GUS HEBRON LIVED IN the Virginia suburb of Reston, the first planned post-war community in the United States. His house was a large brick colonial at the end of a cul-de-sac with lots of oaks and elms behind it. Three stories, tall French windows. Much too much house for one man living alone, which Jon Mallory suspected that Gus Hebron was.
He had found a bio of Hebron online, along with some personal details. Eight years ago, he’d become partner in a commercial satellite business known as Sky Glass Industries Inc. It was sold last year to Boeing. Hebron’s division worked on defense and intelligence contracts, including surveillance projects for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense. Before that, he had helped develop satellite programs for NASA and the National Security Agency. Born in upstate New York, Hebron had received his master’s degree from Georgetown, where he’d taken a class from Jon Mallory’s father. He’d served as a combat engineer officer in the U.S. Army, then worked for Raytheon and United Technologies Corporation before taking a post with the government.
The neighborhood where he lived was new and felt oddly uninhabited. The sun had set, but orange-gold afterglows burned through the shedding trees as Jon pulled in. Hebron greeted him at the front door wearing baggy, faded jeans, fuzzy slippers, and an oversized Washington Redskins jersey. Number 8. He was a big man—six-one, 250, Jon guessed. Full face, easy grin, short-cropped curly hair, with age lines on his forehead and around his eyes. It was a face that didn’t reveal much, although Jon sensed that he was a complex man. The last time they had spoken, Gus had been a student of his father’s. He always wore short-sleeved buttoned shirts in those days and grinned a lot but never said much.
“Come on in, Jonny. Get you a beer?”
“All right.”
Jon stood in the doorway and surveyed the living room. The house was elegantly appointed and seemed brand new. Two-story foyer, hardwood floors, a mantled fireplace. A sixty-inch television played C-SPAN on mute. The room was cluttered with a half-dozen beat-up cardboard boxes stuffed with papers, notebooks, and file folders. Two computer monitors sat side by side on an old wooden work table. The chandeliers were set too bright.
Gus Hebron handed Jon a sixteen-ounce can of Bud Light in a Redskins coolie. He returned to the kitchen and came back with a fruit bowl filled with Chex mix, setting it on the large glass coffee table between them.
“So, what are you doing with yourself these days, Jonny?”
“Nothing real exciting.”
“Yeah.” Hebron grinned. “Still writing, I guess?”
Jon nodded.
“And what prompted you to look me up?”
“Trying to find my brother, as I said.”
Hebron sat on the edge of the sofa, reached for the bowl and popped some of the Chex mix in his mouth, keeping a reserve in his hand. “Why call me?”
“I have a pretty limited number of options at this point.”
“Well. The first question I’d ask is whether or not he wants to be found. If Charlie doesn’t want to be found, you’re wasting your time looking for him.”
“I’m not sure if he does or not,” Jon said. Both men sipped their beers, watching each other. Gus’s face became expressionless, but Jon saw that he was still looking at him. “I’m really just seeking some direction. If you needed to find him, who would you go to?”
“Well. I’d set up an investigation,” Gus said. “I’d have him tracked. And, of course, I could do that, for a price. Why are you so concerned?”
“Just a hunch. He was supposed to call me this morning. He didn’t.”
Gus nodded, then moved his jaw from side to side. Something about him wasn’t quite right, Jon sensed, though he couldn’t figure just what it was.
“Can I ask what the nature of the call was?”
Jon shrugged.
“Do you have a number for him? An e-mail?”
“Nope.”
“Street address? Any way of reaching him?”
“No. He contacted me.”
“What I thought.” He drank his beer. “You two haven’t been particularly close for a while, have you?”
Jon raised his eyebrows but said nothing, surprised that Gus would know this.
“Falling out?”
“I can’t really give you a good reason.”
“Other than Charlie.”
“Right.”
He feigned a laugh. “Well. Look. If you think I’ve got a pipeline to him, I’m sorry to disappoint you, Jon. In fact, to be honest with you, I think the reason I invited you over was because of what you might tell me.”
Jon Mallory frowned. “Really. Does it matter to you?”
