5:44 P.M.
THE CARLYLE
MADISON AVENUE
NEW YORK CITY
In minutes, Igor had built a landscape of transactions spread across a geographic area.
He sat in one of the less spacious rooms in his twenty-million-dollar duplex condominium at the Carlyle. A curved screen was on top of a glass table. To the side, against the wall, a stack of data servers undulated with different colored lights.
Using a MATLAB algorithm he’d written years before—highly customized and designed to access data in various forms and through various channels he did not necessarily have permission to access—Igor was able to map out the signals activity of the three Iranians going back a month: travel patterns, purchases, meals.
The algorithm scanned every existing terabyte of security footage for a month against a facial recognition application. At the same time, by matching Interpol historical data and identifying points of intersection into the Interpol grid, Igor was then able to, in effect, create a storyboard of the movements and activities of the three Iranians.
They’d been in Washington only two days. Before that, they were in and around New York City for at least a month, moving constantly.
He reached for his cell phone.