Blood Covenent, page 17
New York City
Wednesday, July 7, 1999
10:00 P.M. EDT
Harvey Randall rubbed his eyes and moved the stale coffee cups aside. Three nineteen-inch monitors stared back at him from across the desk where he was working. The first monitor displayed Hassan Jamal’s visage from the security camera footage at JFK’s custom’s kiosk. The white block letters stamped across the screen’s bottom read 01-JUL-99 13:27. Hassan stood with the garment bag slung over his shoulder and a small carry-on grip. The black and white footage recorded his passage into the country. A special red flag appeared in the upper right corner, indicating a high-risk candidate. Harvey had studied the face all day. He knew there was something here, but like morning fog it continued to curl away and slip beyond his sight.
The second monitor displayed several photographs. Using a mouse, he could click through them. They showed death in its brutal simplicity. There was little to distinguish these photographs from those he had once seen at the Jesse James Museum. Dead eyes and open mouths with the bullet holes clearly visible—surprise, shock, and confusion rippling across their features. They looked like carp left in the sun too long. The grisly record hung on the walls in Northfield, Minnesota, where the James Gang came to a sudden end. Hassan’s men were captured in the same death repose, and arranged in neat little rows. These photographs were sharp with vibrant color and crystal clarity not available one hundred years ago, yet the emotions that played across their faces were eerily familiar. Harvey wondered if he might not be better off checking tourists for pilfered antlers at West Yellowstone.
The third monitor rolled through the security tapes confiscated from Trump Tower. Harvey went and got the security camera tapes the morning after Feldman’s first briefing. With nothing better to do than to plod through security tapes and compare those tapes to freeze frames, Harvey attacked the problem with the diligence of an IRS agent looking for a five-dollar mistake.
Harvey had rolled through some fifty-six hours of tape. There were eighteen different cameras located inside the Trump Tower lobby. They checked the different entrances, which come in from street level and mezzanine levels into the shops. There were cameras recording escalator passengers and cameras for each of the elevator lobbies. There were two eye-in-the-sky clusters that panned the main lobby, roving for troublemakers.
He had found the tapes showing Hassan Jamal’s arrival at Trump Tower. He waltzed into the main lobby like he owned the building. According to the timestamp difference between the JFK and Trump, it took Hassan seventy minutes to transit the distance. Harvey had been through this tape three times already. He had a yellow legal pad with notes. He had dissected the tape by time and by characters, and he found nothing but the obvious.
Harvey sighed. He watched the footage as Hassan moved across the lobby. Two of the men found in the condominium met him half way through the lobby. They exchanged hugs and handshakes. They appeared genuinely happy to greet each other. Not the popular myth associated with terrorists. He wondered where they came from, who their parents were, and what legacy they left nestled in their black coffins. Did an anguished mother cry? Did a father stand stoically to one side and shake his head? Were they already elevated to sainthood due to their martyrdom? Yet on the screen, they laughed and slapped each other’s backs. One took Hassan’s baggage. The other led the way to the private elevator lobby.
Harvey leaned back in the chair. His head pounded defiantly, and an ache crept up his spine to his neck. The twenty-third floor was fairly silent at 26 Federal Plaza. He stared at the screen as the trio entered the elevator and the doors closed.Nothing!
Was he kidding himself? Had he chased a phantom from his own imaginings? He rubbed his eyes again and leaned forward to tap new commands into the keyboard. The screen showed the elevator next to the first elevator Hassan had just entered slide open. A man emerged and Harvey’s fingers froze above the keyboard.
The fatigue fled from his limbs. He punched the F10 key to freeze the video.Of course! How could he have been so stupid?
Energized, Harvey looked across the desktop he was using. There, tucked away from everything else, was the briefing folder Feldman had handed out to everyone on Sunday night. He lurched passed the coffee cups, yellow legal pads, and donut crumbs. He pulled it towards him like the Holy Grail. His eyes darted back to the screen, then to the file folder. A grim smile emerged across his lips.
