by David Cole
“Rectifying?”
“You know about it. Why do I feel like I’m being played like a grand piano?”
“There’s more.”
“I figured this would be about Carnivore.”
“It is…I mean, that’s why I called you, at first. The map stuff, satcom surveillance photos, that came up later.”
“Where did you get this picture?”
“It was emailed to me.”
“To you?”
“To me.”
“But how…what aren’t you telling me?”
“A lot, Miss Gilbert.”
“Michelle.”
“Michelle. But I have to do this one thing at a time.”
We got to the parking lot and Kyle’s old pickup.
“Well,” she said, “if this helps at all…helps you trust me, I mean. That Mercedes? I asked for it. I have one just like it, back in D.C.”
I pulled onto Ina Road, headed for US 10, not sure what to tell her.
“I figure…that first email picture I showed you. I told you I’d received it by use of Carnivore and JWICS. Would you want to trace the Internet origins of this second picture, using Carnivore?”
“It’s a long shot. Where are we going?”
“Downtown. The government building. So…if you’re a good hacker, or is it cracker, I can never keep them straight. But if you’re good…you have your own ways of figuring out where email comes from. Tracing IP addresses. Packets. Stuff like that. I’m not too good on technology, but I do know the principles. Ah. We’re here. Pull into the underground garage.”
At the elevator bank, the doors opened for us, but she pulled me back, let the doors close and open and close again.
“You’re asking a lot of me,” she said. “I’m going to give you access to cosmic-level security stuff. I’m going to have to trust that you use it wisely, and that you not remember some of what you see. Can I trust you?”
“Trust,” I said. “That.”
“That. I’ve read your entire dossier, Laura. Five times. In between all the details, I read that you do not have a high regard of trust for what you want other people to see in you. Would you say that was a fair observation?”
“I’ve crossed beyond that kind of thing.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“You have to trust me.”
She punched the Up button.
“You’re half Indian.”
“Hopi,” I said. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Trust,” she said, watching the floor numbers light up one at a time as the elevator came down from the top floor. “I talked with that Hopi policeman. I can’t pronounce his name.”
“Seumptewa.”
“He cares about you. He trusts you, he says. He also wonders why you’re still running from being a Hopi. Oh, don’t mind me here, I’m just talking, I always wonder about people’s histories. With all the people you’ve conned in the past twenty years, Laura…Winslow, or whatever your name is, I don’t know if trust is something I should give you without a huge truckload of caution.”
What could I say? I needed her, I realized that, and in thinking that thought, realized I was using her.
“We’ll have to work on trust.”
“That’s not very reassuring.”
The elevator doors opened. She went inside, held the door from closing.
“Well,” she said, “we’ve got nowhere to go but up.”
35
“Jack Zea,” she said, extending a long arm, clinking with a dozen silver bracelets.
“Laura Winslow.”
She held my hand with some force, smiling at Michelle.
“You didn’t tell her I was a woman.”
“Six feet tall, black, thin, and deadly as a Masai spear,” Michelle said.
“Don’t you go on about my small tits.”
“Don’t you go on about how men keep the other sex down in the ranks.”
“Gender, Michelle. Gender. If we’re ever going to crack the glass ceiling, at least let’s use the right words for who we are.”
“You are on the top floor,” Michelle said.
“And my office has got a door.”
But her office didn’t have much else. A standard workstation was set up on a metal cart, a blue Ethernet cable running into a wall connection halfway across the room. There was nothing, absolutely nothing on her desk. A walnut credenza stood against the window wall, but when I ran my finger across it I left a dust trail.
“Where is your office?” I asked.
“AZIS.”
“Oh.”
Arizona Information Systems, the top-secret satcom intelligence center, where I first got to know Taá Wheatley and Jake Nasso.
“Yeah,” she said at the look on my face. “I figured you wouldn’t want to go out there. After the late unpleasantness, and all.”
“Did you know Taá Wheatley?”
“Trained her. Don’t miss her for a moment. So much for history. What have you got for me?”
I handed her five floppy disks.
“Gee. Floppies. Who uses them anymore?”
She rammed one into a computer slot, waited impatiently to check the file listing, quickly copied the file to her hard disk, and opened it.
“Whoa!”
Seeing Meg’s picture, she backed away from the monitor.
“Girl,” she said to me. “Who is this poor thing?”
“A friend. Her name is Meg.”
“Meg.”
But her eyes were already moving around the screen. She ejected the floppy and inserted another one. Don’s first cropping, with Meg no longer in view.
“Sky island. Sonoran desert. These other three floppies, same thing?”
“Yes,” I said.
“So you know what I’m good at.”
“Yes.”
She looked at Michelle.
“How much rank you got today, girl?”
“I’ve been calling in favors all night,” Michelle said.
“Let me guess what the three of us girls are doing here. Somehow, somebody in the government of this great land…some secret somebody, I mean, really secret, this person has been asked to make satcom passes over the Sonoran desert. Right?”
