| |
––––––––
August 15th, 2003 Midtown Manhattan
NYE started at the sound of a knock on the door. It was an unwanted interruption, just when she’d settled down to review the day’s research, and an unusual one. The only people who ever visited her suite were her fellow Travelers—but Anya should be safely out of the way, back in Chickadee with Tate, and the others had all gone to two thousand twelve. Perhaps it’s one of the maids?
When she had climbed out from the cushions of the large armchair she’d ensconced herself in, then trotted over to the door to glance through the peephole, though, what she saw was Special Agent Coulter and at least a couple other FBI men with him.
Nye knew she would have to open the door. The hotel manager or one of the maids would open it for them, if they didn’t just break it down. She couldn’t understand why they’d come for her again, though. The other times she had been out doing something, only for her actions to have been misinterpreted by the authorities—but she’d been sitting quietly in her own rooms this evening. Eating, writing, and starting her review. Nothing that federal agents should even know about, much less be able to misconstrue. So why are they here?
She pushed the bridge of her glasses to start recording, then with a sigh she unlocked the deadbolt, opened the door, and stared at the familiar face. She would have to rely on her intelligence, and her lawyer if necessary, to protect her from the FBI. I managed to handle them twice before.
Agent Coulter was smiling—making an effort to, according to her glasses—and Nye noted that in her file. None of the other agents ever smiled. Why that was could be an interesting study.
Waiting for him to say or do something, Nye acknowledged to herself that this was an opportunity, not only to analyze people’s behavior, but maybe to get Kirin’s watch out of the FBI’s possession. She’d need to look around when they dragged her down to the New York field office this time. If she was going to get that Travel device back, she needed to acquire a lot of specific information about that place and the way they operated at the FBI. The silence continued for a long, protracted moment, but Nye was content to wait as long as she had to.
Agent Coulter was not. “Miss Walker. My apologies for disturbing you like this, but I’m hoping for your help with something. May we come in?”
Nye stood back from the door. “Of course.” She turned and led the men into the sitting room. “But I must say this is different from how you’ve asked for my help before.” And it gave her no opportunity to gather more data on their offices—she would have to keep analyzing the video she’d already gotten.
One of the agents positioned himself in the entryway near the door, while the other carried a black case to her desk and set it on the clean surface, then perched himself on a chair. Agent Coulter took the armchair opposite the one Nye had been sitting in—he must’ve noticed the depressed cushions. She sat down on the edge of that chair and waited, again.
“You were helpful the other two times I needed to ask you questions, so I thought we might as well be comfortable this time.” He smiled at her, again. “You do want to help, don’t you?”
Nye squinted at him. “I’m not sure I do.” Maybe they’d relent and drag her in. “You never did tell me what you were investigating at the soup kitchen, besides me.”
Agent Coulter’s smile didn’t falter. “It’s not my habit to share that kind of information with outsiders. But in this instance it may be necessary, relevant even, to what I want your help with.”
“Well, I’m waiting.”
“We’d been hearing increased chatter about the possibility terrorists might try to recruit a homeless person to help with an upcoming attack. So we began watching places where that might occur.”
Nye shook her head. “Chatter is nothing but the aggregation of intimations from signal intelligence. I doubt your methodology could be sound enough to produce reliable results. At least hard signal intelligence is useful.”
He paused to look around the room. “You may not have heard of the incident outside the UN building this afternoon—a small bomb went off. Thankfully no one was injured.”
“No, I hadn’t heard.” He must’ve noted the lack of a television. “But it would explain those three fire trucks I saw speeding in that direction four minutes before three.”
He nodded to himself. “This is in strictest confidence, you understand?” At her nod, he turned and nodded to the agent sitting at her desk, who opened his case and removed a laptop.
Agent Coulter continued. “This time no one got hurt, and we don’t want there to be a next time, and we think you might be able to help us stop that, you and your memory. Naturally, we’re trying anything we can think of to track down the perpetrator. That includes coming to you.”
Nye nodded. “Anyone who’d set off a bomb and got away with it would be likely to do it again. You’d want to find him as fast as possible to prevent a recurrence. One that might be more destructive. Of course I’ll help, if I can.”
“You’ve spent a lot of time at that soup kitchen, and around the Kips Bay area, which is not far from the UN Headquarters. We’ve got surveillance video of the man who planted the bomb, but it’s not clear enough for running facial recognition—your memory might be able to tell us something though.”
The other agent had booted up his laptop, and he brought it over to sit on the arm of her chair and play the video Agent Coulter had referred to. It was a grainy, low-resolution recording, and it showed a man leaving a backpack on the ground, leaning it up against one of the large waste receptacles. The way he was dressed was similar to the people Nye knew who lived on the street. The agent hit a button, and the screen was filled with a freeze-frame image, the best there was of the bomber.
“It looks as if that ‘chatter’ of yours was correct this time, but that doesn’t validate the practice. And I can’t see his face clearly enough to tell you when or where I’d seen him before, or even if. I’m sorry, but I don’t know what you expected of me.”
Agent Coulter shook his head. “We’re still looking for other, clearer footage of the man, but I don’t hold out much hope. But our software can only examine faces, while you can recall everything you’ve seen. Take a good look at the clothes he’s wearing, the shape of his body. Any detail might identify him for you, in a way it wouldn’t for us. Even if you don’t know who he is, if you’ve seen him before, anything you remember of him could be helpful.”
Nye blinked to start running an analysis, comparing the video of the man placing the backpack to all of her recorded images. Even her advanced software could not recognize that blurry face, but Agent Coulter was correct that she did not have to depend on faces alone.