Harvey flipped open the folder. The killer’s eyes glared into the hospital camera. He pressed the zoom key and the photograph expanded on the screen. The same eyes were caught on film. The man who shot an NYPD policeman and Hassan Jamal was walking out the elevator.
“Gotcha,” whispered Harvey.
He moved the mouse and formed a box around the floor indicator above the elevator door. He tapped a command into the keyboard, and the screen began to move backwards. He ignored Hassan Jamal and his two comrades. Now, he focused his attention on the elevator’s floor indicator. The number increased until it stopped at fifty-three. Harvey noted the floor and stopped the feed.
There were between four and six condominiums on each residence floor of the Tower. He continued to play the tape backwards on the screen. The elevator returned to the main floor without any other stops. He had their unnamed killer on floor fifty-three.
He checked the directory Larry had retrieved from the building supervisor. There were only four condominiums on this floor. Harvey flipped the screen to a second window and began a crosscheck with the IRS computers based on address. He tapped in the first three addresses. Each came back, with hits identifying a widow, a trust fund couple, and a divorced real-estate developer. The last address came back with nothing. According to the Tower list, this floor had no vacancies. He circled the missing apartment number.
For the other addresses he punched up a summary of their tax records, then crosschecked those records against the Social Security database and New York State’s Driver Registration list. He popped out four names without a problem. The developer had court orders mandating child support and alimony payments. Vehicle registration came up with seven vehicles in New York. The widow had an additional two registered in New Jersey.
He reached into the photo ID database maintained for driver licenses. He flipped the widow, the trust fund kids, and the developer on the screen. Harvey stared at their faces. Not even close to Hassan’s killer. He circled the missing number on his sheet: 5310.
Lou Feldman poked his head over the edge of Harvey’s temporary cube.
Harvey thought about ignoring Feldman, but it was close to eleven in the evening and perhaps Feldman just wanted to socialize.
“Got a minute?”
Harvey shrugged. His wife had left him, and his kids no longer talked to him. He had been banished to a patrol area vaguely determined by the intersection of Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. He had been sitting in front of three computer screens for the last ten hours, and Feldman wanted to know if he had a minute.Idiot!
Feldman was already parade-stepping towards his cube, a glassed-in enclosure allowing him to peruse his assembled empire. It had tinted glass and mini-blinds with a bank of phones and two computers hooked into the JEH Building.
“I’ve got something for you to do,” explained Feldman.
Harvey started to open his mouth, then thought better of it.
“It doesn’t look like you’re getting anywhere with the security tapes.” He shook his head. “Didn’t think it would get anywhere.”
Harvey grunted. “I might be getting close.”
“We need results, Harvey,” explained Feldman looking at him over the top of his glasses. He used the tone of a tired teacher when dealing with a recalcitrant student. “I want you to go over to the hospital where Hassan got capped and interview the nursing staff again.”
Harvey nodded his head slowly. “I thought it was already done.”
“Yeah,” continued Feldman. “I sent some junior people over. We need someone senior to clear up some points.”
They wanted him to follow up junior people. He took the file Feldman was handing him. It was a deadend lead designed to keep him out of the office. Working on the tapes must have gotten under Feldman’s skin. Too industrious; probably, afraid he might find something.
“Why don’t you knock off for the night and get some sleep,” offered Feldman. “I’ve included the hospital personnel’s home and office numbers for everyone.”
“Thoughtful of you,” replied Harvey. “I’ll just clean up my stuff and get on this in the morning.”
“Great!” Feldman beamed.
Harvey wondered if Feldman hated the bad guys as much as he seemed to hate him. Feldman appeared relieved as he grabbed his hat and briefcase. “You shut off the lights before you leave.”
“Sure thing.” Harvey smiled.
Dismissed, Harvey sauntered down to his cube. Feldman whistled a show tune and wandered towards the main lobby. Harvey made like he was cleaning up until Feldman vanished into the lobby, then he sat down again. He dropped the heavy file on the side of his desk.
