Immune (The Rho Agenda #2)(99)

The real problem was the laptop. It just didn’t have the kind of speed bigger systems had. Then a new idea presented itself. Of course. The hotel was loaded with networked high-end computing systems. Why not use their system to do the work for her? After all, she already had a virus she could insert the new code into, the same New Year’s Day virus they had originally used to contact the NSA. With a few modifications, it could be programmed to limit itself to the hotel subnets, processing all imagery products, looking for a match to her face and replacing her image with background data copied in from other frames or with background approximations if other frames were unavailable.

Jennifer took a deep breath, then reached forward and initiated the virus launch sequence. A button press on her screen and it was done. Just like that. No bells. No whistles. But the virus had been released and was already replicating itself throughout the designated Bellagio subnets.

Pushing away from the desk, Jennifer stood up. Such brilliant work and nobody here to see it, nobody to tell her just what an amazing thing she had just accomplished. Heather and Mark would have been oohing and aahing, telling her how they couldn’t have done it without her. But that was okay. She was beyond them now.

Down on the street below, just loud enough to penetrate the insulated glass, a lone siren’s wail drifted into the room.





102


Bobby McKinney pushed his way into the room, followed closely by Danny Norman, the Bellagio security chief, the coolness of the room causing him to rub his hands together for warmth. A relic of the days when real computing meant massive Cray supercomputers or perhaps even before that, when vacuum tubes attempted to do a fraction of the work an acid etched piece of silicon wafer now performed, computer centers were still commonly cooled to temperatures that would make an Eskimo reach for his parka.

Larry Fielding rose to meet him. “You’re not going to believe this.”

“Show me.”

Fielding slid back into his spot in front of the bank of keyboards and monitors. “You remember the shot from the blackjack table?”

“The one with the girl in it?”

“Right.”

“What about it?”

“Take a look for yourself.”

McKinney studied the image on the high-resolution display. “Not this one. Where’s the one with the girl in it.”

“This is the same shot. Only now she’s gone.”

“What about backups?”

“The story’s the same on every one of our copies.”

“What about the tape.”

“That’s just it. I pulled the tape and same story there. But get this. The last modified time on the tape was just a few seconds after I finished loading it. It looks like someone edited the data on the tape as I was bringing it up.”

“Bullshit!”

“That’s what I thought too. But look here.” Fielding zoomed in on a section that showed the hotel counter. “See the color artifact here, and then along here. The background’s been edited to replace this section of the image.”

“How?”

“I would say someone was using a program like Photoshop except that it happened too fast.”

“Edited, but not perfectly.”

“Right. Looks like it was done by some sort of computational algorithm running in the background.”

“On our system?”

Fielding shrugged. “Pretty much has to be. And that’s not the worst of it. I ran a check of all of the video data since then, looking for any odd color artifacts such as edge blurring or pixel copies.”

The computer technician’s fingers danced across the keyboard. “Watch this little video segment.”

A video clip showed a crowd of people just outside the Bellagio Buffet. It lasted just over thirty seconds and on the first pass, McKinney failed to notice anything out of the ordinary.

“Okay?”

“Now watch it at one quarter speed,” said Fielding.

Once again, the video showed the line moving toward the cash register. Then there was a glitch, a faint ghosting that moved through the display like a déjà vu echo.

“Freeze that,” McKinney said. “Now back it up frame by frame.”

For the next several minutes, he studied the imagery as Fielding took him frame by frame through the clip.

Larry Fielding spun his chair to face McKinney. “This evening I’ve picked up some similar anomalies in video from around the hotel. It looks like the data is being edited almost as fast as it is recorded. Just like the tape.”

“Fuck.” McKinney straightened. “Tell me someone made a hard copy of the original picture of that girl.”

“Afraid not.”

Fielding was just geek enough to fail to recognize the jeopardy that answer put him in. Fortunately, for him, he was also too valuable to throw away, at least for now.

Turning toward Norman, McKinney clenched his teeth. “Danny. I don’t care what kind of trouble you have to go through, but I want pictures of every guest entering or leaving their hotel rooms for the next two days. And I mean pictures from cameras that use film.”

Danny Norman’s mouth dropped open. “How the hell am I supposed to do that?”

“I don’t give a f*ck. It’ll give you and that overpaid staff of yours something to figure out.” McKinney shoved his index finger into Danny Norman’s chest. “Don’t disappoint me.”