Ryan’s full beard helped conceal his identity, but his name was far too recognizable, especially since his father was all over the news in Indonesia at the moment. Fortunately, The Campus had friends at State who could help them out with different passports. It was standard practice in the intelligence and clandestine world to use actual given names on any alias. Jack, however, was too obvious. When he traveled, Jack Ryan, Jr., became Joseph “Joe” Peterson of Alexandria, Virginia.
“Copy that,” Ryan said. “I’ll pass the word to Adara and Midas to hurry.”
Chavez ended the call, and then, struck with a sudden idea, turned to Clark. “Let’s head over to the hotel. I want to give Gavin a shout, and I need you on the line.”
“Lead on, McDuff,” Clark said, heaving a glum sigh.
“We’re all gonna die, John,” Chavez said. “When is the mystery.”
“Don’t I know it,” Clark said. “I just expected the how would be more interesting.”
32
Chavez punched in Gavin Biery’s number as soon as they got to his room. He put the phone on speaker and set it on the lacquer coffee table between him and Clark.
“Hey, bud,” Chavez said when the IT director picked up. “What can you tell me about retina-scan locks?”
“Are you sure the tech is retina and not iris scan?” Biery asked.
“No.” Chavez raised his eyebrows at Clark. “They’re not the same?” He caught himself. “I mean, I know the anatomical differences in parts of an eyeball. I’m asking about the security mechanisms.”
“I get it,” Biery said. “They’re kind of the same, in that both compare unique images from the user’s eye. An iris scan is just a program that matches similarities from digital photographs of the colored portion of your eye. We all have unique patterns, so the iris is a good spot for identifying characteristics. It’s simple and relatively cheap. Lots of things like passport control and even cell phones are using the tech now because it doesn’t require much besides a camera. A retina scan is a little more complicated. In a nutshell, it’s a deep scan of the pattern of blood vessels on the back wall of your eye. The scanners they use have got to be a little more sophisticated because they’re looking through your pupil inside your eye. And you have to get really close to the device to unlock it.”
“How difficult are they to defeat?”
“Hmmm,” Biery said, mulling it over. “I’m not sure. The iris scan uses a series of digital photos so, in theory, if you had enough quality images of someone’s eye, you could duplicate the key — especially with three-D cameras we have now. The retina scan might be a little tougher. Unless you were able to just get the guy’s eyeball.”
“He might object to the procedure,” Chavez said.
“Yeah.” Biery chuckled. “Have you seen the scanner and lock? I could tell you more if you got me a photo of the tech.”
Chavez looked at Clark and shrugged. “We have not. We’re not a hundred percent sure which it is, but we think our target is running a retina scan.”
“Hmmm,” Biery said again. “Hang on a minute.” Biery’s keyboard clicked rapidly on the other end of the line. “We’re talking about Suparman Games, right?”
“We are,” Chavez said.
“Good.” More keyboard clicks followed, then silence as Gavin read whatever file he’d hacked into. “So I’m assuming you need to get past this unknown lock to break into Suparman’s safe.”
“That would be a correct assumption,” Chavez said. Gavin liked it when you talked to him like he was a character on Star Trek.
“Awesome. Remember how in his social media photos Suparman always wears those thick Elton John glasses?”
Ding leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped, and nodded at the phone on the table.
“I do.”
“Well, I think I just found your key. Suparman’s financials say his optometrist works at Lucky Optical, to the northeast, about twenty minutes out of the city center.”
“Out near the airport,” Clark noted.
“Right,” Biery said. “That’s the one. And here’s the good news. Lucky Optical advertises a machine called an optomap. It’s pretty cool tech; my optometrist has one. It’s a scanning confocal laser that takes a two-hundred-degree-wide field view of the retina. That means high-resolution images of the optic nerve and all the blood vessels at the back of the eye — the same stuff a retina-scan lock is going to be looking for. With vision as bad as Suparman’s, he’s sure to have a substantial patient record on file, including digital images from the optomap.”
Clark scooted his chair closer, interested now. “And we can use the digital files of the images as a key?”
“You could,” Biery said. “In theory.”
Chavez gave a thumbs-up. “That’s terrific news.”
“It’s sort-of-terrific news,” Biery said. “I’m through the optometrist’s office firewall, but all I can find is billing information.”
“No files from the machine?” Clark asked.
“Sorry,” Biery said. “No luck on that count. Most places store the files in a server that uploads to the Cloud, but Suparman’s doc must store them on a stand-alone drive. Wherever it is, it’s not on his networked computers. If you want to break into Suparman’s safe, first you will have to break into his eye doc’s office. I’ll pull up some specs on the optomap machine and walk you through what you’ll need to do to get the images. They’re pretty cool,” he said as an aside. “I have it done every year. Anyway, you should be able to put the files on a thumb drive — or e-mail them to me, then I can put them on a drive for you.”
Chavez leaned back abruptly. For a minute there, it had all seemed so easy. Too easy. “Won’t that opto machine be password-protected?”
“Maybe,” Biery said. “Maybe not. I mean, who goes around stealing photos of people’s eyeballs?”
Ding groaned. “Apparently, we do.”
The two F-15 Eagles out of Kadena are sitting on the tarmac in the Philippines,” Chavez told the team. They’d all linked up in his room at the Whiz Prime Hotel for specific assignments after the recon of the Suparman main offices. “I’ll make the call as soon as it looks like we have Calliope in hand. The birds can be here in less than an hour and then jet back to the good old US of A a hell of a lot faster than we could.”
The F-15 Eagle had listed top speed of more than 1,800 miles per hour, so, “a hell of a lot faster” was a bit of an understatement.
“I wouldn’t mind doing a little diving after that,” Adara said, covering a yawn with her closed fist. “I mean, have you looked at the water around here?”
“Once they’re wheels up and we check in,” Chavez said. “A little R-and-R is well deserved.”
He opened his tablet to display a set of blueprints Gavin had found for Suparman Games’ head offices. The date stamp on the scanned document was smudged, and though they’d been uploaded two years prior, it was impossible to say whether the plans were original or contained any modifications made after construction began. Online plans were notorious for leaving out walls and showing closets where there was actually a bathroom. Still, they used what they had for a tabletop review of the facility. They munched on energy bars rather than eating a big meal that would slow them down, and took a few moments to rehydrate. All of them had sweated through two sets of clothes from the heat alone. The tension of the mission only made it worse.
Midas sat at the desk in the corner, hunched over one of the Raspberry Pi computer boards, soldering wires, referencing some crib notes he’d taken down from Gavin’s over-the-phone instructions.