He settled behind the three monitors and started running the tapes backwards. Three hours later, he had isolated the movements of Hassan’s killer and the introduction of two other people. He suspected Mister 5310 had not used taxicabs to arrive and depart. He paused for a moment before shoving Feldman’s hospital file over the edge of his desk and into the trashcan. He gathered his notes and remembered to turn off the lights.
* * * *
Janet Henry, safely buried in the bowels of the JEH Building, ran her finger down the screen. The huge twenty-one inch display hunched on her desk. Besides the NT workstation explorer window, she also had several X windows open into a pair of high end UNIX Sun servers. Half of the putrid brown windows had editor sessions open displaying shell scripts. The other half was a collection of SQLPLUS screens and GUI editors displaying PL/SQL package code.
She moved the mouse to activate the correct window and tapped in the commands to rerun the latest version of her code. This time, the package compiled correctly.Big deal! So a stupid syntax checker decided the code would not fail to run. There was absolutely no guarantee that what the code did was exactly what she envisioned. There were so many bleeding edges in the technology she was working with. A whole new world ofblobs, lobs, clobs, andbfilesdemanded her attention.
She had refined her code to work on a three-tiered, thirty-six-point recognition system. Nothing would advance to the second tier unless the image matched her base images on the basic twelve-point structure. Furthermore, she had taken the NYPD video footage of Hassan Jamal’s killer and dissected it into different regions: left eye, right eye, nose, forehead, lips, mouth, right ear, left ear, chin, and teeth.
The second tier went for matches on each of those elements. Eye color might change, a nose could be altered, and facial hair added and subtracted, but the fundamental shape of someone’s noggin and the bumps associated with a person’s face were difficult to change in a hurry. Any score over twenty out of twenty-four in the first and second tier systems sent the candidate immediately to thelightening round .
The third-tier check assumed their man was spotted. It examined the height and weight parameters estimated by the Bureau’s analysts. If a full or partial body shot could be rendered, scoring in the third tier took place. Twenty-eight out of thirty-six warranted human intervention. Everything was geared not to a general database match, but to the specific search in Janet’s cyberworld for Hassan’s killer. Lou Feldman gave her whatever she needed.
Someone was quite unhappy about handing over a quarter-terabyte of storage on a sixty-four bit back plane where access time was measured in terms of gibabits rather than megabits. She commanded eight Sun servers connected on duplex T3 lines into the Bureau’s data center at Quantico, Virginia. The data center was quite safe surrounded by the Marine Corps and nestled on the banks of the Potomac as the river made its way around the knurled finger of Maryland and towards Chesapeake Bay.
Someone else was equally upset with the sudden hammer of authority allowing her access to every airport and mass transit video system along the eastern seaboard. Her pilot project had netted Hassan Jamal the day before he intended to light off a nuclear weapon. They had one face and no name. Feldman needed some answers, so with an unlimited budget at his disposal, he turned Janet loose.
Feldman was never one to be bothered by technical details. The whole point of a pilot project was to work the bugs out. Instant success can sometimes lead to certain disaster, and Janet weighed all these things as she abandoned her tidy coding structures and comment blocks. Her directories were crammed with failed coding versions and test scripts. She did not have time to consider the elegant solution; Feldman gave her raw processing power and she cobbled together her code to hunt for a single bad guy.
The Bureau did not hire Janet because she could run a mile or fire a gun. The truth being, she was flatfooted and nearsighted. Janet got to play with the Bureau’s computers because she could produce results. Her world trafficked in entities, tables, and indices. Data was structure and code merely the decoration. The trashcan under her desk became a heap of Diet Coke cans.
She started another test run and turned her attention to the shell scripts. UNIX can be boiled down to a bunch of flat files and processes looking at flat files. She needed to glue the multiple database instances together, and, since they were operating across multiple UNIX platforms, she made the non-database portion flit back and forth using a combination offtp, korn shell andother obscure UNIX commands.The instances could be managed using database links, job queues, and data pipes. She had staged her three-tiered inspection program across multiple machines to cut down on latency. Next, she had pumped up the memory for each instance to over a gigabyte.
