She faltered. “No. I did. But Padlo made a positive ID based on my verbal description to him.”
“Your…verbal description,” Kalmbach echoed softly. Condescension dripped from every word.
“In fact—” she began, but Kalmbach cut her off.
“Do you understand how complex and involved the process is by which a foreign law enforcement official is granted entry into the United States? It involves weeks of legal findings and sworn affidavits by the DOJ’s Criminal Division, the Office of International Affairs. It’s a cumbersome and extremely sensitive legal affair and not one to be taken lightly. For one thing, there must be absolutely incontrovertible evidence of dual criminality.”
Oh, for God’s sake, she thought. The guy lived and breathed paperwork. It was a wonder he hadn’t already died of white lung. “Sir, if Padlo’s right then, those three homicides in Warsaw are tied to these police shootings at Dulles Airport and we’ve got a clear-cut case of dual criminality.”
“A case built on a verbal description over the telephone, Agent Connolly? I hardly think that constitutes a finding of dual criminality. This is an awfully slender reed. I’m afraid we’re not going to be able to grant a visa to Inspector Padlo.”
Yeah, she thought. If Jozef wanted to get into the country quick and easy, no questions asked, he should just join Al Qaeda and enroll in flight school. We’d let him in without a second look.
But she said, “So you’re saying that if we had a clear-cut ID of the shooter — connecting the Warsaw homicides to the Dulles ones — you’d have no problem letting Padlo in?”
“We don’t have that, do we?” Kalmbach said acidly.
“No, sir,” she said. “Not yet.”
“Thank you, Agent…Marion.”
“M.T.,” she said.
But he’d hung up.
She’d been M.T. since the age of thirteen.
She’d always hated her given name, “Marion.” Her father had also been Marion; but then, as he was always proud to point out, that was John Wayne’s real name. In Gulfport, Mississippi, where Dad had been a part-time deputy in the Harrison County Sheriff’s Department, the Duke was up there with Jesus Christ. Bigger, to some folks.
But to her, “Marion” was either a librarian or a housewife in a TV sitcom, and neither fit her self-image. She was a tomboy and proud of it. As tough as any boy, she had even beat up the seventh-grade class bully for daring to call her adored younger brother Wayne a “sissy.”
So she insisted on being called by her initials, which to her ears sounded tough and no-nonsense and the exact opposite of girly-girl. Maybe even a little enigmatic.
Over the years, she’d learned about makeup, and she’d developed a pretty damned nice figure, and she worked out every morning at five for at least an hour. When she wanted to look hot, she could. And she knew that when she put on that slinky red jersey halter dress from Banana Republic she always drew appreciative glances from men.
At work, though, she downplayed her femininity as much as possible. The FBI was still a boys’ club, and she was convinced that the guys took you a lot more seriously if you didn’t arouse their libidos.
Like the guy who sat across from her right now. His name was Bruce Ardsley, and he was a forensic video analyst with the Bureau’s Forensic Audio, Video, and Image Analysis Unit. The main FBI lab was in D.C., in the Hoover building, but they’d recently installed an outpost here because of all the demand on the Bureau since 9/11.
Ardsley wore thick aviator-frame glasses and had greasy hair and long bushy sideburns that might have been modish in the Swinging ‘70s, and he was notorious for trying to hit on all the female agents and administrative assistants. But he’d given up on her long ago. Now they got along fine.
His office, in the basement of the new resident agency building, was no bigger than a closet, jammed with steel shelves heaped with video monitors and digital editing decks and CPUs. Taped to one wall was a mangled poster of a man running up a stadium steps. Above his blurred figure was the word PERSISTENCE. At his feet it said, “There is no GIANT step that does it. It’s a lot of LITTLE steps.”
She handed Ardsley two disks. “The one marked Dulles is from Dulles Airport,” Connolly said.
“Clever.”
She smiled. “The other has the photos from Warsaw.” As he promised, Padlo had e-mailed her photos of Agim Rugova’s henchmen. One of them was Dragan Stefanovic, the man Padlo thought might be the Dulles shooter who’d tried to kill Harold Middleton. Stefanovic had served under Agim Rugova, which made him a war criminal at the very least. After the war, Padlo said, he’d become a mercenary and had gone into hiding.
“High-def, I hope.”
“I doubt it,” she replied.
“Well, all I can do is my best,” Ardsley said. “At least one thing in our favor is the new networked digital-video surveillance system at Dulles. The airports authority dumped a boatload of money on this a couple years ago. Bought a bunch of high-priced Nextiva S2600e wide-dynamic range IP cameras with on-board analytical software-based solutions.”
“Translation, please,” said Connolly.
“Meaning the facial-recognition software is still crap and the images are still fuzzy, but now we can all feel good about how much money we’re throwing at the terrorists.”
“And that’s in our favor…how exactly?” she asked.
He pointed to the steel shelves lined with video monitors. “Once the Bureau realized how crappy the facial-recognition system is, they were forced to sink more money into toys for boys like me to play with. Remember the Super Bowl?”
She groaned. The FBI had put in an extensive surveillance system at the Super Bowl in Tampa in 2001 in order to scan the faces of everyone passing through the turnstiles and match them against the images of known terrorists. The ACLU pitched a fit — this was before 9/11, when people listened to the ACLU — but the whole scheme was a resounding flop anyway. The Bureau had rounded up a couple of scalpers and that was it. “You’re telling me the technology’s no better now?”
“Oh, it’s better,” Ardsley said. “Well, a little better.”
Her phone chirped, and she excused herself and stepped out into the hallway.
“Connolly.”
“Hey, M.T., it’s Tanya Jackson in Technical Services.”
“That was fast,” she said. “You got something?”
She’d called the FBI’s Technical Services unit and asked them to run a locater on Middleton’s cell phone to find out where he was at that very instant. Most cell phones these days, she knew, contained GPS chips that enabled you to pinpoint its location to within a hundred meters, as long as it was turned on and transmitting a signal.
“Well, not exactly,” Jackson said. “There’s sort of a procedural problem.”
“Procedural…?”
“Look, M.T.,” Jackson said apologetically, “you know we’re no longer allowed to track cell phone users without a court order.”
“Oh, is that right?” Connolly said innocently. Of course, she knew all about the recent rulings. Now you had to get a court order to compel a wireless carrier to reveal the location of one of their cell phones. And to get a court order, you had to demonstrate that a crime was in progress or had occurred.
But Jackson had done her favors before. She’d located cell phones for Connolly without the necessary paperwork. Why did she all of a sudden care about the legal niceties?
“Tanya,” she said, “what’s going on?”
There was silence on the other end of the line.
“You’re getting heat on this, aren’t you?” Connolly said.
Another beat of silence, and then Jackson said, “Five minutes after you called me, I heard from someone pretty high up in the Bureau. He reminded me that it was a felony for me to locate a cell phone without a court order. I could go to jail.”