were shining with enthusiasm. “You work out the heights of the towers, you calculate the angles and distances to the target, and then you superimpose that model on all the different venues where the target is due to appear.”

  Howard tapped the file with his fingers. “He could do that?”

  “He could do the preliminary work, sure. I haven’t shown him the video, but if I did he could put together the model, he said. He’d need to know the exact time of day the video was shot, so that he could use the shadows to determine heights and so on, and he might have to go out to the site to make some measurements, but yes, he could do it.”

  “What about the venues? How would he get those into his computer?”

  “You’d need street plans and the heights of the various buildings. He could customise a program for you, but it would take a lot of work to input the information. Once it’s in, though, the program would produce a 3-D model of the area, and it could then superimpose the snipers and target on it. It would tell you if the snipers were preparing for that venue or not. And if the models do fit, it’ll tell you exactly where the snipers will be. It’s a brilliant idea.”

  Howard smiled. “It is. Your husband’s a very clever man. We do have one problem, though. At the moment we don’t know who the target is.”

  Bonnie’s mouth opened, showing perfect white teeth. “Oh. I just assumed. .”

  “That it was the President?”

  She nodded. “You think it’s someone else?”

  “Bonnie, we just don’t know. But your husband’s idea is a good one. We know the President’s itinerary well in advance; if he can set the program up for us, I can bring in extra manpower to do the inputting.”

  “So I can tell him to go ahead?”

  “Sure.”

  Bonnie positively beamed. “He’ll be so pleased. He thinks it’ll be like a detective story. He suggested I ask you to come to dinner with us, tonight. I’ll cook, and he can go over the details with you.”

  It was an offer Howard couldn’t refuse.

  Andy and Bonnie Kim’s house was a spacious single-storey ranch house in a quiet suburban road to the north of Washington. The grass was neatly cropped, the paths were edged with orderly flower beds and the Stars and Stripes fluttered from a white flagpole. Two cars were parked outside when Howard arrived: a Buick Roadmaster and a Cherokee Laredo, and when Bonnie Kim opened the front door and let him in he could see that the interior was just as all-American. It wasn’t what Howard expected at all. He’d always assumed that Koreans stuck closely to their heritage, but the Kims seemed to want it made clear to everyone that they were Americans through to the core.

  Andy Kim had a round, smiling face and a mop of black hair which was continually falling over his eyes. He was as tall as Howard, but much thinner, and his horn-rimmed spectacles gave him a bookish appearance. He shook hands with Howard and asked him if he wanted a beer. Howard said he’d prefer an orange juice and Andy led him through to the living room while Bonnie went to the kitchen. Bonnie had changed from her working clothes into a floral print dress with a white collar and she’d let her hair loose so that it flowed around her shoulders and down her back. She looked impossibly young and he realised that she probably adopted the more severe look in the laboratory in order to be taken more seriously. She’d lost the high heels too and now stood just a little over five feet tall.

  Howard sat down on a long sofa and looked around the room. One wall was lined with bookshelves, a mixture of scientific books, romances and thrillers, all of them in English. On a coffee table were copies of Scientific American, Fortune and several computer magazines. The large-screen television was on but the sound had been muted. The Washington Redskins were playing.

  “Do you want to watch the game?” Andy asked.

  “I’m not a big football fan,” replied Howard.

  “Really? I love it. There’s a lot of mathematics in football, you know?”

  Bonnie came into the room carrying a bottle of Budweiser for her husband and a tall glass of orange juice for Howard. “Dinner’s ready,” she said, “come on through.”

  Before he’d stepped into the house, Howard had expected that Bonnie would cook Korean food for him and that he’d have to deal with chopsticks but having seen the interior he wasn’t in the least surprised to see that Bonnie had prepared steak, french fries and ears of white corn. After the meal, Bonnie served them coffee and all three of them went into the study, a wood-panelled room with several workbenches which were stacked high with electrical equipment and computers. Andy sipped his coffee as he switched on one of the machines. “I’ve done a little preparatory work already,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “No problem,” said Howard, sitting on a stool and watching as Andy’s fingers played across the keyboard.