“Right,” Michelle said. “It was—”
“Whoa, girl. I don’t want a name, I just want an image.”
Michelle took a thick red envelope from her purse and a ballpoint pen. She wrote her name across a white, embossed seal, and handed envelope and pen to Jack, who also signed on the seal before ripping open the envelope. She pulled out a single sheet of paper, flicked her eyes up and down a few times, looked around at all the workstations in her office, and headed toward a computer in the corner. Taking a key-chain from down inside her turtleneck sweater, she yanked the chain over her short-cropped hair and inserted the key into the front of the computer. When the screen popped alive, she went through six different password screens. At the next screen, she propped the sheet of paper in front of her keyboard and typed in what looked like longitude and latitude coordinates.
“We’re going to have to wait a few minutes,” she said. “What I’m going to get first is a fly-by sequence. It’s a huge file. Almost two hundred megabytes. The system in this building is very broadband, but it’s not as fast as I’m used to.”
“You know what all that tech talk means?” Michelle asked me.
“Yes.”
“Then I’m going to leave you with her while I go try to arrange that other thing we talked about,” Michelle said to me.
“You’re a hacker,” Jack said, after Michelle left. It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t answer. “You ever worked with orthorectifying?”
“I don’t even know what it is.”
“Gee. I get to stun you with my knowledge.”
“Make it simple.”
“My middle name. Orthorectification. Satellites take photos. Photos are flat, but contain certain 3-D information. Orthorectifying sof
tware runs this data to generate a 3-D image, actually called an orthoimage. From it, we can make an image-based map. Got that so far?”
“You can’t do anything with the digital image I brought.”
We looked at the photo of Meg.
“Nope. That’s flatlander stuff. We’re trying to find her, right?”
“Right.”
“If this was last year, fuhgedaboutit. Every satellite was one hundred percent on Afghanistan, Pakistan, all those Stans. Now things are freed up some. Some of the data is even online, for everybody. USGS, NASA…a major percentage of the world’s landmass is scanned, some of the satellites can collect as many as four hundred and fifty shots a day.”
“But what about shots above the Sonoran desert?”
“That’s our problem. There is surveillance over northern Mexico, but it’s all drug related, so naturally it’s all classified. And that’s why Michelle brought you to me. I’m…well…how do I explain who I am, what I do, without telling you anything secret. That’s my real problem.”
“I don’t care who you are, what you do, I don’t care if I ever see you again. All I want is for you to try and identify that sky island in the digital images.”
But she wasn’t even paying attention as a large menu came up on her monitor. She rapidly worked her way through a series of file directories, selected a file titled X2_KAB_COL.MPG.
“To save us time, I downloaded the entire MPG file. Usually, with a high-speed Internet connection at our data centers, we’d just do streaming download. Like kids do with MP3 files, you know, movie trailers…”
“Just play the file,” I said. “I do not care how it works!”
“Right. Sorry. What you’re going to see is from Afghanistan. Around Kabul. It’s convenient, to show you this, until I get word whether or not we can do some runs over Sonora. Okay, also, you’re going to see this on a classified bit of software. Call it…advanced Microsoft Media Player. Here we go.”
She stabbed the Enter key.
“Tell me what you want explained, otherwise, we’ll just watch.”
It looked like a low-tech Hollywood special-effects movie, something digitized and surreal. Like an airplane, flying at a thousand feet or so, with a 3-D effect so that mountain ridges stood up sharply. Most of the images were either brown or green. I recognized buildings.
“This is actually the city of Kabul,” Jack said. “Couple of years ago.”
“What’s the image resolution?”
“About fifteen meters. That’s why I’m showing you this demo, instead of the ones where you can actually read license plates. We don’t care about close detail, we want to isolate particular mountain regions.”
“I thought it was all desert. Why so much vegetation?”
“The green stuff?”
“Yes.
“Not vegetation. It’s not a true color image. No blue band. So we’re stuck with green, red, and infrared, and the combination makes vegetation look red and other stuff green. You don’t really see any red here, it is all desert. No vegetation. Do you care?”
“No. Just the shapes. They could be purple, I don’t care.”
“Seen enough?”
“Yeah. Look, Jack…why do you use a man’s name?”
“I work in a man’s world. Jacqueline. Friends call me Jackie.”
“Stop that movie,” I said. “Just…tell me what can happen.”
She stopped the digital playback, slowly shut down the computer while she worked through a checklist of what she could tell me.
“Okay. If…and it’s still an if…I get clearance, we’ll take two passes from one of the EOS satellites. Have to use a polar orbit, and have to use whatever satellite is in a trajectory that will pass over Sonora. We’ll be using the EOS satellite called TERRA. It’s got all kinds of surveil stuff onboard. We’ll be using something called ASTER. Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer. Uses fourteen different wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum, swinging from visible down through thermal and infrared light. Once we get transmissions from the satellite, we can then build some detailed maps of land surfaces. All kinds of variables. Temperature, emissivity, reflectance, and most important to us…elevation.”
