Heart of the World (17 page)

“Billionaire?” I said, mostly to remind him I was still present.

“Hey, sit down somewhere.”

I moved a pile of manuals off a dusty chair and obeyed, edging the chair over so I could eyeball the screens.

He kept typing. “Yeah, this is the stuff gonna change the game. You know they're gonna have biometric feeds in your passport by ‘05; it's the law.”

“HDTV by 2003, wasn't it?”

“Who cares about TV when you've got terrorists to catch? Homeland Security bucks to spend? We've already bypassed the guys who wanted to replace passwords and PINs with fingerprint readers. That shit's okay for Disney, but not for security. You know about the Gummi Bears?”

“Gummi Bears?” I thought my hangover headache might be causing hearing trouble.

“Yeah, yeah, some Japanese guy proved you could diddle the best fingerprint readers with the same kind of gel in Gummi Bears, made a big stink. And the iris scan can be really hard to read. You need a whole mess of professional readers, and what kind of airport's gonna hire people have to have as much education as the guys who read the X-rays at a hospital? Too expensive, but what's turning out to be the goods is what we got, which is 3D imaging.”

“That's better than just a photo?”

“You kidding?” He was off and running, getting faster and louder as he waxed enthusiastic. I got an earful of sub-pixel calibrations and XYZ distances between facial landmarks at sub-mm precision. Patent-pending algorithms were used to triangulate each tiny visual feature— up to a million points on a face. Hanson was in no danger of getting fired even if the boss wandered over. He knew his stuff.

“This system's good to go?” I said. “Now?”

“That's the thing. We got a setup at Miami—Dade on the known drug runs, but we're not exactly advertising it.”

At Miami—Dade. Not Atlanta. Not New York. If Paolina had left the country, I prayed she'd passed through Miami.

I said, “What if you spot somebody, like somebody on the most-wanted list? Whitey Bulger coming to visit?”

“Who?”

In Boston everybody knows who Whitey is. “A mobster,” I said. “A crook.”

“I dunno. It's not up to me. I just do the work.”

I was glad Hanson wasn't developing advanced nuclear weaponry.

He said, “So lemme have the kid's picture and I'll see what we've got.”

I reached into my backpack, removed one of Paolina's photos from a padded envelope.

“Hey, hey,” he said admiringly.

“She's fifteen.”

He muttered something under his breath, “Jailbait,” I think. He didn't quite have the tact to keep it to himself, but at least he tried to mute it. He cut his eyes at me to see whether I'd overheard.

“Okay,” he said, “I'm gonna scan her in, run for similar facial characteristics. We might get a few pops, ‘cause you can see she's Hispanic
and it's a plane loaded with Hispanics, and we haven't got the stuff fine-tuned yet.”

“Don't the people see the cameras and ask what's going on?”

“Even if they saw ‘em, I don't think they'd ask. Most of ‘em want more security. Who wants to wind up part of a human bomb? But they don't notice, because the cameras are simple boxes that can be hidden almost anywhere, the 3D stuff's all software. It's damned near fail-safe without a lot of false positives, which is what gets your airlines really riled. And your ACLU, too.”

“What about makeup?” I said.

“Makeup?” He acted like he'd never heard of the stuff.

“Yeah. If I know you're looking for me, I'm gonna reshape my eyebrows, dye my hair.”

“Yeah, but you can't change your face.”

“Actors do a pretty good job.”

“Beards and shit.”

“I'm not talking beards. I'm talking changing the shape of your face. Cheekpads.”

“I see where you're heading, but we got you nailed. I mean, faces change as people age, the lower jaw sags and shit, but the area around the eye, the setting of the eye, that's what we value most, and you can't change that without major facial surgery. Look, there's nothing I can build that somebody can't gimmick, okay? Any safety field I build, you can tear down, but what I do is I make it hard, as hard as I can, and I have lots of people review what I do because I can't think of everything. You're a PI, right? Maybe we could hire you to do some challenges. You could hang around. We could get to know each other better.” He seemed to have taken our boyfriend-girlfriend charade to heart.

I handed him the photo. “Can you find her for me?”