  “These graphics are really simple, but they’ll give you an idea what I have in mind,” said Andy. Two circles appeared on the screen, green on a black background. Andy pressed another series of keys and the circles were replaced by two figures, one a man with a rifle, another a standing figure. “Okay, suppose we have one sniper, and a target. And suppose the distance between them is five hundred feet, and the angle is ten degrees.” His fingers tapped at the keyboard and the picture became three-dimensional, wit
h a dotted circle above the target. “We know that the sniper must be somewhere along this line,” Andy continued. “Now, if we superimpose the sniper’s possible positions on a city plan. .” Several square and oblong shapes appeared on screen in various colours. “I know, they don’t look like buildings, but you get the drift,” he said.

  Howard smiled. “I’m trying,” he said.

  Andy flicked his hair from his eyes and pushed his spectacles higher up his nose. “Okay, so now we can see which of the buildings are the right height and position to contain the sniper. And you can tell which floor he must be on to shoot at the required angle. Now, with only one sniper there are several positions which satisfy the position requirements.” He pointed to four positions on the three-dimensional map where buildings coincided with the circle. “But, if we increase the number of snipers, we restrict the number of options.”

  Andy bent over the keyboard and began pressing keys quickly. The shapes disappeared from the screen and he added two more snipers, each linked to the target with a dotted line. “With three points to work with, the positions become more fixed, each has a spatial relationship with the others, and with the target. This time we don’t get a circle, we have a tetrahedron. .” A three-dimensional four-sided shape appeared on the screen, like a knifepoint sticking into the ground. “Now it becomes much more difficult to fit this shape into the model of the city.” He called up the coloured blocks again. “See, all three points representing the snipers have to be in the correct position. There is only one solution.” He pointed to the three places where the sniper positions coincided with the buildings.

  Howard drank his coffee. “How long did it take you to set this up?” he asked.

  Andy beamed. “About three hours, but this model is really simplistic. A true working model will be much more complicated.”

  “But possible?”

  “Of course.”

  “How long would it take?”

  Andy shrugged. “The snipers and target model would take a few hours, but getting the measurements and angles is the hard part. I’d have to go out to the desert and I’d need to give the video a thorough analysis.”

  “You haven’t seen it yet?”

  “Of course not,” said Andy. “Bonnie wouldn’t dream of bringing FBI work home with her. She’d stay in the lab all night, but bring work home? Never.”

  “I can arrange for you to see it at the lab,” said Howard.

  “Okay, and I’ll have to go out to Arizona. I’ll need the best part of a day there.”

  “That’s no problem,” said Howard. “You can come back with me, tomorrow morning. You can watch the video when you get back. And I already have a list of places where the President is going to be. We can use them to see if your system works. Can I ask you something, though? What do you get out of this? I mean, the FBI will cover expenses, and I guess we could come up with some consulting fees, but there’s still a lot of work involved.”

  Andy looked at his wife and she nodded encouragement. “What I’d like, if it’s okay with you, is to do a paper on it, if it works. Most of my research is pretty dry stuff, all very academic, and this is a real sexy application of my computer modelling. It’d be a great paper, it’d really get people talking.”

  Howard thought about Andy’s proposal. “We’d need approval of the text,” he said eventually.

  “Sure. No sweat.”

  “And we might want to hold out some of the details, you realise that?”

  “It’s the mathematics I’m interested in, mainly.”

  “And you’ve got to realise that if this goes wrong, we’ll have to keep the lid on it. You might not get the chance to publish anything.”

  “I’ll take the risk.”

  Howard nodded. “It’s a deal, then.” Andy grinned and Bonnie leaned over and hugged him.

  Joker caught the afternoon train down to Hereford. He’d lost his licence six months earlier after a police car had pulled him over on the M25 with a blood-alcohol level almost twice the legal limit. It was a sunny day, but cold, and he was wearing a Navy pea jacket and black wool trousers. He spent the journey deep in thought, his shoulders hunched and his eyes focused in the middle distance as he stared at the countryside which rushed by the train window.

  He’d vowed never to return to the SAS Sterling Lines barracks and hadn’t even replied to the Regiment’s invitation to attend its fiftieth anniversary celebrations in 1991. His time with the SAS had been one of the most challenging, and exciting, periods of his life, but it had also changed him forever. It went above and beyond being a soldier: the SAS had taught him to kill, and part of that training had been a dehumanising programme which left him with a cold, hard place where his conscience used to be. It was only after he’d left the Regiment that he’d realised what he’d lost. What they’d taken away from him.

