64 – Hampton, N.H.
New Hampshire has only thirteen miles of saltwater coastline, a short stretch of rocky beaches sandwiched between the Massachusetts and Maine borders. It is a strategic bit of land, however, and the state has gone to the United States Supreme Court to defend its claim to every inch of it. In modern times, the state that proudly proclaims “Live Free or Die” on its license plates uses its coastal strip to siphon millions of dollars from tourists driving to and from Maine. U.S. Route 95 provides the only north-south highway access to Maine across New Hampshire’s short coastal stretch. New Hampshire erected a toll plaza in the middle of Route 95’s short traverse across the state, requiring every car leaving Maine from the north and heading for Massachusetts, or the rest of the United States, to come to a stop and pay a two dollars for the right to cross New Hampshire.
The FBI viewed this toll plaza, located in the New Hampshire town of Hampton, as a key location in its increasingly desperate search for the radioactive material smuggled into the country. Unmarked cars were located at the toll plaza and agents scanned each of the thousands of vehicles paying their tolls. Nonetheless, the likelihood of detecting the Israeli naval lieutenant who was the object of this massive search was infinitesimal.
Help came from an unexpected source.
Grant Regan was Northeastern Sales manager for BiometSys Software, one of hundreds of high technology startups located along Route 128, the highway circling outside Boston. Regan was in serious trouble. He had just been handed a letter that bore the boldfaced title “Final Pretermination Advisory.” That letter was an extraordinary tumble for the man who had been the darling of the company’s venture capital financiers a year earlier when he placed a demonstration system of the company’s facial scanning and identification product in three terminals at Boston’s Logan Airport. Had that project succeeded, hundreds of millions of Homeland Security dollars would have been on the table to install systems that could instantly scan faces of people passing through airport terminals and identify suspected terrorists.
The problem was that the system didn’t work. Photos of the airport’s top managers were scanned into the system. What was supposed to happen was that as those managers walked through the various terminals, video cameras located throughout the buildings would capture images of their faces, compare them against the images stored in the system’s database and issue alerts. That is what was supposed to happen. What actually happened was a total fiasco. The system alerted on total strangers while the managers stood in front of the cameras without triggering a squawk.
The system was removed after three weeks, all to substantial media coverage. The problem turned out to be minor; an outdated version of a database program was incompatible with the new version of the recognition software. The system worked flawlessly when the updated database software was installed. But by that time the damage was done. Regan wasn’t able to place even a free demonstration system in any public place for nearly ten months. Nobody was willing to be the butt of the negative publicity Logan Airport received when a newspaper photographer caught one of the airport managers thumbing his nose at the video camera without setting off an alarm.
Regan sat on the leather sofa in his sister’s family room at her house in Billerica, outside Boston, doing serious damage to a six-pack of Sam Adams with her husband, Rob. Regan’s brother-in-law was an FBI agent. Regan barely listened to his brother-in-law’s complaints about being removed from an anti-gang task force targeting Boston neighborhoods to be reassigned to what he said was “picnic duty in the boonies.” Regan asked what he meant by that.
“I’m spending all day sitting at a fuckin’ picnic table in a fuckin’ rest area eyeballing every fuckin’ car that drives by for eight hours a fuckin’ day. You know how much time I have to look at some fuckin’ driver with a pair of binoculars as he drives through a fuckin’ toll booth. Maybe two fuckin’ seconds, that’s what. I’m supposed to ID some fuckin’ asshole from a fifty year old fuzzy photo through the binoculars, through his windshield, with the sun glaring down on it, all from fifty fuckin’ yards away.
“What a fuckin’ waste of time this is,” he complained. “And not just for me. We’ve got six fuckin’ agents sitting there all day with our thumbs up our asses. And to tell you the God’s honest truth, this photo we’ve got is such a fuckin’ piece-a-shit I wouldn’t recognize this clown if he walked up and fuckin’ spit in my face.”
Regan’s sister shook her head in exasperation at her husband’s language. Their son’s kindergarten teacher had already sent a note home about the boy’s “word choice,” as the teacher politely called his foul mouth.
“Why are they putting so much resources into trying to find this guy?” Regan asked. A germ of an idea was sprouting in Regan’s mind. “Seems like a lot of effort.”
