Stacey rolled her eyes. ‘No, Paula. They can’t necessarily see a body. But they can zoom in so far these days you can get a lot of detail. They might be able to narrow down where we should be looking by eliminating where there definitely isn’t anything.’
‘That’s wild,’ Paula said.
‘That’s technology. There’s a geography faculty in the USA that reckons they’ve pinpointed where Osama bin Laden’s hiding by narrowing down possibilities from satellite photography, ‘ Stacey said.
‘You’re kidding,’ Paula said.
‘No, I’m not. It was a team at UCLA. First they applied geographic principles developed to predict the distribution of wildlife - distance-decay theory and island biogeographic theory—’
‘What?’ Kevin chipped in.
‘Distance-decay theory . . . OK, you start with a known place that fulfils the criteria this organism needs for survival. Like the Tora Bora caves. You draw a series of concentric circles out from there, and the further you get from the centre, the less likely you are to find those identical conditions. In other words, the further he goes from his heartlands, the more likely he is to be among people who are not sympathetic to his goals and the harder it is to hide. Island biogeographic theory is about choosing somewhere that has resources. So, if you were going to be stuck on an island, you’d rather it was the Isle of Wight than Rockall.’
‘I don’t understand where the satellites come in,’ Paula said, frowning.
‘They figured out the likely zone where Bin Laden might be, then they factored in what they know about him. His height, the fact that he needs regular dialysis so he has to be somewhere with electricity, his need for protection. And then they looked at the most detailed satellite imagery they could find and narrowed it down to three buildings in a particular town,’ Stacey said patiently.
‘So how come they’ve not found him yet?’ Kevin pointed out, not unreasonably.
Stacey shrugged. ‘I only said they reckoned. Not that they’d actually succeeded. Yet. But the satellite imaging is getting more detailed all the time. Each image used to cover thirty metres by thirty metres. Now it’s more like half a metre. You wouldn’t believe the detail the experts analysts can pick up. It’s like having an overhead Google Street View of the whole world.’
‘Stop, Stacey. You’re making my head hurt. But if we can harness that, I will be eternally grateful. Have a word with the satellite bods,’ Carol said. ‘But let’s concentrate on getting the Cumbria team onside. Anything else?’ Glum looks round the table told her all she needed to know. She hated being in this position. What they needed was something big, something headline-grabbing, something spectacular. Only trouble was that what would be meat and drink to Carol and her team would be the worst kind of bad news for somebody else. She’d experienced too much of that sort of tribulation to want to visit it on anyone else.
They were just going to have to grin and bear it.
CHAPTER 9
Even the advent of his teens hadn’t broken Seth Viner’s habit of candour where his parents were concerned. He couldn’t remember a time when he’d felt he needed to keep secrets from either of his two mothers. OK, sometimes it was easier to talk to one rather than the other. Julia was more practical, more down to earth. Calmer in a crisis, more likely to listen all the way through to the end. But she’d weigh things up and she wouldn’t always come down on his side of the issue. Kathy was the emotional one, the one who rushed to judgement. Nevertheless, she’d always be in his corner - my kid, right or wrong. Still, she was the one who made him stick to things, the one who wouldn’t let him take the easy way out when things were difficult. But he’d never regretted telling either of them something, even things he was embarrassed about. They’d taught him that there was no place for secrecy with the people you love most in the world.
The other side of the equation was that they’d always listened to his questions and done their best to answer them. Everything from ‘why’s the sky blue?’ to ‘what are they fighting about in Gaza?’ They never fobbed him off. It sometimes weirded out his teachers and made his friends give him the fish-eyed stare, but he knew all sorts of stuff just because it had occurred to him to ask and it had never occurred to Julia and Kathy not to answer. He reckoned it was something to do with their determination to be honest with him about how he’d ended up with two mothers.
He couldn’t remember when it had dawned on him that it was pretty far out there to have two mothers instead of one of the more conventional arrangements like a mum and a dad or a step-dad, or a single mum and a bunch of grandparents, uncles and babysitters. Everybody starts out thinking their family is normal because they’ve no other experience to measure it against. But by the time he started school, he knew the family that embraced him was different. And not just because of the colour of Kathy’s skin. Oddly enough, the other kids seemed almost oblivious to his difference. He remembered one time when Julia had picked him up from school during his first term. Kathy usually did the school run because she ran her website design service from home, but she’d had to go out of town for some meeting, so Julia had left work early to collect him. She’d been helping him on with his wellies when Ben Rogers had said, ‘Who are you?’
Emma White, who lived on their street, had said, ‘That’s Seth’s mum.’
Ben had frowned. ‘No, it’s not. I’ve met Seth’s mum and this isn’t her,’ he’d said.
‘This is Seth’s other mum,’ Emma had insisted.
Ben had totally taken it in his stride, moving straight on to the next topic of conversation. It had stayed like that - part of the landscape, how the world was, unremarkable - until Seth had been nine or ten, when his passion for football had brought him into direct contact with kids who hadn’t grown up with the notion that having two mums was just part of the spectrum of family life.
One or two of the bigger lads had tried to use Seth’s unusual domestic set-up to get some leverage against him. They soon found out they’d picked the wrong target. Seth seemed to move inside a bubble of invulnerability. He deflected insults with bemused good nature. And he was too well liked among the other boys to make a physical campaign possible. Confounded by his self-confidence, the bullies backed off and chose someone easier to victimise. Even then, Seth thwarted them. He had a way of letting those in authority know when bad things were going on without ever being seen as a grass. He was, it seemed, a good friend and a pointless enemy.
So he’d moved seamlessly into adolescence - kind, popular and direct, his only apparent problem his anxiety not to fail. Julia and Kathy held their breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It seemed like they’d been doing that since the day Julia had inseminated. There had been plenty of Jonahs ready with dire warnings. But Seth had been a happy, easy baby. He’d had colic once. Just once. He’d started sleeping through the night at an incredible seven weeks. He’d avoided childhood ailments apart from the occasional cold. He hadn’t been the toddler from hell, partly because the first time he’d tried it in public, Kathy had walked away and left him standing red-faced and howling in the middle of a supermarket aisle. She’d been watching from round the end of the breakfast cereals, but he hadn’t realised that at the time. The horror of abandonment had been enough to cure him of temper tantrums. He whinged sometimes, as they all did, but neither Kathy nor Julia responded in the desired way, so he’d mostly given that up too.
The personality trait that saved him from being too good to be true was the constant stream of chatter that often seemed to start when his eyes opened in the morning and only ended when they closed again at bedtime. Seth was so entirely fascinated by the world and his place in it that he saw no reason why anyone would not want a blow-by-blow account of his every action and thought, or a remarkably detailed recitation of the plot of whatever DVD he’d last seen, the more trivial the better. Occasionally, belatedly, he would register his audience’s eyes rolling back in their sockets, or their whole faces glazing over as they waited for him to get to the point. It didn’t give him even a flicker of hesitation. He carried on to the bitter end, even when Kathy would lay her head on the kitchen table and moan softly.