While her program was running, she talked. “I have noticed that most homeless people keep wearing the same clothes, and often have quite a distinctive appearance, one from another. I may be able to help.”
It took over a minute for the search subroutine to come up with its results and display them on her lenses. It showed only one instance of the same silhouette, and she watched the footage twice.
Then she brought up the associated data points and looked at Agent Coulter. “I did see the man before, once. On the seventh of August at ten twelve in the morning, that man was shuffling along the sidewalk in Times Square, heading south. He stopped at a trash can and briefly searched the top layer of deposits in a most haphazard manner, then proceeded on his way. That’s all I saw.”
“You didn’t see him going in or out of any building? Or talking to anyone? Did you get a good look at his face? We might be able to put a sketch of the man together.”
Nye held her hand up in the air to stop him talking to her—it was a distraction. “Yes, I can see the man’s face quite clearly.” Her glasses recorded everything in high resolution, unlike those useless surveillance cameras.
“Great. Agent Thompson has advanced identification software on his laptop that can help us generate a sketch right now. With your help.”
Nodding absently, Nye was working on another task she hoped would be even more helpful. Isolating the man’s face from the better quality video she had of him, she then ran those features through the search program against all the faces she’d recorded. Then she turned to look at Agent Thompson and his laptop. He was actually smiling at her.
She noted that fact for her file on the FBI as she listened to him explaining what he wanted her to do to help him assemble a sketch starting with a small selection of different facial features. All she was required to do was choose the hair, the chin, the ears, the nose, and so forth, that most closely resembled the man whose face she was seeing reflected on her lenses. Then he took her through each feature once again, with less variegated selections from which to choose. It was quite simple, and in little time Agent Thompson had finished his sketch. It moved much slower than her glasses, though, which had finished her search request long before.
The young agent was almost gleeful. “And you are sure this looks like him?”
Nye snorted. She ran an analysis of that sketch he’d produced, against her own high-quality image, and found it an easy match. “It’s quite a good likeness. I’d say about ninety-two percent on common points of comparison.” Her glasses said ninety-two point seven. “It should be sufficient to run through your facial recognition software.”
Agent Thompson looked to his boss for permission, and Coulter nodded. “Go ahead and connect to our database and run the image like a photo.” Then Special Agent Coulter looked at Nye and gave what her glasses described as a genuine smile. “I have to thank you, Miss Walker. I think you’ve been a real help to us.”
“Wait, there’s more. I told you I can see his face clearly from that time in Times Square. I reviewed all the other faces I’ve seen recently, and I had seen the same man on one other occasion.”
“And you’re just now recalling this?”
Nye nodded. “Yes. The first time I was trying to recall someone wearing those clothes. I tried again once I could see his face—I found I’d seen that same man before, but wearing different clothes.”
His face froze, and his skin seemed to bristle as if his hairs were standing up, but Nye’s kinesis program didn’t show any physical alteration in his posture. After a short pause, he asked her the obvious question. “And what clothes was he wearing then?”
“He wore a slate-gray suit, a silk tie with a purple and white pattern, and black dress shoes. Some sort of cufflinks also, but I was too far away to make out any detail.” Even her high-resolution video had its limits. She went on to answer the other, implied questions. “It was the Garment District on the first of August—he was entering a warehouse on Thirty-seventh Street at twenty-one minutes past eleven in the morning. He didn’t look homeless, then.”
Agent Coulter stared at her for a moment. “No, indeed.” Then he glanced at his subordinate. “Did you get that, Thompson?”
“Yes, sir. Of course, sir.”
“Good. Now, why don’t we have you show Miss Walker some of the photos we have of known terror suspects to see if she recognizes the man?”
He looked back at Nye. “You don’t mind taking the time to help us out a little more, do you?”
“Of course not. But I don’t think such a laborious undertaking is necessary.”
He ignored her and took out a cell phone. A few seconds later he was asking someone to get him the details of the warehouse at the address she had given him. When he finished giving out instructions to people over the phone, he turned back to her. “Now I’ll leave Thompson here with you—”
The young agent was so excited he interrupted his boss, shoving the laptop in Agent Coulter’s face as he spoke. “We already got a hit off facial recognition. And look who it is.”
Coulter gave Thompson a momentary glare before looking at the laptop. He blinked. “We didn’t even know he was in the country.”
Nye piped up to ask. “Who is he?”
He squinted at her for a second. “I don’t imagine his name would mean anything to you, but he’s known to us. So your assistance has been far more helpful than I’d dared hope.”
“You’re welcome.”
“You are quite extraordinary, you know. I hope you realize that.”
“I’m not, really.” It was her glasses. “But if you can come back some other time, to show me photos of terrorists, then I’d know if I ran into them.”
Agent Coulter had turned and started to leave—that brought him back to stare at her. “That would be a good idea. You spend a lot of time walking the streets of Manhattan, Miss Walker. You might just happen to see something, and it would be worth the effort to show you those photos. Maybe I should see about hiring you as a consultant. You’d have to pass a background check of course.”
Nye cocked her head at him. “Considering how thoroughly you’ve already researched me, wouldn’t that be redundant?”
“We’re often redundant, but we’re thorough. So we don’t make many mistakes.”
A warning signal sounded in her head. Getting hired as a consultant for the FBI would afford her a lot of opportunities to accomplish different goals. It would also give them the potential of learning more about her. But, on balance, she thought it would be worth the risk.