Hendrickson in the bunker of the Fates, at all times striking a confident and commanding pose, although he periodically feels as if something is sliding loose inside his chest and at all times as if he is poised on a wire above the upturned faces of everyone he has ever known, while they wait in gleeful expectation of his fall…
Twenty minutes earlier, the security technician tasked with enhancing the image of Luther Tillman’s parked car clarified the license-plate number. The Chevrolet is a rental obtained from a concession at the Louisville airport on Monday.
Now the tech swivels in his workstation chair and says to Hendrickson, “According to the rental agency, sir, the Chevy was returned to the airport just a short while ago—at five-thirty.”
Airports are monitored by more cameras per cubic foot than any other facilities in the country. Hendrickson tells the tech how to backdoor the NSA’s video coordination program and get an image of whoever dropped off that car in Louisville.
Jane Hawk had taken the precaution of parking her car in a residential neighborhood, a block and a half from the main drag in Iron Furnace, where she assumed there was no camera.
By following multicamera video of her when she departed the tavern with the sheriff, a second technician is able to track her and identify her vehicle as a black Ford Escape. When she drives to Lakeview Road and Tillman follows her in his rental, her license plate is clear as she passes through a well-lighted intersection.
Hendrickson considers putting a description of the car and its license-plate number on the National Crime Information Center’s network, flashing it to every law-enforcement agency in the country, but he hesitates. He suspects the bitch knows how to tap the NCIC without flagging herself, that from time to time she checks to learn if they have any additional crucial information about her. If she discovers they know her car and the plate number, she’ll switch the tags—which are probably stolen—for another stolen pair, and as soon as she can, she’ll dump the Ford Escape.
Nationwide, police cruisers and other government vehicles equipped with 360-degree license-plate-scanning systems collect numbers from vehicles around them—parked and in motion—minute by minute, and transmit those readings to regional archives around the clock. The NSA maintains the central archive for all these systems. If at any time since they left Iron Furnace the Ford Escape or the rental Chevy has been scanned, the NSA program will be able to tell him where and when.
Although no less on edge than before, Hendrickson tells himself that it is a great time to be alive for men like him, when they have the ability, legally or otherwise, to gaze on the world with the infinite eyes of a god.