Читать книгу Jane Hawk Thriller - Dean Koontz - Страница 20

In Garret Nolan’s garage, Jane straddled the motorcycle, flexed her hands around the grips, looking it over—speedometer/tachometer, clutch lever, brake lever, throttle—getting the feel of the machine before putting up the kickstand.

Nolan said, “One more thing you should know. They say Jane Hawk avoids bus stations, train stations, and airports because facial-recognition programs scan travelers for known terrorists and wanted criminals. But that’s not good enough anymore.”

Jane was curious, but Leslie Anderson was on the run only from her former boss, not from the feds, so neither of them expressed interest in what Nolan had said.

“About a year ago,” he continued, “the Chinese government began deploying among their police departments these freaky damn eyeglass-mounted cameras equipped with face-rec tech. Now some of my buddies still in U.S. spec ops recently received the same gear.”

Six months earlier, Jane would have taken such a claim with the entire contents of a salt shaker. Fixed-camera recognition systems were connected to remote facial databases stored in the cloud, so vast they—along with artificial-intelligence analytics—couldn’t be loaded onto the front end of a wearable camera. But technology was advancing at a remarkable pace, especially the tech that could be used for population control and oppression.

“These sunglasses are wired to a handheld device with an offline facial database of up to ten thousand faces,” Nolan said. “The AI is good enough to match a suspect’s face to one in the d-base in just six hundred milliseconds. Fixed cameras have limited lines of sight, but someone wearing these can look everywhere.”

She couldn’t restrain herself from saying, “That sucks.”

Nolan said, “If this gear is being issued to some in the military, you can bet your ass security agencies on the domestic side also have them. So maybe if you ever happen to run into Jane Hawk someday, tell her the one face currently sure to be in that portable d-base is hers. Nowhere is safe.”

“Has anywhere ever been?”

From the seat of a nearby Harley, he picked up a pearl-white Shoei X-9 Air helmet with a dark-smoke shield. “Too bad you can’t wear this everywhere.”

Accepting the helmet, Jane said, “What if they nail me and trace this bike back to you?”

“They can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Ever since I left the military, I’ve been doing business in ways that move me step by step toward the edge of the grid.”

“Gonna go all the way off?”

“Sooner than later, we’ll sell the house and head so far up-country you’d think it was the nineteenth century.”

“Sorry to hear that,” she said. “The more people like you and your wife who get out of the game, the more likely the bastards will win in the end.”

He shrugged. “We’ve got one life, and we don’t want to live any part of it on our knees, which is likely if we stay here.”