  The daylight was starting to leach from the sky as he walked away from the station and he thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his jacket. He’d taken the day off from the paintball arena, but he hadn’t made up his mind yet whether or not to work with the Colonel. There were things he had to get straight in his head first, and for that he needed someone to talk to. A friend. He kept his head down as he walked, but his feet took him unerringly to a pub he used to frequent, set in the middle of a row of brick cottages with leaded windows and old, warping oak doors. There were two barmaids pulling pints and wiping glasses, one of whom he recognised. Her name was Dolly and she served him with a smile but no hint of recognition, leaving Joker in no doubt as to how much he’d changed over the last few years.

  He ordered a Famous Grouse, a double. Two young soldiers stood together at a video game in one corner of the bar, feeding it coins as they drank pints of lager. They had the crew-cuts and thick moustaches that marked them out as being from the Parachute Regiments, from where the SAS drew most of its recruits. It would also make them feel right at home in some of London’s rough trade gay bars. Joker could never understand why they allowed the Paras to stick with their macho style once they joined the ranks of the SAS. The officers insisted that the men refrained from using military plates on their cars and that they dressed as civilians when moving between operations, yet they were so easy to spot that any terrorist worth his salt would have no problem in targeting them, on or off duty.

  Joker drained his glass and signalled for another. Dolly put a refill in front of him. “Don’t I know you?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so,” he said, handing her a twenty-pound note. “Can you give me a bottle of that, to take away?”

  She nodded, wrapped a bottle in a sheet of purple tissue paper and gave it to him with his change.

  As Joker drank his second whisky, a woman appeared at his side and sat down on a bar stool. He saw her reflection in the mirror above the cash register: she was a bleached blonde with a washed-out complexion as if she’d spent too many years indoors. In the mirror she appeared to be about thirty-five years old but when Joker turned to look at her he saw that she was older. She was wearing a red blouse and a black skirt that was a fraction too tight. The two squaddies at the video game burst into laughter and Joker had the feeling that they were laughing at her. Relations between the SAS and the locals were strained at the best of times: the soldiers usually called them ‘pointyheads’ and treated them with contempt, while the local men accused the soldiers of stealing their women. The Saturday-night fights in the crowded bars of Hereford were legendary, as were the queues in the hospital emergency room afterwards.

  The woman ordered a brandy and Coke and when she’d been served she raised her glass to Joker. “Down the hatch,” she said, and he smiled. She had the eager-to-please look of a scolded puppy.

  “Cheers,” said Joker.

  When she put the glass back on the bar it was smeared with lipstick. She nodded at the bottle in his pocket. “You need a hand to drink that?” she said. “I don’t live far from here.”

  Joker felt a sudden wave of compassion for the woman
. She looked as if she expected men to treat her badly and he didn’t want to hurt her feelings. “I can’t,” he said, “I’m visiting a friend and he’s a big drinker.”

  Her face fell momentarily, then she smiled. “Enjoy yourself,” she said.

  Joker drained his glass and left the warmth of the bar. He walked quickly, surprised at how much the temperature had dropped. He wondered if he was getting soft. The church was a brisk ten minutes walk away from the pub. It was built of grey stone with a slate roof and shielded from the road by a line of spreading chestnut trees. The wooden gate squeaked as Joker pushed it open and he walked slowly down the gravel path. He’d been to the church on more than a dozen occasions in his dress uniform: three times for weddings and the remainder for funerals. The churchyard was where the SAS buried its dead.

  Joker followed the path around to the left of the church. The graves were immaculately maintained, the grass verges trimmed with military precision and there were fresh flowers in brass vases on many of the stone and marble slabs. As Joker’s feet crunched along the gravel, the graves he passed sparked off memories and he shuddered. Two of his friends had died in an ambush on the Irish border, another had perished in a car bomb in Germany. Mick Newmarch was the only one he’d seen die.

  There was a fresh grave to the left, covered with bouquets of flowers which had begun to wither. The stone was clearly new and it bore the name of Pete Manyon. Joker stopped for a minute and looked at the cards that were still affixed to the floral tributes. A wife. Parents. A wreath in the form of the regimental crest.

  The stone on Newmarch’s grave was brutal in its simplicity: it was a grey granite block into which had been carved the officer’s name, rank, date of birth and the date he’d died. That was it. No words of condolence, no prayers for his soul. Just the facts. When it came time for Joker to be buried six feet below the ground, that was all the epitaph he wanted. The grave was set back from the path and Joker walked across the short-cropped grass, unwrapping the bottle of Famous Grouse. He took off his pea jacket, dropped it down next to the stone and sat on it. “Evening, Mick,” he said.