“No problem,” said Howard, sitting on a stool and watching as Andy’s fingers played across the keyboard.
“These graphics are really simple, but they’ll give you an idea what I have in mind,” said Andy. Two circles appeared on the screen, green on a black background. Andy pressed another series of keys and the circles were replaced by two figures, one a man with a rifle, another a standing figure. “Okay, suppose we have one sniper, and a target. And suppose the distance between them is five hundred feet, and the angle is ten degrees.” His fingers tapped at the keyboard and the picture became three-dimensional, with a dotted circle above the target. “We know that the sniper must be somewhere along this line,” Andy continued. “Now, if we superimpose the sniper’s possible positions on a city plan. .” Several square and oblong shapes appeared on screen in various colours. “I know, they don’t look like buildings, but you get the drift,” he said.
Howard smiled. “I’m trying,” he said.
Andy flicked his hair from his eyes and pushed his spectacles higher up his nose. “Okay, so now we can see which of the buildings are the right height and position to contain the sniper. And you can tell which floor he must be on to shoot at the required angle. Now, with only one sniper there are several positions which satisfy the position requirements.” He pointed to four positions on the three-dimensional map where buildings coincided with the circle. “But, if we increase the number of snipers, we restrict the number of options.”
Andy bent over the keyboard and began pressing keys quickly. The shapes disappeared from the screen and he added two more snipers, each linked to the target with a dotted line. “With three points to work with, the positions become more fixed, each has a spatial relationship with the others, and with the target. This time we don’t get a circle, we have a tetrahedron. .” A three-dimensional four-sided shape appeared on the screen, like a knifepoint sticking into the ground. “Now it becomes much more difficult to fit this shape into the model of the city.” He called up the coloured blocks again. “See, all three points representing the snipers have to be in the correct position. There is only one solution.” He pointed to the three places where the sniper positions coincided with the buildings.
Howard drank his coffee. “How long did it take you to set this up?” he asked.
Andy beamed. “About three hours, but this model is really simplistic. A true working model will be much more complicated.”
“But possible?”
“Of course.”
“How long would it take?”
Andy shrugged. “The snipers and target model would take a few hours, but getting the measurements and angles is the hard part. I’d have to go out to the desert and I’d need to give the video a thorough analysis.”
“You haven’t seen it yet?”
“Of course not,” said Andy. “Bonnie wouldn’t dream of bringing FBI work home with her. She’d stay in the lab all night, but bring work home? Never.”
“I can arrange for you to see it at the lab,” said Howard.
“Okay, and I’ll have to go out to Arizona. I’ll need the best part of a day there.”
“That’s no problem,” said Howard. “You can come back with me, tomorrow morning. You can watch the video when you get back. And I already have a list of places where the President is going to be. We can use them to see if your system works. Can I ask you something, though? What do you get out of this? I mean, the FBI will cover expenses, and I guess we could come up with some consulting fees, but there’s still a lot of work involved.”
Andy looked at his wife and she nodded encouragement. “What I’d like, if it’s okay with you, is to do a paper on it, if it works. Most of my research is pretty dry stuff, all very academic, and this is a real sexy application of my computer modelling. It’d be a great paper, it’d really get people talking.”
Howard thought about Andy’s proposal. “We’d need approval of the text,” he said eventually.
“Sure. No sweat.”
“And we might want to hold out some of the details, you realise that?”
“It’s the mathematics I’m interested in, mainly.”
“And you’ve got to realise that if this goes wrong, we’ll have to keep the lid on it. You might not get the chance to publish anything.”
“I’ll take the risk.”
Howard nodded. “It’s a deal, then.” Andy grinned and Bonnie leaned over and hugged him.
Joker caught the afternoon train down to Hereford. He’d lost his licence six months earlier after a police car had pulled him over on the M25 with a blood-alcohol level almost twice the legal limit. It was a sunny day, but cold, and he was wearing a Navy pea jacket and black wool trousers. He spent the journey deep in thought, his shoulders hunched and his eyes focused in the middle distance as he stared at the countryside which rushed by the train window.
He’d vowed never to return to the SAS Sterling Lines barracks and hadn’t even replied to the Regiment’s invitation to attend its fiftieth anniversary celebrations in 1991. His time with the SAS had been one of the most challenging, and exciting, periods of his life, but it had also changed him forever. It went above and beyond being a soldier: the SAS had taught him to kill, and part of that training had been a dehumanising programme which left him with a cold, hard place where his conscience used to be. It was only after he’d left the Regiment that he’d realised what he’d lost. What they’d taken away from him.
The daylight was starting to leach from the sky as he walked away from the station and he thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his jacket. He’d taken the day off from the paintball arena, but he hadn’t made up his mind yet whether or not to work with the Colonel. There were things he had to get straight in his head first, and for that he needed someone to talk to. A friend. He kept his head down as he walked, but his feet took him unerringly to a pub he used to frequent, set in the middle of a row of brick cottages with leaded windows and old, warping oak doors. There were two barmaids pulling pints and wiping glasses, one of whom he recognised. Her name was Dolly and she served him with a smile but no hint of recognition, leaving Joker in no doubt as to how much he’d changed over the last few years.
He ordered a Famous Grouse, a double. Two young soldiers stood together at a video game in one corner of the bar, feeding it coins as they drank pints of lager. They had the crew-cuts and thick moustaches that marked them out as being from the Parachute Regiments, from where the SAS drew most of its recruits. It would also make them feel right at home in some of London’s rough trade gay bars. Joker could never understand why they allowed the Paras to stick with their macho style once they joined the ranks of the SAS. The officers insisted that the men refrained from using military plates on their cars and that they dressed as civilians when moving between operations, yet they were so easy to spot that any terrorist worth his salt would have no problem in targeting them, on or off duty.
Joker drained his glass and signalled for another. Dolly put a refill in front of him. “Don’t I know you?” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” he said, handing her a twenty-pound note. “Can you give me a bottle of that, to take away?”
She nodded, wrapped a bottle in a sheet of purple tissue paper and gave it to him with his change.
As Joker drank his second whisky, a woman appeared at his side and sat down on a bar stool. He saw her reflection in the mirror above the cash register: she was a bleached blonde with a washed-out complexion as if she’d spent too many years indoors. In the mirror she appeared to be about thirty-five years old but when Joker turned to look at her he saw that she was older. She was wearing a red blouse and a black skirt that was a fraction too tight. The two squaddies at the video game burst into laughter and Joker had the feeling that they were laughing at her. Relations between the SAS and the locals were strained at the best of times: the soldiers usually called them ‘pointyheads’ and treated them with contempt, while the local men accused the soldiers of stealing their women. The Saturday-night fights in the crowded bars of Hereford were legendary, as were the queues in the hospital emergency room afterwards.