“Sure, right.” He rejoined real life and got the twitchy look on his face again, the look that said he'd never have time to code all the programs he needed to code.

He placed the photo in a machine that looked pretty much like any scanner. I tried to follow his fingers as they raced across the keyboard but he typed with blinding speed, and when I checked the screen he wasn't typing anything recognizable as words.

The larger screen came up with a possible, but it wasn't Paolina,
didn't even look much like her. He tapped the keys some more and then up came another wrong one. An older girl, much older. Then bingo, there she was.

In her school photo, she'd tried to look eighteen, using way too much makeup, choosing a low-cut stretchy top that emphasized her womanly shape. In this shot, she was a child, her hair tumbled around her shoulders, her face wiped clean of lipstick and eyeliner, the neckline of her blouse high and frilly. She could have passed for twelve or thirteen. She didn't smile. Her eyes seemed lifeless. Her mouth was drawn into a thin line.

“Which flight was she on?”

“That's the same girl?” Hanson eyed the screen incredulously. “See? This stuff is good!”

“Which flight?”

“Gimme a sec.”

Was Paolina cooperating with Roldan? Had he tricked her in some way? Lied to her? I searched her eyes and found nothing to guide me.

“Flight 48, Avianca. Miami—Bogota, two nights ago.”

Two nights. I'd missed her by a day.

“I'm confused,” I said. “What is it you do with these images? Which databases do you compare them with? CIA? DEA?”

“That's not my job,” he said. “I'm part of the capture team. Capturing the images, I mean. I'm sorry if this isn't what you want.”

I said, “This is terrific, Greg, really,” while my mind raced with possible follow-up questions. “Now can you pull up the people with her? The people who walked with her, who sat in the seats next to her?” If she was traveling as a twelve-year-old, it stood to reason she'd have parents with her, adults, guardians.

“No. The system's not programmed that way. Not at all.”

“But you can get her passport data, right?” She had to be traveling under an assumed name; if I knew that name I'd be ahead of the game.

He shook his head like a wet dog.

“We're not allowed right now. We're just doing the one thing: ID. Sorry.”

“Greg, you've been a big help.” I smiled and squeezed his shoulder.

He ducked his head. “Not big enough, I guess. Hey, I hope it works out for you.”

“Tell me, exactly where is the camera located?”

“Huh?”

“The one that shot her picture.”

“There are three cameras, to get the 3D image.”

“Yeah, but are they in the security line, on the jetway? Where?”

“Security,” he mumbled, glancing over his shoulder to make sure no one else was near enough to hear.

“And it's video, right,” I said, “so it must be sequential.”

“Yeah.”

“So theoretically, if you had the raw tape, you could see who stood in front of her and who stood behind her in line.” “Well, yeah.”

“How big a deal would it be to get ahold of that tape, run the people near her through the databases, see if you can get IDs on them? Even if I could just get photos of them, it would be terrific. I'd be willing to pay for the pictures, pay for your time.”

He swiveled his chair and faced me for the first time since we'd entered the warren of cubicles. His jaw was tight. “You know how I know your Captain Mooney?”

I shook my head cautiously. It didn't hurt as much as I thought it would.

“I'm almost twenty-five now, but when I was eighteen, my brother— twelve years old, always twelve, never gonna be anything else—he was killed in the Old Colony Projects. Man, Boston. I left, and I don't think I could ever go back. I don't think about it, you know? I just flat-out don't think about it. And then, out of the damned blue, the lieutenant calls me.”

I wanted to say I was sorry, but my tongue was stuck in my mouth.

“I'll try and find what I can, but don't you try to give me any money for it. The lieutenant, he caught the bastard did it and any time he wants my right arm, you tell him, he can have it clear up to the shoulder. Any time. And if this helps you find your sister, would you—I dunno, gimme a call, let me know?”

I got his business card and his home phone. While he was walking me to the lobby, I wanted to ask about his brother, about what happened, to comfort him in some way, but with the guard staring and the walls closing in, I suddenly felt like I couldn't breathe. I'd been planning to ask the guard to call me a cab, but I blundered out into the killing heat instead, walking as fast as I could till I turned the corner.