“When?” I asked.
“This ain’t like a TV remote, honey. I can’t just point and click, I’ve got to depend on a lot of people in all kinds of places to make it work. Plus, we’ve got to hope there’s no cloud cover, so we get the full range of scanning.”
“Bottom timeline?”
“Maybe…today, probably not until tomorrow. Minimum.”
I took out my Fujiyama and started programming it.
“Girl, what is that thing?”
“Prototype PDA, cell phone—”
“I want one.”
“—plus video conferencing. When you get digital movies, like the one you just showed me, can you transmit me the files?”
“We’re beyond top secret. I don’t think so.”
I wrote down several Internet addresses and two cell numbers.
“Use any of these,” I said. “All of them will register on this thing.”
She reached for my hands. I thought she wanted to look closer at the Fujiyama, but she just wanted to hold me, to give some reassurance along with her bad news.
“You understand, Laura, this might not even happen?”
“Yes.”
“And getting the images…that’s just the first step. I’ve got to scan your flatlander photo into some other software that will make simulated projections about 3-D elevations. Then I’ve got to match that guesswork into the satellite feeds.”
“If all that happens, what are the odds you can identify that sky island?”
“Not great. In fact, I’ve never done anything like this.”
“If you can do it, I’ll get you one of these toys.”
“Let’s get your friend first,” she said. “Then we’ll talk about toys.”
36
“Let’s talk about kidnapping,” Michelle said, waiting for me outside Jack’s office. “I have an idea.”
“So do I.”
“Can we share them?”
Right hand to her mouth, she licked the webbed part between thumb and index finger. I could see a thin, red line, small dabs of blood oozing out of it.
“Slideback victim,” she said. “Was trying a new Glock at the range last night, damn slide bit me.”
She took a Band-Aid out of her purse and slapped in on haphazardly.
“Let’s go outside and sit on the grass.”
“First off, I want to tell you more about myself. I’m a Specialist in Information Technology Policy. Security clearance so high I have a coded piece of software just to remind me what my passwords are to see what I’m working on.”
“At some point,” I said carefully, “at some really risky point for you, if you give me access to Carnivore, you’re going to find out things about me that…to me…to the people I work with, those things could be very dangerous.”
“I’ll give you a signed statement that nothing I ever learn will lead to criminal or civil charges against you, in any court…anywhere.”
I just snorted.
“Okay,” she said, “but I mean that. Before you write me off, just listen to what I’ve got. It’s connected to a kidnapping ring. Maybe…not definitely, but maybe it’s the same people who took your friend.”
“You want my trust.”
“Godammit, Laura, I need more than your trust. I need the information you’ve got, the technology and contacts and skill you’ve got. I will share with you anything I have that’s relevant to finding your friend.”
“Anything you say is relevant.”
“All right. Everything I’ve got. I’ll tell you everything.”
“In exchange for…what?”
“Your help.”
“Then I’ll have to make a phone call.”
“Do it. Now.”
I walked a hundred yards away
and called Don.
“Here’s the deal,” I told him. “The Gilbert woman wants to give me information, wants all my information, wants to work with me.”
“That means, work with us.”
“Yes.”
“Conditionally?”
“No conditions. Total trust.”
“Last I believed in total trust, I was five, and then my closest friend told me that Santa Claus was a myth. Fake. And the Easter Bunny, too.”
“I want to bring her up to meet you.”
“There’s no other way?”
“Not if you want to get into Carnivore.”
“Worth the stretch,” he said finally.
“Remember. She can afford to make all kinds of offers. Hit or miss, get all kinds of resources, walk back and forth across the line. You and me, we get caught at just one of the serious things we do…”
“Yeah. But it’s worth the stretch, if you trust her.”
“Trust. That.”
“That.”
“Be there in fifteen.”
I hung up, looked back at Michelle, who had peeled the Band-Aid off her hand and was sucking the slideback wound. She stared at me, hand frozen in her mouth. I nodded, and we went back into the parking garage for my car.
“I’m going to drop you at Raging Sage,” I said. “Get into your Mercedes, make sure your cell is on. I’ll call you in about half an hour. Deal?”
“You’ve got to clear me with somebody first.”
“I’ve already done that. Mostly, I’ve got to clear you with myself. Body parts,” I said. “Black market. How really real is all that?”
“Hundreds of millions of dollars a year.”
“If the person who kidnapped my friend was running a ring like that, would he also run the organization that got the people?”
“No. He’d buy them. From kidnappers.”
“So if the Peraza cartel is kidnapping for profit, you’re saying they’re not the ones who would sell body parts?”
“Two different things, entirely. Two different mindsets.”
I told her about Victorio, but the name meant nothing to her.
“I can run it through NCIC,” she said. “Through all the federal databases, see if the name comes up. Worth a shot, I guess, but I don’t think we’ve got much time.