The District was the easiest to coerce into her new standards. After all, Uncle owned everything inside the District and money was never an object. New York, Boston, and Miami were part of the original pilot project. It was the other cities that gave her fits. Even with Feldman’s heavy-handed tactics it would be another week before Richmond, Norfolk, and Wilmington came on line. Raleigh would make its first appearance on Friday, but then, inside the Triangle, they understood what a computer was.
Points south would flicker to life over the next three weeks. It is one thing to declare access to the T3 line; it is entirely another thing to make it happen. Feldman was not someone who made things happen. He was in the declaration business. He signed the orders and approved the payment vouchers, but he never grasped the complexity of what Janet was attempting to accomplish. Janet could not care less. She had a chance to test her theories and prove herself.
Sometime after midnight, Janet dozed off at her desk. She forgot to reset the test system, and they lost a precious six hours of processing time before she woke up again. It was close to six when the sun started to stream through the eastern windows.
Lou Feldman saw to it that Harvey Randall never bothered Janet Henry. They operated in separate cities on vastly different projects. Harvey plodded through a visual database looking for clues at Trump Tower, and Janet prepared to invade the privacy of millions of people in the search for the same man. Neither had a name yet, and both were little bit behind Michael Rehazi—the Terror of Tehran.
CHAPTER 18
New York City,
Thursday, July 8, 1999
1:00 P.M. EDT
Seventeen years old, alone in one of the world’s largest cities, and embarked on a holy crusade, the twins, Mahmood and Ahmad, rode through the busy streets in Rehazi’s minivan. TheSAMSON weapon was wedged against one side of the van next to a pair of Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns. They each had a personal sidearm as well: ancient .38 special Smith & Wesson revolvers pilfered from some third world police force.
Neither boy fully understood what would happen once they keyed in the arming command. On the half-table between the front seats lay the contents of Rehazi’s envelope. Two thousand dollars is a great deal of money when one has lived amidst the remnants of an incomplete war. It is very little when faced with the expenses imposed by New York. The village where they were born was little more than blasted-out buildings, shattered roads, and bullet-scarred walls. Three times the territory had changed hands between the Iraqi and Iranian armies. The back and forth battle left little more than bodies to bury from both sides.
Rehazi simply built on the bountiful propaganda spouting from Tehran. Iraq was an ally of the Americans and a client of the godless Russians. Never mind that the balance shifted a few short years later, or that Saddam Hussein sent his warplanes to Iran for shelter. The Islamic Republic generated orphans and widows with the same efficiency that Detroit rolled automobiles down an assembly line. It took little effort to convert the plentiful raw materials into martyrs.
The twins never actually met Rehazi. They were handled, prepared, and trained by surrogates. Rehazi worked for theKhat-e Emami —Line of the Iman faction. They were thestudents who organized the assault on the American Embassy in 1979 and considered themselves guardians of Ayatollah Khomeni’s Islamic Revolution. Rehazi did not have to go far to find the right type of person to train his terrorists. His trainers were tripping over each other to get to the head of the line.
Political and religious instruction flowed in special camps. Weapons training, bomb making, and language skills were rehearsed for the coming revenge. Revenge was one of those intangible levers used to fire the imagination and focus latent anger. The twins no longer had any parents. Both were sacrificed to a greater good, although the reasons were sometimes nebulous and tended to change as the times and seasons demanded. They might have died from one of the thousands of bombs, poisoned water, or starvation. It mattered nothing to Rehazi; he simply used what they left behind—precious flesh and blood.
One of the skills that they never really honed in those desert camps was driving an automobile. After all, theMajima’-e Ruhaniyun-e Mobarez —Assembly of Militant Clerics—was busily reconstructing the country in the image of the thirteenth century. Oil was for lamps and expensive weapons. Automobiles were symbols of the decadent West, but necessary requirements for leadership.
