Ok, for once I'm not making up technology. I'm taking current research and projecting it into the future. The facial recognition program is real. I saw it on PBS a while back. Check it out at: http://www.ri.cmu.edu/projects/project_454.html





(Chapter 10. Various places in LA. March 5, 2033.)



As soon as Steve called in, officers had cordoned off the entire park. They searched and dusted the phone booth and the surrounding area in the light of the street lamps, and finally, around six o'clock, the morning brightened enough for them to search the rest of the park without fear of destroying evidence while they fumbled about in the dark.

"Cap'n, Donovan here. You gotta see this," an officer paged Dion. "I'm at the north end of the park, and you just gotta see it. Words won't do it justice."

Another voice came over the radio, "Let me guess. It's on a tripod about five feet high, black pebbled finish, has a battery pack, electric motor, and some gears."

"How'd you guess," Donovan responded, sounding a bit deflated.

"Got one over here by the band shell."

"And down here on the playground," a third voice added.

"By the groundskeeper's shed, too," came a fourth report.

Dion looked at Steve, who took the radio and said, "We'll be right there, Donovan. The rest of you, whatever it is, dust it for prints, photograph it, and bag it as evidence."

As they got in the car to head to the north end of the park, Dion said, "The groundskeeper's shed is closer, sir." When he was on duty, he always called his Uncle Steve either sir or Chief.

Steve nodded and said, "I know, but Donovan's a young officer, and he called it in first. It will stroke his ego just a little to have us make the trip to see what he has. He'll remember this, and if you'd go to the guys at the garden shed, he'd remember that, too, in a very different light. In the long run, when he has to put up with something he doesn't like, how you treat him in moments like this will make a difference in how well he takes his lumps."

Dion looked at Steve with admiration.

"What?"

"You do stuff like that without even thinking, don't you?"

Steve frowned, "Don't you?"

Dion laughed.





Emily pulled up to the Compton State Bank in a little blue Chevy. She looked at her passenger and said, "We're lucky you put it in a bank with twenty-four hour lobby service. We'd never be able to pull this off during regular business hours. As it is, you have ten minutes, no more."

Moretti nodded.

"That should be enough."

"It has to be enough, Moretti. We've dyed your hair and shaved your moustache, but by now, your face and mine are out on the Web. Three years ago, all federally insured banks were required to link their security cameras into the FBI's facial recognition program."

As she spoke, she plugged her laptop into the Chevy's power port.

"It'll only take about seven minutes for the program to identify you, and another two for it to send up a red flag and have that red flag recognized and processed by a dispatcher. Average police response time in this neighborhood is six minutes. We will be gone five minutes before that. So you have ten minutes."

Moretti grinned. The young woman's confidence was infectious. She planned everything down to the second, and always seemed so certain it would go off without a hitch. Moretti was actually beginning to think he might live to talk to his kid one day.

"I'll be back in nine."





"I'll be damned," Steve scratched his head. "So there were no snipers after all?"

"It appears not, sir," Donovan said, nervous and proud all at once to be talking with Deputy Chief Sloan. The man had been a hero of his since he was a kid, and he'd never expected this day to really come.

"And there are three more of these around the park, huh?"

"Yes, sir. If you'd like to borrow my binoculars, you can see them all, but this one has the main control, as far as I can tell."

"Explain, Donovan."

Steve could clearly see what Donovan was talking about, but he could also see that the young man felt so proud of himself he was about to burst his buttons. Might as well let him think he was being helpful. He listened and nodded as he looked at the other tripods through Donovan's binoculars

Donovan explained how the four tripods sitting around the park were linked to one another by infrared remote control. Each tripod was equipped with a laser pointer, some gears, some micro circuitry, and an electric motor. The one Donovan had discovered also had a small circuit board and a timer attached. It was programmed to control the other three tripods.

"…and that's how she made it look like there were four snipers with weapons trained on you the whole time, sir."

"Three, Donovan," Steve said. "When she approached me, one of the lights went out. She had me convinced she was one of the snipers."

Looking at Dion, he said, "She's brilliant."

"Actually, sir, it's a fairly simple setup. Any eighth grader with a class in basic programming and the right materials could do it."

