Chapter 44
Kang’s warehouse in Campeche had become a command center to rival Mission Control at NASA. On one side were scholars he’d hired to translate the glyphs from the submerged temple; on the other were banks of computers, dozens of screens, and groups of trained men working the equipment like air traffic controllers.
It was a face-to-face search with a twenty-first-century twist. Kang had teams scouring the various towns, villages, and archeological sites that he suspected the NRI team might visit, including the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. All in all two hundred men were running about, carrying cameras and other remote sensing equipment. They simply wandered around, scanning faces, moving from section to section, through plazas, airports, restaurants, and hotels, wandering up and down streets and avenues. His men did not have to find the NRI team; in fact most of them had no idea what they were looking for. They just had to execute the simple orders they were given. Kang’s computers would do the rest.
Behind him, racks of high-powered servers hummed as they absorbed and processed the data. Facial recognition software running at blazing speeds examined every image. A man moved down one street, and five hundred faces were scanned and ruled out. Another man wandered the airport from gate to gate, and in thirty minutes Kang could be certain that the NRI personnel were not there.
In this way his two hundred men could scour the countryside like a veritable army of spotters.
Kang checked the readout. His artificial intelligence system had initially predicted a 31 percent chance that the NRI team would access one of these points for additional information.
But that prediction was updated constantly based on the rate of progress. As Kang checked the readout, he saw a diminishing likelihood of finding the Americans at any of the known Mayan sights. And with all the additional faces that had been scanned and rejected at the university, that probability was falling as well.
The current analysis graded the possibilities in the following manner:
Probability that
NRI party has been captured or incapacitated: 3.27%
NRI party no longer in Mexico and heading for the United States: 9.41%
NRI party will use McCarter’s remote access to New York University mainframe: 11.74%
NRI party has sufficient information to locate precise point of next site: 14.69%
NRI party will access a local university or museum for data: 28.91%
NRI party has sufficient data to begin generalized search for next site: 31.08%
Possible other outcomes: < 1%
Kang considered the data. The most likely category, that the NRI party now had sufficient information to begin a generalized search, had been the second least likely category twenty-four hours before. He had watched with both concern and hope as it rose steadily in the rankings.
If the NRI party was truly out in the jungle somewhere, they were much closer to finding the next stone than he’d hoped. On the other hand, that was what he needed them to do eventually. And by leaving the metropolitan areas and entering the jungle they played into his hands. Out there Kang had ways of finding and tracking them that were not feasible in the crowded streets of urban civilization. And when he found them, he would deal with them away from the harsh light of any witnesses.
He turned to the project leader. “Prepare to launch the drones.”