“Mine’s the same,” Laurel put in. “Doesn’t look like much. Couldn’t you just steal one and alter it?”
Caston shook his head. “When you enter, you swipe the card through a reader. The card encodes a digital signature that calls up a guest record from the computer. Now, that computer at the door has the most powerful kind of cybersecurity you can ask for: it’s ‘air-gapped.’ In other words, it’s a stand-alone, not connected to the Internet, so you can’t hack into it. And there’s a guard stationed at a monitor, and every time a card is read, the name and photograph from the computer record get displayed on the screen. Point is, if you’re not already in the computer, you’re shit out of luck.”
“That the technical term?”
“And then there’s a metal detector you’ve got to pass through, like at the airport,” Caston went on. “Jackets, keys, and such go through a conveyor belt.”
“Enough to keep out an assassin?” Laurel asked.
“We’re talking about someone who has been planning this for months, maybe longer,” Caston replied. He glanced at Ambler. “You’ve got about two hours.”
Ambler wandered over where Laurel had been standing and peered out the window into the gloomy afternoon again. Snow was drifting down, lazily but steadily.
What were his options? He felt a rising sense of panic, knew he must keep that emotion at bay: it could freeze him up, cause him to choke, to lose touch with his instincts.
Laurel’s voice: “What if you say you’ve lost your card?”
“Then they apologize and escort you to the exit,” Caston replied. “I saw that happen when I was here a few years back. And they don’t care if you’re the king of Morocco. Everyone inside that place has a card around his neck.”
“Even heads of states?” Laurel pressed.
“I just saw the vice president of the United States. He was wearing a slate blue suit and a yellow tie. And a Davos ID card about five inches below the knot. It’s simple, and it’s ironclad. These people don’t play. They’ve never had a security breach in some three decades, and there’s a reason for that.”
When Ambler turned back to the others, Laurel was looking at him expectantly. “There’s got to be something, right? The human factor—like you always say.”
Ambler heard her words as if they had been spoken from a long distance away. Scenarios flitted by in his mind—entertained, considered, explored, and rejected, all within seconds. Almost every organization had the porosity of human discretion, because day-today practicalities demanded some measure of flexibility. But the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum was not a day-to-day institution. It was a special event, lasting just one week. Here rules really could be infinitely stringent. Not enough time ever elapsed for the security officers to start taking much for granted.
Ambler’s eyes fell on the black WEF tote bag that Caston had been carrying, filled with the material that people were given at check-in. He picked it up and spilled its contents on the bed. There was a copy of Global Agenda, the WEF magazine that was prepared for the occasion, and a white binder with the schedule of events. Ambler flipped through it: page after page listed panels with such stultifying titles as “Whither Water Management?” “Securing the Global Health System,” “The Future of U.S. Foreign Policy,” “Human Security and National Security: Friends or Foes?,” “Toward a New Bretton Woods.” There was the schedule of addresses by the UN secretary-general, the United States vice president, the president of Pakistan, and others; Liu Ang’s address was clearly the culminating and keynote event. Ambler closed the binder and picked up a short, thick, almost cubical book, listing all the “participants” in the WEF annual meeting—nearly fifteen hundred pages featuring photographs of each followed by a career biography crammed in small sans-serif type.
“Look at all the faces here,” Ambler said. He rolled a thumb across its width, like a riffle animation.
“Make a hell of a police lineup,” Laurel put in. Frustration began to fill the air like a stench.
Suddenly Caston sat bolt upright. “A police lineup,” he echoed.
Ambler looked at him, saw something in Caston’s eyes that almost scared him—his eyes were practically swiveling in their sockets. “What are you on about?” he prompted in a low voice.
“They ought to be outlawed,” Caston said. “Lineups, I mean. They’re responsible for a god-awful number of false convictions. The error rates are insupportable.”
“You’re exhausted,” Laurel said quickly. She turned to Ambler anxiously. “He didn’t sleep on the train at all.”
