Was she planning to kill me? Breece wondered. He shook his head and got up to pour himself another drink.

The last identity he’d been using was burned now, but he had others. He’d spent the last few hours spinning one of them up, securing replacements for the equipment he’d been forced to leave behind at the old flat, remotely wiping the data he had there.

And warning the Nigerian.

Breece was safe, at the moment. Now he wanted to know who he’d been dealing with out there. Who had tried to stop his op?

He sank back into the chair with his fresh drink, then blinked, used his eyes to navigate menus painted in his field of view by his tactical contacts, paired them with the slate next to the chair, started downloading video and audio they’d captured to the device.

He’d been nose to nose with one of his opponents. He pulled up that one’s face now, moved it from the slate to the wall screen, blown up ten times larger than life.

Dark eyes. Face paint in black and white. Were those strong contrast lines meant to confuse facial recognition?

He took the image, and a sample of others he had of this man, and fired them off to a facial recognition service.

As he’d feared, there were no high-confidence matches. The low confidence matches numbered in the millions. He downloaded the data set, with biographical information, just in case. He could analyze that later. But another approach presented itself now.

What he was looking at right now, after all, was just a single, flat frame. But Breece had been recording from both tactical contacts.

“Load stereo vision,” Breece said to his slate. “Augment this face. Loop all frames.”

His slate obeyed, found the matching frames.

Now the face’s features grew more distinct, as image processing algorithms used the stereo vision to amplify depth, bringing the sharp nose and chin forward, enhancing the large lips, highlighting the cheekbones, indenting the area around the eyes. The face came alive, jogging towards him through the smoke, reacting in pain and fear as Breece clenched a hand around his throat. And then again, showing fear, opening his 3D mouth to speak, as Breece stood above him, his gun pointed down at the man.

There was something very, very familiar about that face. Now that the depth masking of the paint was partially undone, now that the face’s strong features were highlighted, Breece was sure he’d seen this man before.

He closed his eyes, thinking, reaching. It had been recently, he thought…

Wait.

Breece opened his eyes.

“Video search,” he said. “My feed from the Mall protest. Start around 8am. Find all faces on signs. Display.”