There are few photos of my little sister in which she does not smile. It's a joke between us, that she can't spot a camera without a joyful grin lighting her dark eyes. The somber image captured by the security camera haunted me.

I caught the flash of a taxi's roof light out of the corner of my eye, raised my hand in the universal salute. The pavement seemed to shimmer in the heat. Running through honking traffic to open the door, I was already making plans. Back to the hotel, airline reservations, pack. I could be on my way in half an hour. I didn't know where she was, but I knew which flight she'd taken. I might not have clicked with Naylor, but I'd gotten my lead. My hunch was solid, backed by fact; my little sister had boarded a flight to Bogota.

Colombia. My passport was in order. The U.S. government advised against traveling there, but didn't forbid it. I considered Mooney's dismay at the prospect of my jetting off to Bogota. I thought about Sam.

I hadn't told Mooney, but I'd spoken to Sam, in the small hours.

He'd sounded tired, but he understood my need to follow Paolina wherever she might go. What he didn't understand was my lack of a weapon. When I'd played it light, telling him I didn't need a firearm to find a teenaged girl, he'd stopped me with: “You're looking for a druglord and don't forget it.”

He could arrange to get me a gun in Miami, no paperwork, no questions asked. But how long would it take? I bit my lip, wondering if he could work the same magic in Bogota.

Some of the Mob guys will tell you they're not involved in drugs. Whitey Bulger used to insist he'd never visit that particular catastrophe on his South Boston home turf. He lied; he turned out to be the major heroin distributor for the area. When kids OD'd in Southie it was on Whitey's shit, Mexican Brown, brought in by Irish mobsters to plague their own backyard.

Did Sam have Colombian connections? I could have asked. Dammit, I should have asked. But there it was: I didn't want to know.

He'd ended the call with another atypical “I love you,” and hadn't mentioned leaving Las Vegas on a chartered plane. What the hell was he up to? Once, years ago, I'd angrily told him I'd never marry him unless and until he was out of the Mob for good. Was it possible he'd gone to Las Vegas to try to disentangle himself from the web that had snared his
family before he was born? More likely, I thought, he had some new shady money-making scheme to share with his western counterparts.

A deep blue Saturn, identical to the one parked in the shade of the motel lot, caught my eye as it changed lanes. It followed, hanging three or four cars behind the cab, shifting lanes frequently. Its windows were so heavily tinted I couldn't identify either of the men inside. One could have been Vandenburg, one Naylor. Both could have been part of a Miami hit squad, I supposed, although Moon had given me the idea that the hit squad pursuing Sam was a traveling act, a Boston thing.

Someone watching Gianelli might have seen us split at Logan and tracked me, might have shadowed me from the airport to the motel, decided to keep watch in case Sam joined me. But I didn't think I'd been followed from the airport to Vandenburg's office. And I was damn sure no one had followed me from Vandenburg's to the hotel.

If no one had followed me from the airport…ah…I knew who'd been watching Sam at Logan. I stopped trying to identify the men in the Saturn. Most likely, I didn't know them, couldn't have recognized them, because I don't know any FBI agents currently working out of Miami.

Mooney knew where I was. If they were FBI, Mooney must have given them the name of the motel.

PAOLINA

What the hell did they want from her?
She didn't think they even knew her father. One thing she was sure of, her father would never let her be treated like this. Not her own father, who'd written her such cool letters and sent her lucky Julio. Losing Julio was a sign; the golden birdman knew better than to go with these crazy people.

They were putting stuff in her food, but she could never catch them at it. A bowl of canned spaghetti, heated in a motel microwave, tasted bitter, but she couldn't be sure. All she knew was that the nights passed quickly in a kind of foggy haze, a whirling blur. She wasn't sleepy, but she slept long and hard, and woke befuddled, with the coppery taste of metal filings in her mouth. She tried not eating, but still she slept. And she had to drink, didn't she? You couldn't live without water. She lost track of days, and no one ever let her turn on a TV or even a radio. She couldn't trust the food or the water and she couldn't trust Ana, in spite of her small unexpected kindnesses, the secret gift of a candy bar or soft drink. She couldn't trust Jorge.