By now MJ was totally wired. She enlarged the cropped area once more to see if she could find what the six men were doing-where and how they fit in the particular instant in time frozen in the photograph. She worked as methodically as if she were examining the contents of a petri dish or a lab specimen preserved under the glass slide of a microscope. It took her half an hour or so, but she finally realized what the six men were doing.
They were bodyguards. For a seventh man. A Palestinian security officer from the look of his uniform. That was odd. PSS officers provided security, they didn’t receive it.
She hadn’t paid much interest to the guy before. But now she lavished her attention on him. Except he wasn’t entirely visible. The Palestinian’s face was partially obscured by the red-and-white checked kaffiyeh he’d wrapped around his head and shoulders.
Just under two-thirds of his face could be seen. MJ’s eyes crinkled. “Not for long, Buster Brown.” She brushed her shoulder-length, butterscotch-colored hair out of her eyes, pulled it straight back, and trussed it with a rubber band. Then she took the photo crop, saved it as a separate jpg file, opened her Adobe Photo Shop software, and started playing with the editing tools. This son of a bitch was going to behers.
1:14P.M. MJ glanced up at the wall clock that was just visible over the top of her cubicle. Christ, Mrs. SJ was going to have a fit. She expected her C-PIGgies to go through a minimum of sixty photographs a day. MJ had scanned only eight. Well, things had taken longer than expected. But there he was, in living color.
MJ examined the face. The guy was about fifty-maybe a couple of years either side. Olive skin. He sported a thick mustache. But the more MJ stared at the mustache, the more she became convinced it was fake. His eyebrows were thin, and the rest of his face didn’t support the weight of the huge brush on his upper lip. It was out of balance to the rest of him. She enlarged the picture so she could see everything more clearly.
Several details bothered her. The picture had been taken at midday. Most men shave in the mornings. There were light traces of five-o’clock shadow at the edges of the man’s cheeks. But the upper lip area adjacent to his mustache had no discernible hair. That meant it was clean-shaven. But his cheeks weren’t. Paying special attention to one area of the face when shaving was, she knew, consistent with wearing a disguise or a prosthetic. She’d seen Tom prepare disguises and that’s how he did things.
Okay, let’s assume disguise. She played with the software for a while. After half an hour she had composited seven distinct full facials. There was one with mustache; one with Ayatollah-style beard and another with close-cropped Yasser Arafat stubble; one barefaced, one with full head of hair, another one balding, and a final one with shaved head. After MJ finished playing with noses, chins, and cheekbones, she had more than forty images. Then she keyed up the IdentaBase facial recognition database and let it do its magic.
3:26P.M. This made no sense. No sense at all. None of the more than twoscore composites had caused the recognition software to hiccup.
MJ sighed. Back to the drawing board. She focused on her first composite-the one in which she’d erased the kaffiyeh and reconstructed the left side of his face.
By now, she’d given him a name. She called him Khalil, because that was the name of a Palestinian terrorist in John Le Carré’s novelThe Little Drummer Girl, a book she’d read in college.
Okay, Khalil, MJ posited as she stared, what if you had plastic surgery so the Israelis couldn’t identify you?
She blew up the photo, then scanned it as closely as she could to see if Khalil’s face bore any signs of cosmetic alteration. When she saw-or at least thought she saw-possible changes, she tried to conjure up what he’d had done to himself.
It took her hours of trial and error, but she finally put together something she was happy with. The Khalil she now stared at certainly was different from the man in the original photograph-and yet he was the same man. She’d made small but significant changes: enlarged his upper lip, reduced the prominence of the cheekbones to make his face slightly more oblong, extended the hairline just a tad lower onto the forehead, and taken the Roman-like hook out of the nose.
6:45P.M. MJ sent Khalil’s image to the IdentaBase software. Six minutes later, she’d gotten the hiccup she was waiting for. The software pulled ninety-two points and a name.
The name was Imad Mugniyah. MJ went white. Imad Mugniyah was the world’s second most wanted terrorist. The founder of the Islamic Jihad Organization. The man who’d blown up two American embassies in Lebanon and killed 241 U.S. Marines. The man who had kidnapped and tortured to death CIA’s Beirut station chief William Buckley.
She’d once seen one of the CIA’s two photographs of Imad Mugniyah-and the guy in that picture, which dated from 1988, looked nothing like either the individual in the Reuters photo or the composite she’d sent to IdentaBase.
And yet there it was in black-and-white: ninety-two points. Holy Mother of God.
Just to make sure, MJ logged onto BigPond and pulled up the original picture. The photo had been obtained in September 1988 by a Hezbollah penetration agent working for a Beirut-based Arabic-speaking case officer named.8It showed Mugniyah, surrounded by seven of his IJO colleagues, watching CNN’s coverage of the aftermath of the July 1988 shoot-down of a civilian Iranian Airbus by the USSVincennes.
There was significance to this. In December 1988, Pan Am’s Flight 103 from London to Washington exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland. Among the 259 passengers were five CIA officers, including the son-in-law of the Agency’s deputy director for operations and,9a former Beirut station chief who had come close to killing or capturing Imad Mugniyah twice. Despite the fact that the Libyan intelligence service had ultimately been convicted of bombing Pan Am 103, there were those at CIA-and MJ’s boyfriend Tom Stafford was among them-who believed it was theVincennes incident that led to the bombing, that Iran was ultimately responsible, and that Imad Mugniyah was somehow complicit in the atrocity.
MJ printed out the BigPond photo and compared it with her afternoon’s work. There was a slight resemblance. Imad Mugniyah had been born sometime in the 1960s: 1962 or 1963 was what came to mind. He’d be in his forties now. Which was more or less the age of the man in the Reuters photograph. But Imad Mugniyah? At the site of a bombing in Gaza? Such things were way above her pay grade.
MJ decided to let Mrs. Sin-Gin handle the problem. She wrote a half-page single-spaced memo, clipped all of the photos together, slipped them into an envelope, which she sealed and then put inside an orange-tabbed folder. At 8:15P.M., MJ walked the folder down the corridor to Mrs. ST. JOHN’s office suite. The outer door was locked and the receptionist had long since left. So she pushed the file through the letter slot in the top of the receptionist’s secure documents repository, returned to her own cubicle, removed the hard drive from her classified computer, slid it into the safe that sat adjacent to her desk, put the pen drive with the original photos on top of the hard drive, locked the door, and gave the knob an extra twirl. Mrs. SJ could deal with Imad Mugniyah in the morning.
17 OCTOBER 2003
8:03A.M.