Page 58 of The Grave Artist
Su strode to the machine and rummaged. “No hazelnut. What’s the point?” She found one that apparently suited her taste, though, and brewed.
“All right. I just scored something about Kane.”
Su had been parsing the evidence recovered from Kane’s last known location, in Trinidad and Tobago, where he’d fled after his recent failed mission in the United States.
Jake nodded to his computer. “Just got a message from an associate. He might be headed to Amsterdam.”
“Could be related,” Su said. “Let me tell you what I found.” She gestured to his computer. “May I?”
“Sure.”
She spoke as she typed. “This was in the hallway of his hotel in Trinidad the day he skipped town when he found out you and Carmen were onto him. Near his door.”
The photo was of a PCB—a printed circuit board. Green in color, it would have been made of the substrate FR4, a composite of fiberglass and epoxy resin. He shrugged. “One of about twenty million in the Western Hemisphere.”
“But how many are made by Systèmes de Circuits Spécialisés de Lyons?”
Jake felt his heart tap hard. “What? How can you tell?”
“Micro etching. Invisible to the naked eye.” She sipped more coffee. “Though I’d prefer to say unaided eye. The idea of an eyeball wearing clothes is just odd. Is it significant, Jake?”
“Oh, yes. It’s a company that works almost exclusively with CERN.”
The European Council for Nuclear Research is an international organization that runs the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Located in Meyrin, a western suburb of Geneva, Switzerland, it’s been the site of dozens of particle accelerators since the 1950s and presently houses the Large Hadron Collider, the biggest and most powerful such device in the world.
Su said, “Particle acceleration’s a research tool. If you’re thinking Kane could weaponize a collider, I don’t know how.”
“No,” Jake said. “The problem’s something else. A lot of people don’t know CERN is also one of the largest computing networks in the world. Last year they generated more than fifty petabytes of data.”
Sanchez said to Su, “He talks this way sometimes. Heron?”
“Fifty petabytes would be—” He glanced at Su. “You have children. Fifty petabytes of YouTube videos would keep them busy for five million years.”
“Lord,” she muttered. “And I cut them off after an hour.”
“The World Wide Web was invented at CERN.”
Sanchez said, “So the internet traffic going through CERN is massive. If Kane could get access to that ...”
Su said, “It’s a short flight from Amsterdam to Geneva.”
Jake muttered, “Does HSI have a presence there?”
“Yes,” Sanchez said. “I don’t know if it’s Geneva or Zurich. But I’ll find out. And get a notice to the supervisory special agent. They’ll contact CERN and the Swiss and French intelligence forces.”
Su was studying him. He could feel her eyes. “You really want this guy Kane, don’t you?”
How does it feel . . .
He offered only a nod.
After she left, Sanchez took a call and Jake deduced from her end of the conversation that the canvassing LAPD officers were having no luck learning where HK had gone after attacking Tandy.
Her shaking head confirmed his deductions. After disconnecting, she said, “We really need Ms. Person of Interest, Heron. She was at the murder scene. She was at the funeral. She knowssomething.”
“That she clearly doesn’t want to share.”
Jake returned to his computer. His chaining bot was working. Like Tarzan swinging through the jungle from vine to vine, chaining is when a bot looking for a particular subject spots something that could be related to it and then makes a determination about where to go next. In this case, it meant the next logical video camera that might pick up an image of Ms. POI on Harrison. The bot would keep up the chaining until the subject vanished completely or it scored ID information, like facial recognition or a license plate.
