“What do you say we go shopping?” Thornton asked.
“How could we live if we passed this up?” replied Mallery.
He joined about twenty customers in Mo’s, a lemon-yellow discount clothing store advertising SHOES, 2 FOR 1. He patted his pocket, feeling the seven $100 bills he’d taken from Albert’s wallet before covering the dead boat captain with a tarp and setting him adrift in the Mermaid III’s portside Zodiac lifeboat in hope of decoying any searchers. While packing the Mermaid III’s other Zodiac, Mallery found $1,500 more in Albert’s duffel bag. The total of $2,200 ought to go a long way toward the purchase of disguises now.
To minimize the chance of their being seen together, Mallery waited a minute before entering Mo’s, then plucked a blouse off a rack and headed to the dressing rooms. Thornton remained behind, choosing a floral-print shirt for himself in XXL — bulky clothing veiled stature. For the same reason he also picked out a pair of stoplight-red board shorts with more square inches of material than any pair of long pants he’d ever owned. Next, in defiance of conventional spook wisdom that wearing hats aroused surveillants’ suspicions, he fished an Atlanta Braves cap from a bargain bin. It would keep him from being the only male tourist on the island without a baseball cap. The Braves cap would also serve to hide his unique haircut, with the bill draping his features in shadows. These measures would throw off human searchers.
Cameras were tougher. Baseball caps made no difference to facial recognition software. Even bushy mustaches and beards were useless. In order to fool the machines, Thornton had read, you had to think the way they did. For instance, you could compress or distend a photo and a human would instantly recognize the subject, but a computer couldn’t. Computerized facial recognition applications took into account relative positioning, sizes, and shapes of the eyes, nose, cheekbones, and jaw. Accordingly Thornton selected a tube of zinc oxide. When applied, the white sun-protection cream was capable of widening the bridge of a nose so that it boggled a system running principal component analysis or even the latest three-dimensional recognition software. The wraparound sunglasses Thornton chose would accomplish more of the same. He completed his outfit with a pair of Nike knockoffs, leaving part of the balled-up tissue paper in the toe of one of the shoes in order to alter his stride.
For Mallery, he picked out an extra-long T-shirt, the sort commonly worn over a bathing suit, this one with a silk-screened image of Peter Tosh, designed to divert attention from her face, though he suspected that if the surveillants were male, her bare legs would provide ample diversion. He chose a pair of sunglasses for her too, with frames big enough to negate the pronounced contour of her cheekbones. He also got thick glam-rock-style makeup, which could thwart skin-texture analytics, and a can of mousse to keep tendrils of hair pasted to her face — a monkey wrench to systems running linear discriminate analysis. Finally, he selected something called Dreamscape Instant Blonde.
At the counter, he added a box of on-sale Chiclets. Properly wadded in the mouth, the gum wouldn’t draw a second glance from other humans but could utterly discombobulate elastic bunch graph measurement-based software.
Ten minutes later, he met an almost unrecognizable Mallery around the corner. They proceeded onto Broad Street, one of the city’s main drags, thick with people and vehicular traffic, all of the cars in need of new carburetors. Steel bands competed from either end of the block.
Over the commotion, she asked, “So where to?”
“Good question,” he admitted. “I’m hoping that the answer leaps out at us while we’re walking around, and if it doesn’t, that we’ll at least have some candidates.”
The signs they passed offered no help. BC. LOWE & CO. DOLLARWISE. UNITED SERVICES. Any of these names might uniquely resonate with locals or in fact front Littlebird Central. A narrow gap between the three-story Dollarwise building and its four-story neighbor revealed a stripe of tropical sky, the first bit of sky Thornton had seen in a while. He glumly realized that he’d underestimated the scale of the city. He turned to Mallery, whose bright expression lacked only the proverbial lightbulb.
“In my experience, voice recognition software is problematic at best,” she said. “Which has me thinking: So many organizations now get their podcasts converted into transcripts by offshore services staffed by human transcribers. Maybe this is as easy as looking up transcription companies.”
Could be, Thornton thought. “The thing is, our gang wouldn’t need or want new business other than their own. A big CIA listening post in Berlin was fronted for years by a generic College of Religious Studies. Other operations don’t even bother with a sign.”
“Those would just whet our transcribers’ curiosity — in which case, maybe the cover is a generic tech company.”
“Good thinking.” Thornton kept to himself that, unfortunately, of the last four businesses — BC, Lowe & Co., Dollarwise, and United Services — she had eliminated only Dollarwise. The best field officers, he reminded himself, had a knack for adapting a plan when things went wrong. The problem was, those were the best field officers. He didn’t know what to do in order to adapt.
But he could try something different. That notion alone sparked a new idea. “They might want to be on a busy thoroughfare like this,” he said, “but there are lots of reasons a quieter street would make sense.”
They turned onto Pine Street. Still crowded, but smaller, narrower, and cheaper. On the sliver of a sidewalk, a man rushed past them shoving a squeaky shopping cart full of fish, some still quivering, the stench so strong Thornton half expected to be able to see a shimmer in the air.
“I like this block,” he said.
But by the end of it, he had counted another fifteen signs for businesses that could front the listening post, and at least that many offices without signs.
“How about we stop in there?” Mallery waved at a café on the far corner. “Get ourselves a cold drink, then look on the Web or at the local yellow pages, make a list, and work our way down it?”
“Or we could just ask him.” Thornton pointed to a FedEx truck down the block. A sweat-soaked deliveryman sat smoking a cigarette on the steel ramp extending to the street.
Mallery walked down the street, trying to neaten hair that the dye and sea air had nearly turned to plastic. She succeeded only in clearing her eyes. Thornton had her back from the café. Still she felt naked. Her checkbook was useless now. Without a support staff at her beck and call, or even a smartphone, she was on her own, reduced to old-fashioned smarts. Well, that and her smile.
As she approached the FedEx man, she faked a genuine smile to the utmost of her election-campaign-honed ability, the one that reached all the way from the mouth to the eyes and wrinkled the skin on the outer corners of the eyes. The man was overweight, in his thirties, with no hair other than thick eyebrows turned down toward a don’t-mess-with-me countenance. He smiled back, his eyebrows relaxing to a straight line. He tapped his cigarette ash on the dolly ramp, stood, and took a step toward her.