Steve nodded and smiled.

"You're right, Donovan, but who would think to?"

Donovan thought a moment, and said, "Not many people that I know of, sir."

"That's why she's brilliant."

Just as Donovan was about to respond, Commander Banks roared up and shouted out the window, "Chief, Moretti's been spotted at Compton State Bank. Units are on their way."

Steve practically dove into the car, yelling, "Let's roll."

As the car sped away, young Officer Donovan heard the Chief call back to him, "Good work, Donovan."





"Come on, Moretti, come on."

Emily tapped constantly at her keyboard. She had three windows open on her laptop. One was the FBI missing persons/most wanted page on Giancarlo Moretti. She had discovered a flaw in the automatic update function that had been written into the facial recognition program the banks tied into. As soon as a person was spotted, his web page was updated. It was a good idea to keep the information as current as practical, but you didn't always want the whole world to know immediately that you had found the bad guys. If the people who were trying to hide watched their own web page, they knew the moment the FBI was on to them, and had time to pull out before the feds could get into position. She'd have to bring the problem to Agent Wagner's attention, if she ever had the chance.

The second window displayed computer transcriptions of the LAPD dispatchers' calls. She could monitor their conversations and know the moment the LAPD was notified of Moretti's presence in the bank. Of course, she had hacked into the system illegally, but considering all the other things she'd done lately, if the DA pressed charges, the maximum 18 months for the first offense would seem like nothing compared to what she'd get for kidnapping a federal witness, stealing an FBI van and whatnot.

The third window showed the positions of all active LAPD units relative to her own location. There was still quite a little congregation of vehicles at the park. Tapping away at the keys, she highlighted the Chief's car with a gold star. She had, again illegally, tapped into the satellite that tracked their LoJack devices. A mapping program, her own little piece of active ingenuity, plotted the quickest route from her current location to her proposed destination. As the patrol cars shifted position, the route was constantly updated to avoid the cops. Because *all* cop cars were equipped with LoJacks, she could even spot the unmarked units from several blocks away. With a few keystrokes, she told the program to code the unmarked cars in blue and the black and whites in red.

A blip on the missing persons/most wanted window surprised her. Looking at her watch, she saw it had only been five and a half minutes.

"Too soon, too soon," she muttered.

Troubled, she maximized the dispatch transcriptions window. Sooner than she expected, she saw mention of Moretti appear on that screen, and moments later, in the mapping window, the golden icon for the Chief's car started to move. It had only been seven minutes by now, thirty percent faster than she had expected. On the mapping screen, she counted seven cars speeding toward her.

"Oh, hell."





"ETA of the nearest unit is three minutes, Chief."

"Let's hope they're in time."



Emily watched as her escape route program changed constantly. The closer the cops got, the fewer routes the program had to choose from. She knew there was a fifteen second lag between her updates and their actual positions. She had about two minutes and forty-five seconds. She closed the missing persons/most wanted window, hoping that using less memory would let the mapping program function faster and give her just a fraction more lead-time.

She piled her hair in a knot on top of her head and pulled a ball cap over it. Then she put some sunglasses on and popped a piece of bubblegum in her mouth. She made a decision, then. At fifteen seconds, she would go into the bank, and it would become a standoff. She'd let all the tellers out, of course, but she and Moretti would stay in there, holed up until the cops gassed them out or let them get away. If Moretti got out in time, they'd cruise away, and all the cops would see would be a kid getting a driving lesson before the morning's traffic got too heavy.





"Two minutes, chief."





"Traffic!" The word escaped Emily's lips before she knew she was going to speak it.

"Damn!" She pounded the dash with a fist. She had forgotten to account for lighter Internet traffic in the early hours of the morning. With fewer users online, electronic messages moved faster. She'd been such an idiot.

Rooting around in the back of the Chevy, she found a broad-brimmed straw hat for Moretti. Glancing again at the laptop, she noticed the cops were getting uncomfortably close.





"First unit will be arriving on the scene in one minute, Chief. Our ETA is two fifteen."

"Come on," Steve muttered, "Come on."





