Among the agencies to whom he had reached out, the FBI was by far the most cooperative, probably because he still had a lot of contacts within its sprawling organizational bureaucracy. It gave him quick access to NGI-IPS, the Next Generation Identification-Interstate Photo System that served the agency and state police departments. The rest presented varying levels of resistance but gradually came around to some degree of helpfulness.

By late afternoon, Ki had obtained provisional authorizations to search the CIA’s Guardian image repository, the Department of State’s TIP/PISCES, and the NSA-sponsored TIDE, or Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, a master list of known and suspected terrorists. He also gained access to the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s biometric database, leaving only Interpol, which he had emailed earlier. But the six-hour time difference between New York and Lyon, France, where it was headquartered, probably meant a lag of a full day.

In each instance there were stipulations and constraints. None of the agencies allowed him to run a direct line into their databases. All required that he put his digital signature on a Memorandum of Understanding, which meant they had total and absolute oversight of his probe, as well as the discretionary power to restrict it on grounds of informational security. And he had a strong hunch the CIA—a party to the CloudCable deal—would give his searches its close scrutiny.

Still, four out of five wasn’t too shoddy. With the single exception of Interpol, he had secured all the permissions he would need. Additionally, Net Force’s Mirror Image system contained its own candidate pool of cybercriminals and cyberterrorists. But with the organization not quite a year old, and budgetary scuffles in Congress putting the brakes on its funding for the servers and routers and technical personnel, the search engine was not yet as extensive as the rest.

At six o’clock, Ki decided to have something to eat, went out for a burger and asked the waitress to bag his dessert. An hour or so later he returned to the Terminal to get started.

He had led off with the FBI’s face-rec system. The number of images NGI-IPS kicked out could be set for a minimum of two, a maximum of fifty and a default of twenty potential matches. Requesting the max, he submitted his probe photo and then let the software evaluate it against the candidate pool. The search was an automated process: once he fed in the photo, there was nothing for him to do but crank up his music and wait.