“How did the demonstration go with the assistant director?” Ailes had Gerald video conference Breyer masquerading as the head of the FBI

“He was impressed and disturbed. He knew the NSA and the CIA psy-ops were working on something similar, but he didn’t know how to react when I told him one of his agents put it together from a game console from Toys ‘R’ Us, substituting millions of dollars’ worth of government hardware for something that costs three hundred dollars. He asked Gerald to start working on a way to tell when we’re looking at an altered image; a sock puppet, as Gerald calls them. He thinks he can do it by dissecting the motion algorithm. It won’t tell us if someone is using a different method, but it can spot one similar to ours.”

Being able to tell electronically if we’re talking to a real person or not is crucial. We may have to track down tens of thousands of people. We have call centers with video conferencing in the FBI where we can do that from if we’re sure we won’t be spoofed by the Warlock.

Screening this many people in just a few days is a logistical nightmare. Anything we can do to narrow the field would help immensely.

“What are the other departments up to?” I ask.

“Right now the big discussion is with Chisholm and behavioral analysis is how this affects the profile of the Warlock. They seem to think this could make him some kind of super-genius hacker. Gerald and I are trying to convince them it doesn’t. There’s a difference between knowing how to use a tool someone else made and being the person who invented it. We don’t even know that he’s made a video puppet. And if he does, all it means so far is that he’s very resourceful. People tend to read too much into skills they don’t have.”

I can relate to that. Some people see you do a simple mind-reading stunt and they think you’re psychic. I used to pull the watch steal I did on Jensen on first dates. I stopped doing it when I realized that it might be a reason men were too afraid to call me for a second date. Or at least I think that’s the reason.

“What about matching the birthdays?” I ask. The idea of putting matching faces to matching birthdays to find twins simplifies things. If the Warlock is looking for matching pairs, so to speak, that would allow us to narrow our potential victims by a larger margin. We have computers to sift through the data; the trouble was finding a source for that information.

“Yes. That was very helpful. It gave the director enough reason to push ahead with the Yearbook Project.”

I hadn’t heard about that. “Yearbook? I don’t know what that is.”

“It’s our own social network database. Unlike some of our databases targeting terrorism suspects, where we need a court’s permission to even enter a name, this is a database of publicly available information all cross-referenced and processed by artificial intelligence. If a bunch of people wish your username on Twitter a happy birthday, we can then add a birthday tag to your profile. If you upload a photograph with faces in it, the system uses deductive logic to figure out who they are and then uses a face search similar to Faceplaced to build a profile.”