“Just what is it you want to know about these prints?” Harper flexed his fingers like a concert pianist.
“Ah, have they been enhanced? Touched up? Whatever the phrase is.”
“Well, the two prints are identical.” Toad had given Harper two prints, the original that Elizabeth Thorn had handed him Friday night and one he had made yesterday evening from the negative at a one-hour photo shop in a suburban mall. “I ran them through the scanner,” Harper continued, “which looks at the light levels in little segments called pixels and assigns a numerical value, which is how the computer uses the information. The prints are essentially identical with only minor, statistically insignificant variations. Possibly caused by dust on the negative.”
Toad grunted. “Did anybody doctor it up?”
“Not that I can see.” Harper punched buttons. Columns of numbers appeared on the screen before him. “What we’re looking for are lines, sharp variations in light values that shouldn’t be there. Of course, with a sophisticated enough computer, those traces could be erased, but then the resultant print would have to be photographed to get a new negative, and that would fuzz everything. I just don’t think so. Maybe one chance in a hundred. Or one in a thousand.”
“What can you tell me about the picture?”
Harper’s fingers flew across the keyboard. The photo appeared on the screen. “It’s a man sitting at a table reading a newspaper. Apparently at a sidewalk café.”
“Do you know the man?”
“No, but if you like I can access the CIA’s data base and maybe we can match the face.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Toad Tarkington said. “Is there anything in the photo that would indicate where it was taken?”
The computer wizard stroked the mouse and drew a box over the newspaper. He clicked again on the mouse button and the boxed area filled the screen. The headline was in English and quite legible, but the masthead was less so. “We’ll enhance it a little,” Harper muttered and clicked the mouse again.
After a few seconds he announced, “The Times.”
“New York Times?”
“The Times. The real one. London.”
“What day?”
“Can’t tell. The date is just too small. But look at this.” The whole photograph was brought back to the screen and the cursor repositioned over a white splotch on the café window. Now the splotch appeared. Toad came around the counter and stared over Harper’s shoulder. “It’s a notice of the hours the café is open. You can’t read the language in this blowup — the picture is too fuzzy — but if the computer uses an enhancement program to fill in the gaps it should become legible.”
His fingers danced. After a minute or two he said, “It’s not English. It’s Portuguese.”
“So the photo was taken in Portugal.”
“Or in front of a Portuguese café in London, Berlin, Zurich, Rome, Madrid, New York, Washing—”
“How about the front page of the paper? Can you give me a printout of that?”
“Sure.” Richard Harper clicked the mouse on the print menu and in a moment the laser began to hum. Toad waited until the page came out of the printer, then examined it carefully. There was a portion of a photo centered under the paper’s big headline, which contained the words “Common Market ministers.” He folded the page and put it back into his pocket.
“Well,” he said, “I guess that’s everything. Give me back the prints and erase everything from the memory of your idiot box and I’ll get out of your hair.”
Harper shrugged. He put the prints in the envelope that had originally contained them and passed it to Toad, who slipped the envelope into an inside pocket. Then Harper clicked away on the mouse. After a few seconds of activity he sat back and said, “It’s gone.”
“I don’t want to insult you,” Toad said, “but I should emphasize this little matter is a tippy top secret, eyes only. Loose lips sink ships.”
“Everything I do is classified, Commander,” Harper said tartly. He reached for the folder on the top of the pile in his in basket.
“No offense,” Toad muttered. “By the way, what were those lines you were saying about ‘visions and revisions’?”
Now Harper colored slightly and made a vague gesture. “ ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’ ”
“Umm.”
An hour later in the media reading room in the Madison Building of the Library of Congress Toad found the page of the London Times that had been captured in the photo. Several weeks’ editions of the newspaper were on each roll of microfilm. He selected the roll that included the date Nigel Keren died, placed it on a Bell & Howell viewing console and began to scroll through the pages. The headline he wanted was on page twenty-three of the scroll, the edition of November 1, 1991.
Rear Admiral Jake Grafton spent the morning in a briefing. As usual, the subject was nuclear weapons in the Commonwealth of Independent States, which was the old Soviet Union. This matter was boiling on the front burner. The locations of the strategic nuclear missiles — ICBMs — were known and the political control apparatus was more or less public knowledge. But the Allied intelligence community had lost sight of the tactical nuclear weapons — weapons that were by definition mobile. They were hidden behind the pall of smoke rising from the rubble of the Soviet Union.
Listening to experts discuss nuclear weapons as if they were missing vases from a seedy art gallery, Grafton’s attention wandered. He had first sat through classified lectures on the ins and outs of nuclear weapons technology as a very junior A-6 pilot, before he went to Vietnam for the first time. In those days attack plane crews were each assigned targets under the Single Integrated Operational Plan — SIOP. The lectures were like something from Dr. Strangelove’s horror cabinet — thermal pulses, blast effects, radiation and kill zones and the like. When the course was over he even got a certificate suitable for framing that proclaimed he was a qualified Nuclear Weapons Delivery Pilot.
But the whole experience was just some weird military mind-bender until he was handed his first target the day after the ship sailed from Pearl Harbor on his first cruise to Vietnam.
Shanghai.
He was assigned to drop a nuclear weapon on the military district headquarters in Shanghai. It wasn’t exactly downtown, but it was on the edge of it.
Actually he was not going to drop the bomb: he was going to toss it, throw it about forty-three thousand feet, as he recalled. That was how far away from the target the pull-up point was. He would cross the initial point at five hundred knots, exactly five hundred feet above the ground, and push the pickle on the stick, which would start the timer on the nuclear ordnance panel. The timer would tick off the preset number of seconds until he reached the calculated pull-up point — that point forty-three thousand feet from the target. Then a tone would sound in his ears. He was to apply smooth, steady back-pressure on the stick so that one second after the tone began he would have four Gs on the aircraft. At about thirty-eight degrees nose-up the tone would cease and the weapon would come off the bomb rack and he would keep pulling, up and over the top, then do a half roll going down the back side and scoot out the way he had come in.
He had practiced the delivery on the navy’s bombing range in Oregon. With little, blue, twenty-eight-pound practice bombs. The delivery method was inherently inaccurate and the bombs were sprinkled liberally over the countryside, sometimes a couple miles from the intended target. A good delivery was one in which the bomb impacted within a half mile of where you wanted it. With a six-hundred-kiloton nuke, a miss by a mile or two wouldn’t matter much.
“Close enough for government work,” he and his bombardier assured each other.