Dark Rivers of the Heart

wall."
        "Whack her hard," Summerton said, and he hung up.
        As Roy followed a long curve under drooping magnolia boughs, past a wrought-iron fence beyond which a replica of Tara stood spot lighted in the rain-swept darkness, he said, "Cease scrambling."
        The computer beeped to indicate compliance.
        "Please connect," he said, and recited the telephone number that would brin him into Mama's arms.
        The video display flickered. When Roy glanced at the screen, he saw the opening question: WHO GOES 'There?
        Though the phone would react to vocal commands, Mama would not; therefore, Roy pulled off the narrow road and stopped in a driveway, before a pair of nine-foot-high wrought-iron gates, to type in his responses to the security interrogation. After the transmission of his thumbprint, he was granted access to Mama in Virginia.
        From her basic menu, he chose FIELD OFFICES. From that submenu, he chose LOS ANGELES, and he was thereby connected to the largest of Mama's babies on the West Coast.
        He went through a few menus in the Los Angeles computer until he arrived at the files of the photo-analysis department. The file that interested him was currently in play, as he knew it would be, and he tapped in to observe.
        The screen of his portable computer went to black and white, and then it filled with a photograph of a man's head from the neck up. His face was half turned away from the camera, dappled with shadows, blurred by a screen of rain.
        Roy was disappointed. He had hoped for a clearer picture.
        This was dismayingly like an impressionist painting: in general, recognizable; in specific, mysterious.
        Earlier in the evening, in Santa Monica, the surveillance team had taken photographs of the stranger who had gone into the bungalow minutes prior to the swat team assault. The night, the heavy rain, and the overgrown trees that prevented the streetlamps from casting much light on the sidewalk-all conspired to make it difficult to get a clear look at the man. Furthermore, they had not been expecting him, had thought that he was only an ordinary pedestrian who would pass by, and had been unpleasantly surprised when he'd turned in at the woman's house.
        Consequently, they had gotten precious few shots, none of quality, and none that revealed the full face of the mystery man, though the camera had been equipped with a telephoto lens.
        The best of the photographs already had been scanned into the local-office, where it was being processed by an enhancement program.
        The computer would attempt to identify rain distortion and eliminate it.
        Then it would gradually lighten all areas of the shot uniformly, until it was able to identify biological structures in the deepest shadows that fell across the face; employing its extensive knowledge of human skull formation-with an enormous catalogue of the variations that occurred between the sexes, among the races, and among age groups-the computer would interpret the structures it glimpsed and develope them on a best-guess basis.
        The process was laborious even at the lightning speed with which the program operated. Any photograph could ultimately be broken down into tiny dots of light and shadow called pixels: puzzle pieces that were identically shaped but varied subtly in texture and shading.
        Every one of the hundreds of thousands of pixels in this photograph had to be analyzed, to decipher not merely what it represented but what it's undistorted relationship was to each of the many pixels surrounding it, which meant that the computer had to make hundreds of millions of comparisons and decisions in order to clarify the image.
        Even then, there was no guarantee that the face finally rising from the murk would be an entirely accurate depiction of the man who had been photographed. Analysis of this kind of work was as much an art-or guess as it was a reliable technological process. Roy had seen instances in which a computer-enhanced portrait was as off the mark as any amateur artist's paint-by-the-numbers canvas of the Arc de Triomphe or of Manhattan at twilight. However, the face that they eventually got from the computer most likely would be so close to the man's true appearance as to be an exact likeness.
        Now, as the computer made decisions and adjusted thousands of pixels, the image on the video display rippled from left to