Gus’s face became very serious, an expression Jon hadn’t imagined was in his repertoire. “Your father mattered to me. Your family does, sure.” He gazed at his beer can, tilting it for a moment as if reading the letters. “When I worked with your dad, we were part of an exclusive community. Weren’t allowed to discuss the shit we were working on with anyone. A lot of it, we weren’t even allowed to tell our spouses. I guess it goes back to that. And, I mean, I knew you and your brother when you were kids, after your mom died.” He grinned, and it made Jon feel like an outsider, as he sometimes had as a teenager, unable to enter the closed world where his father and brother lived. “Couldn’t have been two kids more yin and yang than you two, could there?”
Jon Mallory allowed a quick smile. It was true, he supposed. Jon had been the more predictably rebellious one, interested in rock music and TV shows that Charlie and their father thought frivolous. But he’d also wanted to live a different sort of life, a life out in the open. Charlie had stayed close to the more concealed path cut by their father. “But I understand you may have had some contact with my brother recently,” Jon said. “That you may have even worked together earlier this year.”
“Why do you say that?”
Jon shrugged. “Source told me.”
“Yeah?” Hebron drank his beer, then ran a forefinger in a semi-circle over the rim of the can. “You know, it’s funny. I’m older than Charlie and younger than your dad. And there was a big gap there, between those generations. Your father was a gifted man, but he was old school. He drank the Kool-Aid like a lot of the brightest people of that generation. He said his prayers to the government each night because back then the U.S. government really was the almighty. The leading edge in science, space exploration, weapons systems. Charlie’s more like me, I guess. We saw opportunity shifting elsewhere. Did you know seventy percent of intelligence work is subcontracted out now?”
Jon nodded. He sipped his beer.
“Both of us got out of government, graduated to the real world. Taking what we were doing for the government and doing it better on the outside. And, in some cases, selling it back to them.” He winked, pulling his right leg up.
“Satellite imaging, in your case.”
“Yeah. Source tell you that, too?”
Jon smiled. “Nope, all I had to do was Google your name and the company came up. It’s hardly a secret. Big business now, isn’t it? Satellite imaging.”
“Has been, sure. Ten, twelve years or more.”
“You changed the subject, though.”
“Did I?”
“Yeah.”
He made a snorting sound, let his leg go, and leaned forward, as if gathering his strength to stand. “Here. Let me get you a cold one.” He took Jon’s can, which wasn’t empty. Returned to the kitchen. Jon heard him open the refrigerator, pop two more beers, pour out and crunch the old cans. He took inventory of the room, trying to figure what was wrong. For one thing, the house wasn’t lived in. He was pretty sure of that. No, this couldn’t be Hebron’s home.
“What changed ten or twelve years ago?” Jon asked, as Gus returned.
“What?”
“You said satellite imaging has been big for ten or twelve years. What changed ten or twelve years ago?”
“Oh.” He reached for a handful of Chex mix and leaned back. “Well. The law changed. Back in the early ’90s, actually.”
“Did it? How so?”
“It’s sort of an interesting story. Government started to get a little worried back then, afraid that foreign competition for satellite technology was going to knock the pegs out from under us. So, in ’94, Washington decided it would allow private companies to launch satellites with high-resolution sensors—stuff that was available only to the intelligence community before then. That changed it, opened it up. After that, you could provide information to anyone who was able to pay for it. That’s how our company got started.”
“And my brother was working with you on something recently.”
Hebron turned his head, seeming to fend off the question. “The thing about your brother: he sees things that other people don’t. Sometimes, it almost resembles paranoia. Although in a funny way, I understand it.”
“When did you last talk with him?”
“Last winter. Not long after your dad died.” He took a slow drink, his face impassive. “He was here, in the city, for a few days.”
“Really. Business?”
Hebron snorted. He ran his finger again in a semi-circle over the top of his beer can. “We never had any dealings that weren’t business, Jonny. Okay? He was helping you on those stories about Africa, wasn’t he?”
“Possibly.”
“Thought so. Well, as I say: If Charlie doesn’t want to be found, I really don’t think you and I are going to find him.” He stared at Jon as if to underline a point, then went back to his beer, finished it. “I was surprised he wasn’t here for your dad’s funeral.”
“I was, too. He must’ve had good reason.”
“Must’ve.”
Jon watched Hebron watching him. Jon’s father had suffered from heart disease for several years, but his death eight months earlier had been sudden, the circumstances still not settled in Jon’s mind.
Gus Hebron elaborately got up and took Jon’s half-empty beer. “I keep thinking this’ll be the year,” he said, coming back out, holding up two more cold ones.
