Clancy, Tom - Op Center 03 - Games Of State by Clancy Tom

Author:Clancy, Tom [Clancy, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

from telephone directories around the world to troop and police

strength and deployment in most cities at home and abroad.

But Stol and his smal staff had designed a system which not

only accessed data, it analyzed it. An ID program written by

Stol al owed researchers to circle a nose or an eye or mouth on

a terrorist's face and find it anywhere it appeared in

international police or newspaper files.

Landscapes could likewise be compared by highlighting the

contour of a mountain, horizon, or shore. Two ful -time day and

night operators were stationed at the Archive, which could

handle over thirty separate operations at once.

It took the Kraken less than fifteen minutes to find the

photograph of Deputy Foreign Minister Hausen. It had been

snapped by a Reuters photographer and published in a Berlin

newspaper five months before, when Hausen had arrived to

give a speech at a dinner of Holocaust survivors.

When he received the information, Eddie couldn't help but

resent the cruelty of the juxtaposition of this particular image in

the game.

The landscape behind Hausen took a little longer to identify,

though here the programmers got lucky. Instead of asking for a

worldwide check, Deirdre Donahue and Natt Mendelsohn

started with Germany, then moved to Austria, Poland, and

France. After forty-seven minutes, the computer found the spot.

It was located in the south of France.

Deirdre located a history of the view, wrote a complete

summary, and added it to the file.

Eddie faxed the information to Matt. Then the long, powerful

tentacles of the Kraken rested as the monster went back to

watching, silently, from its secret lair.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR Thursday, 5:02 P.M., Hamburg,

Germany

As he walked back to the office building, Paul Hood was

showered with memories. Crisp, detailed memories of the

buried but unforgotten things he and Nancy Jo had done and

said to each other nearly twenty years ago.

He remembered sitting in a Mexican restaurant in Studio City,

discussing whether or not they would eventual y want kids. He

thought they would; she definitely did not.

They ate tacos and drank bitter coffee and debated the pros

and cons of parenthood into the smal hours of the morning.

He remembered waiting for a Paul Newman movie to start in a

Westwood theater while he and Nancy discussed the House

Judiciary Committee's debate on whether President Nixon

should be impeached. He could stil smel the popcorn she had,

taste the Milk Duds he ate.

He remembered talking through the night about the future of

technology after playing the black-and-white video game Pong

for the first time. He should have known, by the way she

whipped his butt, that that was the field she was destined to

conquer.

He hadn't thought of these things in years, yet he could recal so

many of the exact words, the smel s and sights, Nancy Jo's

expressions and what she was wearing. It was al so vivid. So

was her energy. He had been smitten with that, even a little

intimidated. She was the kind of woman who looked under

every rock, explored each new world, looked into every fresh

field. And when that lovely dervish wasn't working, she was

playing with Hood in discos and in bed, yel ing herself hoarse at

Lakers or Rams or Kings games, shouting with

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