“Let him talk,” Ambler said softly.
“Because eyewitnesses are highly fallible,” Caston went on. “You saw someone do a bad thing, and you’re led to believe that one of the people in the lineup may be the fellow that you saw. So you look—and there’s a heuristic that most people follow. They choose the one who looks most like the person they remember.”
“Why’s that a problem?” Laurel sounded puzzled.
“Because the closest person isn’t necessarily the same person. ‘It’s Number Four,’ they say. ‘It’s Number Two.’ And sometimes Number Four or Number Two is a cop, a stand-in, and there’s no harm, no foul. The investigators thank the witness and send him on his way. But, as the odds will have it, sometimes that guy is a suspect. Not the actual perp, but a suspect. He happens to look a little more like the fellow you saw than any of the others. But he’s not the fellow you saw. All of a sudden, you’re got an eyewitness testifying against the suspect: ‘Can you point to the man that you saw that night?’ and that whole rigamarole, and a jury imagines that nothing could be more open-and-shut than that. Now, there’s a way to elicit what an eyewitness saw without that distortion: you do it seriatim. Show them photographs of people, not at the same time, but one after another. You ask: ‘Is this the one? Yes or no?’ If you switch to the seriatim method, the rate of misidentification plunges from seven percent to less than one percent. It’s an outrage that people in law enforcement haven’t grasped these basic statistics.” He looked up, suddenly sharp. “But my point: in the real world, often enough, close gets you your goddamn cigar.” He blinked rapidly. “The data are very clear on this. Ergo: we find the person who looks most like you. Fifteen hundred faces—that’s a sample space we can work with.”
Ambler did not reply right away.
As Caston stood near him, Ambler began to flip through the book, rapidly, methodically, a wetted forefinger whisking through almost mechanically. “I want you to look at the pictures, too,” he told Laurel. “If it’s close enough, you’ll know it at once. Don’t think about it. Just look—experience it. If it’s workable, you’ll know it in an instant.”
The faces flew by, about two per second. “Wait,” Laurel said.
Caston stuck a small, rectangular Post-it on the page and said, “Keep going.”
Ambler did, whisking through the next hundred pages without interruption until he paused at one. Caston placed another adhesive flag on the page, and Ambler resumed paging through. When Ashton Palmer’s face appeared, Ambler paused briefly. None of them spoke. None of them had to. It was the same when he reached Ellen Whitfield’s page. She looked blandly handsome, as her mentor looked distinguished, but their coiled intelligence and ambition was filtered out of the official postage-stamp-sized photograph. At this point, their images provided nothing but distraction.
By the time Ambler had gone through the entire book, four pages had been flagged. Ambler handed the book over to Caston. “You’ve got the fresh eyes. Take a look.”
Caston flipped to each of the four. “The third one,” he said, passing it to Laurel, who did the same.
“Probably the third,” she said, a little more hesitantly.
Ambler opened the book to the third Post-it flag and tore off the page, scrutinizing the man’s biography. “Not the strongest resemblance, I wouldn’t have thought,” Ambler said, half to himself. “But then, I have a hard time remembering what I look like
these days.” He glanced again at the black-and-white photograph. The man’s eyes conveyed a self-regarding severity, bordering on hauteur, though it was hard to know how much of it was him, how much the particular photograph.
Jozef Vrabel was his name, and he was the president of V&S Slovakia, a Bratislava-based company that specialized in “wireless solutions, services and products, and security in access networks.”
“I don’t mean to puncture the mood,” Laurel said. “But how are we going to get the guy’s card in the first place?”
“Don’t ask me,” Caston said, shrugging. “Ask Mr. Human Factor over here.”
“Can we find him?” Ambler looked at Caston and then peered out of the window again. On the roof, two stories above him, a pair of sharpshooters were on patrol, he knew. Yet what good were weapons without a target? How ironic that he had first to outwit those who sought, as he did, to ensure security. The enemies of his enemies were his enemies.
