Omega The Girl in the Box - By Robert J. Crane Page 0,75

She looked at me over her reading glasses. “You seem much more relaxed than yesterday. Different, somehow.”

I stiffened. “Um. No. Same me.”

“You sure?” She cocked her head at me, peering at me, squinting her eyes. “You seem different.”

“Nope.” I shook my head. Gulp.

She shook her head as though trying to clear it. “Okay. J.J.?”

“Got some minor discrepancies I found here,” he said, holding up his tablet computer.

“With the passports?” I asked, before Ariadne could.

“Yeah,” he said with a downer tone and looking at the tablet. “We tracked the three coming in, but there’s not really been any movement on the others in that batch from the UK. A few of them look like they’ve been used in the last six months, but not anywhere local. One in Mombasa two weeks ago, one in Kolkata three months ago, another in Shenzen about nine months ago...” He shrugged. “No pattern I can detect.”

“Shenzen is in China, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Yeah,” J.J. said, looking up from the tablet. “Just across the harbor from Hong Kong, I think.”

“So it’s in China, nine months ago,” I said. “Wasn’t that when...?”

“When the compound, the meta compound—” Ariadne spoke up, “the one that was run by their government, got destroyed.”

“Right,” I said. “And Kolkata—err...sorry, the books I’ve read call it Calcutta—”

“And what fine ethnocentric volumes they must be,” J.J. said.

“Wasn’t India, three months ago, the site of another massacre?” I watched Eve turn to stone as Ariadne looked thoughtful. “Another few hundred metas killed?”

“Yeah,” J.J. murmured. “Hm. Weird pattern, then, huh? You think Omega had anything to do with...?”

“The Director says that extermination is not their game,” Ariadne said, a pen in her mouth.

“So why else would they be there at those times?” I asked. “Coincidence?”

“Weird coincidence,” J.J. said. “Timing is kinda off, since they don’t have anyone there any other times, just during the approximate time when the massacres occurred.”

“It could have been an investigator,” I said, wondering why I was defending Omega. “They could have been checking things out.”

“And I could have been born in Louisville, Kentucky, but strangely enough, I was born in Stuttgart.” Eve was all sarcasm. “If it seems unlikely, it probably is.”

“Let me see the passport photos,” I said to J.J. and he held up his tablet, revealing a face of an older man, in his sixties, grey-haired and with steel-rimmed glasses. He wore the look of a caring grandfather like an old blanket over the shoulders of a bum. “Janos Dichtmann.” I looked up at Ariadne and Eve. “Janos sounds awfully close to Janus.”

“You think someone decided to get cute with the passport office?” Ariadne looked at me. “Kind of an on-the-nose thing to do, don’t you think?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “But that doesn’t make it any less likely to be accurate.”

“If true,” Eve said, “and this is the Janus we’ve been told about, then he’s either not in the country or traveling under a different passport batch—since you said this passport hasn’t been cleared through U.S. customs?”

“No,” J.J. said, flipping back to the data. “This one went to Shenzen, and that’s it. I don’t even see a return trip, so theoretically he’s still in China.”

“I don’t take that as a positive sign, since he would have been there for about nine months now,” Ariadne said. “I think we can assume that he’s probably using multiple identities and has at least made it back to the UK by now, if that is in fact where their home base is.”

“Which means that your theory of tracking passports is not going to give us a complete picture,” I said.

J.J. froze, as though he were running the calculation in his head. “Okay, wait, I got it. We have facial recognition software, right? I’ll run it like this—everyone who’s gone through customs in the last twenty-four hours, then work backward to a week, then a month, looking for a match to this face.” He held up Janos Dichtmann’s passport photo. “If I can establish a match, then I’ve got his current passport, and can trace that; they may have gotten sloppy and done another batch, in which case we’ve got him, you know?”

“You think they’ll have done batches like this more than once?” Ariadne asked, skeptical.

“This isn’t the sort of thing most people are going to pick up on,” J.J. said. “The Department of Homeland Security doesn’t even have the resources to come up with this unless they knew specifically what they were looking for, and this is...it’s too good. These are legit passports, and