The Bestseller Job by Greg Cox

Author:Greg Cox [Cox, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101622247
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2013-05-06T16:00:00+00:00

“Y’all remember this footage,” Hardison said, waving his clicker like a pointer. He had to admit it, he enjoyed these moments in the spotlight. “Taken by a traffic cam a few blocks away from the ‘accident,’ and ingeniously enhanced by yours truly.”

The crew, plus Denise, was seated before the screens while Hardison got his emcee on. The monitors offered a glimpse of the murder limo’s driver, as seen through the town car’s front windshield.

Denise, who hadn’t seen the face of the driver before, stared stonily at the screen. Her jaw clenched. Her whole body was tense. Her face flushed. You didn’t have to be able to read people as expertly as Sophie could to see that she was barely keeping a lid on some serious anger. Throw in some gamma rays and she’d be Hulking out on them for sure.

Not that Hardison blamed her. The bad guys had run down the love of her life.

If somebody had Parker killed…

“Yeah, I remember,” Eliot said tersely. He also looked like he wanted the homicidal driver in his sights as soon as possible. “What about it?”

“Well, I’ve had my own, custom-made facial-recognition software running overtime for the last fifteen-plus hours.” That was time enough to compare the driver’s face print to literally millions of photographs. “It took a while, for reasons I’ll get around to, but I finally got a hit.”

He clicked the remote and the screens divided themselves between the enhanced traffic photo and a series of color shots of what appeared to be the same man, albeit a few years younger. The stills were obviously undercover surveillance photos taken by a telephoto lens from long distance. The photos showed a lean, elegantly dressed man getting into a waiting black limo. A lucky gust of wind blew off his trilby hat, exposing a gaunt, aristocratic-looking face that bore a distinct resemblance to the driver of the murder car. He had a long, angular face with thin lips, a sharp nose, and calculating gray eyes. Wispy brown hair, going gray at the temples, led up in a widow’s peak atop his high forehead. He lingered outside the limo, scowling impatiently, while a flunky retrieved his hat.

“A tad younger,” Sophie observed, “but he could be the same man.”

“No need to guess,” Hardison bragged. “Let science settle this.”

He split the screen between the driver and the man in the spy photos. Green dots mapped their respective faces. Lines connected the dots. In less than a minute, the program coughed up its ruling.

confirmation: 88.6%, a dialogue box reported.

Eliot grunted in approval. “Close enough for government work.”

“Funny you should say that,” Hardison said. “’Cause our friend here does a lot of work for a lot of governments. Almost all of it off-the-record.”

Nate signaled Hardison to speed it up. “Cut to the chase.”

Really? Hardison thought. That’s how it is? We’re backseat-driving my pacing now?

He didn’t like being rushed, and was tempted to drag out the suspense a few moments longer, but the look on Denise’s face—and Eliot’s—convinced him that now was not the time.

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