“Aftermarket surveillance feeds? Explain this.”
“These days there are observational cameras everywhere. I’m not talking about people running around with their cell phones snapping away when a celebrity does something stupid and it gets posted online. I mean cameras at ATM sites, along streets, office buildings, courthouses, airports, train stations, and millions of other places. Hell, London is one big camera, particularly with the congestion charge enforcement requirements. The result is there are literally trillions of bytes of images out there and it ends up on enormous servers. It’s made the cops’ job easier. With just about any crime, at least in a public area, there’s a decent chance it was captured on film somewhere.”
“But how does that help us? Were there such cameras in the ancient town of Gordes?” Kuchin said skeptically.
Rice opened up his laptop and set it on a wooden coffee table. “No, we went at it from a different angle. You have to understand that a lot of this data is not locally stored. The capacity just isn’t there, particularly for smaller firms and average-size municipalities, and it’s hugely expensive to store and maintain even for megafirms and large cities. So what do folks do when confronted with a need that they are not equipped to handle or is too capital-intensive to take on alone?”
“They outsource it to firms who specialize in that area.”
“Exactly. So much of this data is stored centrally at gigantic server complexes around the world. Think of it as massive file cabinets organized by countries, states, cities, towns, suburbs, or divided tactically into government buildings, banks, commercial office properties, even military facilities, and dozens of other subcategories. The images are typically saved for years, or even in perpetuity. It’s not like you’ve got billions of photos stacked somewhere. It’s all digital. The storage footprint is relatively small.”
“And you never know when some of this data might have value?”
“Exactly. Let’s say there’s an image of an employee meeting outside a building with the same person for weeks. It might not mean anything then, but two years from now when business secrets are stolen it might very well aid in building a corporate espionage case against that employee.”
“I see. Go on.”
“Years ago entrepreneurs saw opportunities in this fledgling field and took advantage to build substantial global businesses from the fact that we really have become a Big Brother society. Now, here is the key for our purposes. Certain people within some of these companies quickly realized that the stored images had value to many others besides the original client. This is so because a camera captures many things outside of the original intent of why it was placed in a certain location. For example, aside from anything to do with the client who put the camera there, if you know someone was at a certain place at a certain time and you want a compromising picture of that person, chances are very good there was an electronic eye there and that the feed exists on some server.”
“So in effect employees of these companies are selling the images to people who want them for reasons unrelated to why the surveillance was conducted in the first place?”
“Exactly. They let it be known discreetly that they can run checks for the right price and the picture is delivered for a fee. Some have gone a step further and the actual companies that collect this data and store it are also selling images to third parties. Apparently the law is vague in some countries, or at least inconsistent enough about the uses that can be made of the stored information to allow sufficient wiggle room for the companies to do this. And the original clients either don’t care or more likely are unaware of these additional uses of the data.
“And that’s where we came in. We sent one well-known server platform covering a number of countries in Europe the digitized images taken from your drawings and the photo of the woman. They ran it through every file they had. We didn’t get a hit the first go-round, but we did the second.”
“And the hit?”
Rice keyed in some commands on his computer and turned the screen around for Kuchin to see. “It was only one hit, but it was better than nothing. Zurich. Outside a hotel, seven months ago,” Rice explained.
Kuchin sat forward and studied the picture. That was the tall man all right.
“But who is he?”
“We don’t know yet.”
Kuchin slapped the table with his palm. “Then this is useless to me.”
“Wait, Evan, please, there’s more. Look at the woman beside him.”
Kuchin did. She was tall, slender, and blonde. Then he noted that the woman’s arm was touching Shaw’s hand. He shot a glance at Rice. “They are together?”
“Apparently so, yes. We checked with the hotel. They would give out no information on either of them, so we next ran her photo through the image data banks.”
“And you got a hit?”
“More than that.” Rice handed him a file. “I know you prefer paper to digital.”
Kuchin took the file, but did not open it. “Her name?”
“Katie James.”
73
CAN’T WE at least eat our meal before the pretend time is over?” said Reggie earnestly.
“Does it mean that much to you?”
“Actually it does.”
Shaw rifled a glance at the waiter hovering nearby. “Okay, this is probably not the best place to do it anyway.”
Their food came and they talked about things other people would normally talk about over a meal out. Another bottle of wine, this one a red, was ordered and fully drunk. Coffees followed and they shared a dessert that had coconut and ribbons of white icing on top. Shaw paid the bill with a credit card.
“A. Shaw?” said Reggie as she spied the name on the plastic. “What’s the A stand for?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
He signed on the dotted line and they rose and left. The evening was still warm, at least by London standards, though now Reggie wished she had brought the sweater. Noticing her chill bumps, Shaw took off his jacket and draped it around her shoulders. It hung down like a dress.
“Forty-six extra long?” she said, gripping the material.
“Something like that. How’re the feet?”
“Depends on where we’re headed.”
“My hotel’s in that direction. Ten-minute cab ride.”
She looked startled. “Your hotel?”
“Or we can go to your place.”
“Why does it have to be either one?”
“Or we can just go to another public place and talk about it and hope nobody overhears us.”
Reggie thought of the sex-crazed couple in the rooms above her. “My place is not that quiet,” she said.
“Mine is.”
“Where exactly is it?”
“The Savoy. It recently reopened. Excellent river views. Very nice.”
“What did you tell me before about being forward? Going to your hotel room this late at night seems to fall into that category.”
“That was before, this is now. We can cab it. It’s down in the Strand.”
“I know where the damn Savoy is.”
“Then let’s go.”
An efficient cabbie with “the knowledge,” as Londoners referred to the mental map cabdrivers were required to learn over several years, whisked them along Piccadilly, over to Haymarket, around Lord Nelson and his army of pigeons, and onto the Strand.
“It’s always puzzled me why the only place one drives on the right in all of Britain is down the little street to the Savoy entrance,” said Shaw.
“It’s because the hotel’s forecourt was too narrow for coachmen to pull up to the front doors if they had to hug the left side.” Shaw stared at her in mild amusement. She said sharply, “What? I am English, after all.”
They walked through the lobby, up a flight of stairs, and rode an elevator car up to Shaw’s room. He closed the door behind them, dropped his keys on the table, and pointed to a chair for Reggie to take while he sat on the edge of the bed.