“Pardon?”
“For the ’Skins. Been that way for some time now, hasn’t it?” He handed a Bud Light to Jon and rubbed his belly. “You know, you invest your energy into something each year and each year it doesn’t happen. Makes a man begin to lose his faith a little bit.”
“I guess.”
Hebron stared at his beer can, a bemused look in his eyes. Then he launched into a soliloquy about the Redskins. He seemed a little drunk all of a sudden. When Jon Mallory said he should be going, Hebron held up his hand.
“I’ll give you two tips about your brother,” he said. “All I can tell you. All I’m going to tell you.”
“All right.”
Jon stood and waited, wondering what was up.
“Do you know what D.M.A. stands for?”
“No. Never was able to find out.”
“You might try a little harder.”
He winked.
“Second?”
“Second, and more importantly: I know that your brother had done business with a company called Olduvai Charities. He mentioned it, anyway, during our last conversation. It’s based in East Africa but has some sort of connection in the States, and in China. Something about it bothered him.”
“Ol-du-vay?”
“Olduvai. As in Olduvai Gorge. Birthplace of mankind, supposedly. Okay? Now, you didn’t hear that from me. And if you say you did, I deny we ever had this conversation. All right? And I want you to call me as soon as you hear that he’s okay. You promise me that?”
“All right.” Gus Hebron walked him toward the door, grinning at something again, his arm going to Jon’s back several times. What is really going on here? he wondered.
“Anyway, good to see you, Jonny.”
“Sure.”
“I want you to find your brother.”
“I do, too.”
“Hey, you have a long ride back. You want to use the facilities, be my guest. Right in here.” He pushed open a door and flicked on the lights. Like the chandelier in the living room, they were a little too bright.
“Thanks.” Jon pulled the door closed. The bathroom was immaculate, other than a crumpled sixteen-ounce Bud Light can in the trash basket. It smelled of clean towels, hand-soap, and disinfectant. A full floor-to-ceiling mirror faced him as he urinated. There was another mirror on his right behind the sink. Jon glanced at himself in both; his eyes looked tired; he was in need of a shave. Then, preferring not to look, he turned his eyes away, focusing on what he was doing.
Afterward, he washed his hands and glanced at himself again. Dried his hands absently. Then he turned off the light and put on a cordial face to say goodbye.
GUS HEBRON WATCHED from a darkened bedroom window as Jon Mallory eased his sky-blue Camry out of the drive. His eyes followed the red taillights as they became more distant, turned right, and disappeared behind a row of large brick houses. He bolted the front door and turned off the porch light, walked to the utility room behind the bathroom and unlocked it.
In the house plans, this had been designated the laundry room, but Gus Hebron had put it to a different use. A long wooden collapsible work table was set up along the length of one wall. On it were three computer imaging monitors and processors. Cords snaked among them, connecting with the input processor on a smaller table nearby.
Hebron typed in a program sequence on the input processor. The processor had downloaded approximately ninety separate images of Jon Mallory’s face and head, captured by eight pinhole digital cameras—three behind the transparent full-length mirror, one behind the transparent sink mirror, and four concealed in the wallpaper design of the bathroom walls. The ceiling and sink lights had prevented him from noticing that the mirrors were transparent; all Jon Mallory had seen were the reflections of himself and the room.
Hebron had installed the full-length mirror facing the toilet, with the understanding of where, precisely, his subject would stand and how his head would be positioned. Jon Mallory stood just under five feet eleven. The eight cameras captured angled images that would be merged by computer algorithms to create a three-dimensional mesh of his head.
Outside, in the grass beside the sidewalk that led to the driveway, and mounted on either side of the front doorway, photographic sensors caught dozens of flash images of Jon Mallory’s walk as he returned to his car—an auto-sensor movement system that Hebron had engineered at his laboratory in nearby Dulles, Virginia. A technology not yet commercially available. The principle was simple: Everyone’s walk is as distinctive as his or her fingerprint or retinal pattern. Hebron’s division had developed a process for matching video prints of the rhythms and cadences of a person’s walk.
This project was finished now. Gus Hebron had spent three days outfitting the bathroom and front yard with cameras, sensors and imaging equipment and now would be able to assemble a reliable, three-dimensional image of Jon Mallory that could be added to his client’s data base. They would need it in the coming weeks.