"Come on, come on," Emily whispered hoarsely as she glanced back and forth between the clock on the computer screen and the door to the bank. She heard the wail of approaching sirens. She saw red and blue icons closing quickly, the gold star not far behind.

The clock counted down.

Forty-five seconds…

She started the engine.

Thirty…

She put the car in gear.

Twenty…

Moretti came strolling out of the bank and froze when he heard the sirens.

"MOVE!!!!!" She screamed at him from the open window of the car.

He ran to the car and dove in the passenger's side. At that moment, the mapping program flashed a message.

UNABLE TO AVOID OBSTACLES. MAPPING ROUTE WITH FEWEST OBSTACLES.

Emily socked the straw hat on Moretti's head and said, "Sit up straight. Looked relaxed. You're teaching a kid to drive."

She gave him the laptop, and considering what she said, told him, "On second thought, it might be ok to look scared shitless."

Glancing at the mapping screen, she pulled smoothly into the left-hand lane and headed to the light. She saw no sense in taking off like a bat out of hell until they knew they were tagged.

"You just gonna roll right by them, huh?"

"That's the plan. Speeding away from a bank is guaranteed to draw their attention." Her stomach clenched and she blew an enormous bubble as the first black and white rolled by them.

She hung a left and a right, and an unmarked car skidded around the turn.

Looking at the mapping screen, she saw they were headed right for the gold star. Three blocks north, hang a right, and they would be in the clear. They got through the first two lights ok, but the next one was red. Moretti held his breath as the Chief's car approached. Emily blew a bubble as big as her head. The Chief's car slowed at the red light, then cruised through a break in the cross traffic. The fugitives started to breathe again, and grinned at each other.





"Dammit!" Steve was getting frustrated. They'd missed Emily and Moretti by less than thirty seconds.

"Did you see what they were driving," he asked the people in the bank. "Or which way they went?"

"Chief," the security guard called to him, "I didn't see which way they went, but I did see what they were driving, and I noticed something odd about them."

"What was that?" Steve was trying hard to reign in his temper. The man was trying to help, after all.

"Well, I was looking out at the street, and there was this gorgeous redhead in a little blue Chevy, don't know the year, but it was an older model…"

"Dion…"

"I'm on it Chief."

As the guard continued his story, Dion put out an APB on the vehicle…





Several miles from the bank, Emily pulled into a fast-food drive through. She and Moretti ordered value meals, and gulped them down as they headed out to a more residential section of the city.

"Em," Moretti had taken to using the nickname, and Emily didn't much mind.

"Yeah?"

"They've got an APB out," he said, looking at the dispatch screen.

"Figured it would happen soon. I saw the guard watching me."

She pulled into a quiet little neighborhood, the kind of area the cops didn't feel the need to patrol much in the daylight because it was still relatively safe.

"You got what you needed from your safety deposit box, right?"

"Yep, got all the documentation, the entire family tree is right here." He held up a notebook and a long tube of the type that held blueprints. "Goes back over thirty years."

"Very cool."

She pulled into an alley and shut down her laptop. Nodding toward an SUV parked down the alley, she said, "Ever ride in one of those new Saudi cars?"

"Nope. You?"

"Can't say as I have. Like to try it?"

"Why not?"

As she checked the Lasca over to be sure it didn't have a built in tracking system, Emily said, "I did some research at Carpoint.com a while back. Lasca means 'soldier.' These things are fully warranted for the first 150,000 miles. I guess the Saudi's think their cars are pretty tough."

"They need to be," Moretti said, "to stand up to sand storms and desert heat, I guess."

Declaring the vehicle free of tracking devices, Emily disarmed the anti- theft system and popped the locks. She and Moretti climbed in and headed to Santa Monica.



"Well, she had this laptop out and she was tapping at it constantly. All of a sudden, she got real agitated. Then she put her hair up, covered it with a ball cap, put on some shades, and started the car. When the man came out, she put a hat on his head, too. I didn't see which way they went, because just then, the manager called me to tell me about the detain order for the man."

"I see."

"And she was chewing bubblegum and blowing bubbles big enough to float away on. She acted like she was sixteen."

Steve and Cheryl looked at each other and blinked.

"At the red light," Cheryl said.

"Aughhh!"