Immune (The Rho Agenda #2)(98)
By the time Jennifer had finished toweling her hair, she realized just how hungry she was. She’d seen a Waffle House down a side street on her cab ride over, but if she ate in one of the Bellagio’s restaurants she could charge it to her room. Since she was short on cash at the moment, that option seemed to make more sense, even if it did mean she would have a lot more of the camera video to clean up later. That thought didn’t bother her. She needed to write her video editing tool anyway, and that would give her a chance to do both at once.
By the time she had made her way down to the buffet line, Jennifer was so hungry she suspected the other guests could hear her stomach rumbling. She considered dining at the Café Bellagio or at the Pool Café, but she just couldn’t resist experiencing all the buffet had to offer. The wait proved worthwhile, although she felt a bit embarrassed at the number of foods she selected to sample. As if anyone here cared.
A glance at the table to her left revealed a family with six kids attacking plates piled high with pastries. From the way they were inhaling the food, this clearly wasn’t going to be their last course either.
Jennifer rose from the table and began walking through the crowd, back toward the elevators that would carry her up to her room. As she walked, she glanced up at the black glass domes housing the hotel’s video surveillance cameras. No doubt about it, these Vegas casino owners were one paranoid bunch. They made it hard for an honest young woman like herself to maintain her privacy.
As soon as she opened the door into her suite, she saw that the room had been cleaned while she was gone. A moment of panic sent her rushing into the bedroom. Seeing her laptop on the desk where she had left it, she quickly checked her backpack, a wave of relief passing through her body as she saw the two alien headsets tucked in right where she had left them, atop the extra clothes that comprised the remainder of her wardrobe.
Jennifer knew she would have to remedy that situation shortly, probably with a trip to some shops right inside the hotel. Right now, though, it was time to start doing what she had run away to do. Ever since her last trip to the Second Ship, she had known what was required. It had just taken her a while to come to terms with the fact that she could never take those steps while under her parents’ supervision, and although it would have been nice to have Mark and Heather’s help, they just weren’t ready. Maybe they never would be.
The Rho Ship was out there, and its technologies were about to be spread around the planet. Once that genie was completely out of the bottle, there might be no way to put it back in. From what she had seen in the Second Ship databanks, no civilization that had succumbed to that addiction had ever been saved.
Heather and Mark believed that they could stay safely on the edge of the fight, dropping little hints to government agencies in the hope they would recognize the evil and put a stop to it. Jennifer no longer held such illusions. Even the deadly Jack Johnson or Gregory, whatever his real name, had failed to stop the Rho Project. In the process of their meddling, the president of the United States had paid the ultimate price for trying to slow the Rho Project’s forward march.
Jennifer slid onto the chair and typed in the password, which bypassed her laptop’s encryption program. Anyway, she was through playing second fiddle to Mark and Heather. She’d been the one to discover how to access the Second Ship’s internal databanks, and it had accepted her. It had chosen its champion, and no matter what anyone else thought, Jennifer was it.
The time for half measures was over, but her next actions were going to require money and lots of it—more fake identities, more offshore bank accounts. Jennifer grinned. In an odd way, she was about to become the Robin Hood of her day. She had already identified over a dozen drug cartel bank accounts that were begging to have some of their ill-gotten gains put to better use.
Having spent the last few weeks analyzing how the cartels laundered their money, Jennifer found their methods almost laughable. They had certainly never seen anything like the convoluted money trail she was about to inflict upon them. And if it caused the various cartels to suspect each other, so much the better.
But first she had some video cleanup to do. The fun stuff would have to wait just a little bit longer.
101
3:42 p.m. Jennifer glanced at the digital display at the lower right corner of her laptop monitor. What she had expected to take a couple of hours had turned into an all-day project, although the outcome was far better than she had originally envisioned.
Shortly after starting development work on her video editing program, the idea had hit her. Why should she be spending all this time every day manually hacking into the hotel security systems to find and edit video frames that contained her image? Surely she could come up with an automated way to do that.
The first part of the problem involved facial recognition software, something that would have been difficult for someone of lesser talent, which basically meant everyone else on the planet. The algorithm she selected used a combination of relative facial measurements based upon a matrix comparison. Since she had already produced an OpenGL three-dimensional representation of her face, all she needed was the routine that would identify key facial features in each image frame, grab the measurements from that image, and compare against the stored data matrix.
Ironically, the hardest part had nothing to do with the complexities of facial recognition. The camera imagery involved more than just faces. It did no good to just erase her head, she had to find the face and then resolve the outline of her body by forcing a comparison against earlier and later frames from the same camera. While not overly difficult, the first several algorithms took way too much computer time to process, and although she refined the program several times to optimize the calculations, the results were still way too slow.