“Oh, he’s a bad mother fucker all right, I’ll tell you that,” Rob said. “And whoever does find this asshole is gonna be one mother fuckin’ bigtime hero. But it ain’t gonna be me, not the way they’ve got this gig set up now, I’ll tell you that.”
“What toll plaza is this all at?” Regan asked, getting excited now.
“Hampton Fuckin’ New Hampshire,” Rob answered.
“I know that,” Regan said. “What’s it got, about eight toll booths or so? Are you checking both north and south traffic?”
“Yeah, about eight booths,” Rob said, staring at his brother-in-law, who he viewed as a total loser who was going to break his sister’s heart one of these days, if he hadn’t done so already. “What the fuck makes you so curious, anyway?”
“Rob, let me make you a proposition, one that can save both our asses and make you that hero you were talking about.” Regan quickly explained the concept that had occurred to him. The FBI agent thought about it, made a few phone calls and came back to the family room, where Regan was waiting anxiously.
“Thumbs up, buddy,” he said, smiling. “So long as it doesn’t cost the Bureau a nickel they said to get cracking on it. Install the thing tonight. They’re gonna have a State Police detail there to direct traffic so you don’t get flattened by an eighteen-wheeler. Then first thing tomorrow morning you flip the switch and we’ll see what happens. Can you get it all set up tonight?”
“I’m on the way,” Regan said, excited. He made several calls on his cell phone, calling the chief technician at BiometSys, arranging for equipment to be delivered in a rental van and begging a software engineer to cancel what he said was his first date with an uninflatable woman in three months so they could all meet at the toll plaza at 10:00 p.m.
In six hours, working through the night, they’d installed video cameras at each southbound toll booth, placed to scan through the driver’s window as cars stopped to pay the toll. Wires were strung out of the tollbooths and over the long common roof to the rental van parked at the end of the toll plaza. The van was so packed with high speed computers and additional memory racks that the windows had to be kept rolled down and the rear door left open to keep the interior from overheating.
At 6:00 a.m. a man who identified himself only as Agent Ross shook Regan none too gently by the shoulder when he found the man nodding off in the front seat of the van.
“Your name Regan?” he asked. “I’ve got something for you.”
When Regan identified himself, confirming his identity with his driver’s license (such Twentieth Century ID tech, he thought while he did so), Agent Ross handed him a manila envelope containing an eight by ten inch photograph of a man standing on a beach. The man was squinting, as if he were staring into the sun.
“Find this guy,” Agent Ross said to Regan. “And when you do, let those guys know.” He pointed to a black Jeep Grand Cherokee SUV with four men sitting inside. He turned and left without saying good-bye.
Regan looked at the photograph and walked to the rear of the van. He handed the photo to a tall man who was so thin it seemed as if whatever fat had ever rested on his body had been sucked out by a powerful vacuum. The seated man’s left foot, crossed over his right leg, was bouncing up and down to a rhythm recorded at thirty-three-and-a-third rpm but played back at seventy-eight. He was throwing Doritos into his mouth as fast as his foot was vibrating, the calories of one being burned by the intensity of the other.
“Is this good enough?” Regan asked the man, handing him the photo.
The man, who wore wire-framed glasses with coke bottle thick lenses, held the photo to within inches of his eyes and moved it from side to side.
He made an odd almost-humming noise.
“MMMMMMM, yes, OK,” he said. “Distance between eyes, width of nose, depth of eye sockets, all clear, all relative. She can set a ratio, create an algorithm there. Plenty of nodal points, cheekbones, nice, jaw line, chin. mmmmmmmm. Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen good nodal points. That’s plenty, plenty. Mmmmmmmmmmmm.
“Oh yes, she can calculate a faceprint from this photo. We’ve got the new digital cameras out there, the new fineline ones I wanted but they were too cheap to buy before but we’ve sure got them now. Yup, she can find this guy. Want me to scan the photo in now?”
“Let’s do it,” Regan said. “I sure hope this guy, whoever he is, decides to drive down from Maine today.”
“That is the unfortunate variable,” the thin man, who was BiometSys’ chief software engineer, said sadly.
Regan looked at the lines of cars already backing up at the toll booths. Maine and New Hampshire commuters making the long drive down to Boston most likely. This could be a long fucking day, he thought. Now I know what Rob was complaining about.