The Devil's Code

perspective.”
    “They’re not that big. They’re fives.”
    “From this angle.”
    “Bullshit. Not that big. And my toe isn’t that bent.”
    “You’re right. I’m sorry. I apologize.”
    “No, you don’t,” she said. She stretched again. “You don’t care whose fragile ego you crush. All artists are like that.”
    “Somebody once said that a portrait is a painting where there’s something not quite right about the mouth,” I said. “It might have been Sargent. Anyway, nobody’s ever said that about the foot.”
    “I’m the first.”
    “Go take a shower,” I said.
    She went to take a shower and I struggled with the foreshortening of her leg and foot, and with her face in the back, rising over her thigh, and the pillow behind that. When I was done, I took the drawing out, ripped it up, and tossed it in the wastebasket. Something not quite right about the foot. With all that in my head, waiting for LuEllen to get out of the bathroom, I looked out the window down at the parking lot.
    And understood what I hadn’t understood before.
    Why I had looked down at the parking lot and thought I’d missed an important thought.
    Understood the AmMath photographs—or something about them, anyway. It all came out of the perspective of LuEllen’s foot . . .
    T he shower was running and I could hear her humming to herself in the bathroom as I brought the laptop up, and one of the photos.
    “Jesus.” I was right. I sat staring at it, then brought up another one. Ripped a piece of paper out of my drawing book, got a pen, and began making comparative measurements on the computer screen. I was still doing it when LuEllen came bobbling out of the bathroom with a towel around her head. I glanced at her and looked back at the computer.
    “Thanks,” she said. “I’m here with my nice pink . . .”
    “Shut up. I gotta get online with Bobby. Get dressed.”
    “What?”
    “Look at this photograph.”
    She looked over my shoulder. “What?” she asked again.
    “Look how this shadow comes down from this light pole? The shadow from the sun?”
    “Yeah?”
    “Look how it comes down from this light pole,” I said.
    “All right.”
    “And this one.”
    “I see all the shadows and all the light poles, Kidd. So what?”
    “All the shadows are in exactly the same perspective. Exactly, as close as I can measure. Doesn’t it look weird to you?”
    “No. And so what?”
    “It’s impossible, that’s all. Well, not impossible, if the camera was far enough back.”
    “We were thinking it might be a surveillance camera up on a roof. It’d have to be, to get that high angle.”
    “Still not high enough,” I said. “I gotta get with Bobby. He could make some better measurements and do the numbers.”
    “If that’s not high enough, what? You think it was made by a plane?”
    “Not high enough,” I said. “I think that’s a satellite photograph.”
    S he still wasn’t much impressed; I had to work to get that. “Think what a face would look like if you took it from three blocks away with your Nikon and then blew it up to this size. It’d look like a thumbprint,” I said. “Look at those faces. You can’t quite recognize them, but you almost can. If that camera’s in orbit, it has one unbelievable capability.”
    Now she was hunched over me, and spotted something we should have seen before. “You know, those cars . . .” There were only a half-dozen of them in the parking lot. “Not a single one of them isAmerican-made. Look at this one . . .” She tapped the screen with a fingernail. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen that kind. It looks like a combination of a pickup truck and a sedan.”
    “You see those in the Middle East,” I said. “Lots of them.”
    She straightened. “So it’s a satellite photo. So what?”
    “I don’t know, yet. But it seems unlikely that a satellite would take a picture of three guys and the three guys were important,” I said. “How could you time something like that?”
    “Radios, maybe . . .”
    I shook my head. “I bet it’s not the guys that are important. I bet it’s the photograph. Not the content, just the photograph, that they have it. They’re supposed to be working on the Clipper chip, and they have this. This has got to be some kind of ungodly high-level secret capability. You could not only see stuff like ammo dumps, you could see what’s in them. If they can do something with computers to punch up the resolution—just a