Which is to say that I could see just fine. I couldn’t see as well as a guy on a boat with the flat calm sea in front of him, but for a guy backed into the shadow of a Hortensia bush in the rain, I could see quite well, without being easily seen myself.

To my left was the gatekeeper’s house. The floodlights were illuminated, and I didn’t stare too long and hard in that direction. I did think a little about what Daniel might be doing. I pictured him sitting there in a chair waiting. Not looking at anything in particular, just vaguely and unspecifically out the window. Which is pretty much what I thought Nazari would be doing. Maybe she was thinking about her upcoming exam for the BRI. Or maybe she was thinking about the dead Iraqi.

I was thinking about the Bogie.

Blomstein’s message said that the search he’d done on Nazari’s crime scene photos had thrown up a Bogie. Which meant that by now, it wasn’t just between me and Blomstein. Someone else had been alerted to the query. All Blomstein had done was enter Nazari’s pictures into a computer program. The computer then chewed on them for a while. Scanning through the pictures, one by one, from top to bottom, impartially. Making connections between this pixel and that pixel. When it was done, the program tied up and packaged those connections into something that it could communicate to other computers.

Then the computer program had called up the big network.

Blomstein’s computer was on a desk in a borrowed Royal Air Force base in the UK. But while he sat back and chewed on a pencil, his computer was able to call up reinforcements from millions of other computers all over the United States and allied nations. The call awakened warehouses full of hard drives and computer processing units dotted around the deserts, plains, and forests, each of them several football fields across, packed and humming with air conditioners, cooling fans, and blinking data ports.

The faces in Nazari’s photographs would be matched at blistering speeds against every other photograph that had ever been saved onto a United States or allied military hard drive. Which would be something along the lines of four billion facial recognition quality images, give or take, it was difficult to say precisely.

If matches were made, the network would gather up all the information it had, and send it back in a nice and tidy report to Blomstein’s computer program, which would then pop up a little window on the screen. Blomstein would quit chewing his pencil and lean into his screen to read off the report. Then he’d call me.

But it hadn’t happened like that.