Now his gaze settled on a long dark blue wall—a solid but movable barrier—that stood in front of the Congress Center’s poured-concrete exterior. Along its length was a series of large white rectangles with a blue logo: WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM, each word stacked on top of one another, with a thin crescent curling through the o’s. To the left, there was a sign with the same logo, and arrows directing MEDIA/STAFF to a different entrance than the “middle entry” meant for participants.
Fear, hopelessness, and sheer rage swirled within him, and the result, somehow, was to form an alloy stronger than any of its components: an alloy of sheer resolve.
It took him a few moments before he realized that Caston had been speaking. “Wonders of technology,” the numbers maven was saying. “There’s a computer intranet at the conference center and a lot of the hotels here, too. It’s all designed so that you can find people. The networking aspect is pretty key to the Davos experience.”
“You do any networking when you were there, Caston?”
“I don’t network” was the peevish response. “I analyze networks. Point is, if I go to the lobby, they’ll have a terminal there. I can type in this name, and it’ll say what programs he’s signed up to attend. Because you have to sign up, you see. Then . . .”
“Then you find him, and tell him that there’s an emergency, and bring him outside the center.”
Caston coughed. “Me?”
“How are you at lying?”
Caston reflected for a moment. “Mediocre.”
“Mediocre will be good enough,” Ambler said. He reached over and gave Caston an encouraging squeeze on the shoulder. Caston squirmed at his touch. “Sometimes, if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.”
“If I can help . . .” Laurel began.
“I’m going to need you on the logistics front,” Ambler told her. He started to explain. “I’ll need binoculars or some high-powered device for vision enhancement. There are more than a thousand people at the center. According to the printed agenda, the president of China is scheduled to speak at the Congress Hall.”
“That’s the biggest hall in the place,” Caston said. “Seats a thousand, easily. Maybe more.”
“That’s a lot of faces, and I’m not going to be able to get near them all.”
“You’re going to stick out if you start walking around with a pair of binocs around your neck,” Laurel cautioned. “You could attract the wrong kind of attention.”
“You’re talking about security surveillance.”
“That place is camera central,” Laurel said, “with all the broadcast cameramen around.”
“How’s that?”
“I had a chat with one of the camera guys,” Laurel replied. “Thought it might turn up something useful. Turns out that the WEF records a lot of events for its own purposes, but more than that, the major events—plenary sessions and a few open forums—are taped by some of the major broadcast media. The BBC, CNN International, Sky TV, SBC, like that. Amazing lenses on those cameras—I took a peek through the viewfinder of one.”
Ambler tilted his head.
“So I was thinking—you could use one of those, just for the zoom. Those television cameras—they’re portable but bulky, and they have a powerful optical zoom. That’s better than any binocular. And they’re nothing that would attract a second look.”
Ambler felt a tiny flutter within him. “My God, Laurel,” he said.
“Don’t look so shocked that I had a good idea,” she joshed. “Only thing I’m wondering is, why would the head of V&S Slovakia be toting a camera through the convention hall?”
“It’s not an issue when you’re inside,” Caston said. “You need the badge to enter. Once you’re in, nobody’s going to be paying that much attention. The badge itself doesn’t display your affiliation, just your name. Once you’re inside, it’s a whole different ball game.”
“What about getting hold of a camera?” Ambler asked.
“Not a problem—I know just how to pick up a couple,” Laurel said. “The guys I spoke to showed me a storeroom full of them.”
“Listen, Laurel, you’re not trained for operational—”
“You’re in a life raft and you want to check whether someone has a boater license?” Caston scoffed. “I thought I was supposed to be the rule stickler here.”
“Fact is, it’s gonna be easier for me than for ‘Jozef Vrabel’ to get into that storeroom,” Laurel said. “And I’ve already had friendly chats with the boys who go in and out of it.” In a mock-vampish tone, she added, “I may not have ‘skills,’ but I do have . . . assets.”
