“They’re not just streetlights.” She reached into the backseat, retrieving her laptop. “Those are Sensity Systems lights. We’re talking thermal, sound, shock, video—they continuously gather information and suck everything into the cloud.” She ran her fingers through her hair, flipped it over so the shaved strip showed above her right ear. “’Member how Van Sciver got onto Orphan L?”
“A surveillance photo of him smoking.”
“Taken from a streetlight,” she said. “We’re gonna use Van Sciver’s game against him.”
Evan stared at the streetlights, but they looked ordinary to him. “You sure those are the kind you’re talking about?”
She gave him a look, then booted up her computer.
He said, “How can they afford something like that in a broke neighborhood like this?”
Her fingers were already working the keys in a fury. “Federal funding. It’s part of the Safe Cities initiative. Detroit got a hundred mil off the government, and if Detroit can get it…” She glanced over. “You don’t keep up on this stuff, do you?”
“No.”
“The streetlights are all LED. The whole system gets paid for by the money cities save from the reduction in electricity costs. How ’bout that? A government plan that isn’t a total cluster. Not that it started with the government. The software was developed to track foot traffic at shopping malls, see what stores people go into, what they look at, how they respond to sales announcements, coupons, all that.”
“Can you hack it?”
She kept her head lowered, her fingers moving. “I’m gonna pretend you didn’t ask me that.”
He cast an eye toward the facility’s front door. “The cops are gonna be here soon.”
“Well,” she said, “then it’s a good thing I’m fast.”
*
“Turn left up there. No, the next intersection. Good. Now run it straight for a half mile.”
Evan was driving the minivan, Joey in the passenger seat, directing him through traffic and simultaneously hammering away at the laptop. He felt increasingly like her chauffeur, an observation that, he was chagrinned to note, Mia had once made in regard to Peter.
Evan was becoming just another suburban dad.
Joey had what looked like a dozen windows open on the screen. He risked a glance over. On one of them she seemed to be reviewing footage angled on the eastern flank of the McClair Children’s Mental Health Center.
“Anything?” he asked.
“Patience, young Padawan.” The laptop was humming. “Wait. You were supposed to turn left back there. Hang on.” She popped another window to the fore, this one featuring a GPS map. “Go left, left, right.”
He obeyed. Focusing on the road and the rearview mirrors rather than on Joey’s active laptop screen took some discipline.
“Okay. Just—pull over here. We’re in range.”
He looked around. A fenced park. A courthouse. A McDonald’s.
“In range of what?” he said.
She ignored the question. “Let’s get you up to speed.” She punched a button, swiveled the laptop on the minivan’s roomy center console. Evan watched the exterior of C Hall, the image so steady that save for a few leaves blowing past and the sound of out-of-frame traffic it might have been a photograph.
At last a pair of shadows darkened the bottom of the screen. Two men approached the window of Room 14. One held a crowbar, the other a pistol lengthened by a suppressor. The guy holding the pis tol moved aggressively, sweat glistening on his bald head. The men flattened to either side of the window.
Evan told his heartbeat to stay slow and steady, and it obeyed.
He didn’t recognize either man; Van Sciver had sent more freelance muscle. The gunman raised a black-gloved hand, his ridged, shiny skull gleaming as he did a three-finger countdown. The other guy jammed the crowbar beneath the sash window and slid it up. The bald man spun into the open frame, pistol raised, his mouth moving.
Issuing orders.
The streetlight sensor was too far away to capture the words, but a moment later David Smith appeared at the sill, holding his hands before him, showing his palms. He looked more shocked than scared. The bald man grabbed the boy’s shirt and ripped him through the window. As he manhandled the kid away from the building, another figure emerged at the edge of the screen, her back to the camera.
Her face wasn’t visible, but Evan recognized her form.
Orphan V.
Candy McClure pointed at the gunman, clearly issuing an admonition, and he lightened his grip on the boy. The freelancers kept David between them, hustling him away. An instant later the frame was as empty and serene as before.
The snatch-and-go had taken six seconds.
Evan looked at Joey across the console. “Seems like they want to keep him.”
“Or kill him off site.”
“No,” Evan said. “You saw the way Orphan V spoke to that guy. Van Sciver wants the kid unharmed.”
“Or she does. She might have to duke it out with Van Sciver.”
“She can be convincing,” Evan said.
Joey read something in his face and let the point drop. She leaned over, bringing up a freeze-frame of the men standing on both sides of the window before the break-in. Reference points littered their heads, a digital overlay.
“I go with Panasonic FacePro Facial Recognition,” she said. “It’s the best. Two for two.”
“Two for two?”
“Fast and accurate. They use it at SFO.”
“When do we get the results?”
“We have them.”
Another window, another revelation. The two men, identified as Paul Delmonico and Shane Shea. Delmonico was the one who’d jimmied the window and Shea the gunman. Shea had a bony build, his forehead prominent, the grooves of his cranial bones pronounced on his shiny bald skull. Their records had recently been classified top secret, which put their backgrounds and training out of reach for the time being. Evan figured they were dishonorably discharged recon marines, Van Sciver’s favorite source of renewable muscle. For now Evan and Joey had faces and names, and that was all they needed.
Next Joey pulled up a United Airlines itinerary she had unearthed. “They came in on a flight this morning from Alabama.”
“Where Van Sciver killed Orphan C.” And where Jack had plowed into the dirt from sixteen thousand feet.
“Right. And they rented this at the airport.” Click. “A black Suburban. I know, inventive, right? License plate VBK-5976.”
She paused to check if he was impressed.
He was.
“The same credit card was used to get another matching Suburban, license plate TLY-9443. So I’m thinking four men.”
“Looks like it,” Evan said.
“You know what ALPR is?” she asked.
“Automated license-plate recognition,” Evan said, relieved to be back on familiar turf. “Police cruisers have sensors embedded in the light bars that scan the plates of all surrounding vehicles. They can swallow numbers eight lanes across on cars going in either direction up to eighty miles per hour. They process the plates for outstanding warrants in real time and store them for posterity.”
“Gold star for the old guy,” Joey said. “I already input the licenses into the ALPR system and coded the system to send me and only me an alert when one of the light-bar sensors picks up either Suburban. We’re gonna use Virginia’s Finest to track down these guys for us.” Her grin took on a devious cast. “In more ways than one.”
Evan followed her gaze up the street to the courthouse. It was a beautiful Colonial Revival building—weathered brick, white columns, hipped roof. A trickle of men and women scurried across the front lawn, some black, some white, some in suits, others in overalls, each of them moving with a sense of purpose. A sign in front read CRIMINAL GENERAL DISTRICT COURT.
“Oh,” Evan said. “Oh.”
Already Joey was pulling up the courthouse’s private Wi-Fi network reserved for judges, DAs, and clerks. Hashkiller’s 131-billion-password dictionary required only twenty-seven seconds to get her on. The Records Management System took two and a half minutes. And then there it was before them on the screen, glowing like a holy relic.
A bench warrant.
Evan and Joey smiled at each other.
“First move,” Joey said. “Get the bad guys off the street. Or at least the two we have names for.”
“You’re kind of a genius.”
“I agree with everything but the ‘kind of.’” She wiggled her fingers in glee and then typed in a phony case record.