Ambler looked at her. “I just don’t see a way—”
Laurel gave a half smile. “I do.”
The funny thing, Adrian Choi reflected as he sat at Clayton Caston’s wonderfully tidy desk, was that his boss managed to create as much work for him when he was away as when he was in the office. Caston’s recent telephone calls had been abrupt, hurried, and cryptic. Lots of urgent requests, no explanations. It was all very mysterious.
Adrian was loving it.
He was even enjoying his slight hangover this morning—a hangover! An unaccustomed sensation for him. It seemed so very . . . Derek St. John. In those Clive McCarthy page-turners, Derek St. John was always prone to overindulgence. “Too much is never enough” was among his signature lines; another was “Instant gratification tries my patience.” In the line of duty, he was regularly obliged to spend long evenings seducing beautiful women, ordering costly champagnes with French names that Adrian couldn’t pronounce, followed by a morning hangover. “It’s pronounced ‘Sin-jin,’ ” the superspy would suavely, waggishly, explain to those women who mispronounced his surname. “With the stress falling on sin.” Derek St. John even had a special hangover recipe, detailed in Clive McCarthy’s Operation Atlantis, but it contained raw eggs, and Adrian didn’t think it was a good idea to eat raw eggs.
Not that Adrian had spent the evening with a long-legged supermodel known to be an associate of a villainous quadriplegic who lived in a special zero-gravity satellite circling the earth, which is what had happened in Operation Atlantis. Adrian’s evening was definitely more earthbound. When he thought about it, actually, he had a twinge of guilt, which wasn’t very Derek St. John at all.
Her name was Caitlin Easton, and she was an administrative assistant at the Joint Facilities Center. On the phone her voice had become giggly and appealing once he had warmed her up. Adrian had to hide his disappointment when they finally met, at Grenville’s Grill. She was just a little heavier than he had imagined, and he noticed the beginnings of a pimple near one corner of her nose. Not that the place he’d brought her to was any great shakes: Grenville’s Grill was a self-styled “eatery” in Tysons Corner where the staff slapped down oversize laminated menus, served potato chips in annoying little napkin-lined baskets, and put toothpicks in its club sandwiches; it just happened to be on the way home for both of them. Still, the more they spoke, the more he saw that she had a lively sense of humor, and he’d had a pretty
decent time. When he told her his full name, saying, “It’s Adrian Choi, with the stress falling on oy,” she laughed, though she couldn’t have caught the reference. She laughed at a lot of things he said, even when they weren’t especially funny, and that gave him a real high. She was fun.
So why the twinge? Well, he had been using her, hadn’t he? He’d said, “Hey, if you’re not doing anything after work, maybe we could have a drink, grab a bite?” He hadn’t said, “You guys have something my boss needs.” So in a way the whole operation was a little undercover. And Caitlin Easton wasn’t an enemy agent, after all; she was just—well, a file clerk, in plain English.
The phone purred, an inside call. Caitlin?
Yes, it was Caitlin.
He took a deep breath. “Hey you,” he said, surprising himself; he sounded more relaxed than he’d felt.
“Hey you,” she said.
“That was fun last night.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, it was.” She lowered her voice. “Hey listen, I think I’ve got something for you.”
“Really?”
“I don’t want you to get into any more hot water with your boss is all.”
“You’re talking about . . .?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Caitlin, I don’t know how to thank you.”
“You’ll think of a way.” Caitlin giggled.
Adrian blushed.
Ambler’s first glimpse of Jozef Vrabel in the flesh was disheartening: the person he had chosen for a doppelgänger was an unimpressive man, barely five foot five, with a small head, narrow shoulders, and a round, protruding belly over wide hips; he looked like a human top. If Caston was right, though, all that had to match was the face; and the face was—well, close enough for a quick glance by someone who was looking for similarities rather than differences.