Free Direct Action by John Weisman

editing tools. This son of a bitch was going to be hers.
    1:14 P . M . MJ glanced up at the wall clock that was just visible over the top of her cubicle. Christ, Mrs. SJ was going to have a fit. She expected her C-PIGgies to go through a minimum of sixty photographs a day. MJ had scanned only eight. Well, things had taken longer than expected. But there he was, in living color.
    MJ examined the face. The guy was about fifty—maybe a couple of years either side. Olive skin. He sported a thick mustache. But the more MJ stared at the mustache, the more she became convinced it was fake. His eyebrows were thin, and the rest of his face didn’t support the weight of the huge brush on his upper lip. It was out of balance to the rest of him. She enlarged the picture so she could see everything more clearly.
    Several details bothered her. The picture had been taken at midday. Most men shave in the mornings. There were light traces of five-o’clock shadow at the edges of the man’s cheeks. But the upper lip area adjacent to his mustache had no discernible hair. That meant it was clean-shaven. But his cheeks weren’t. Paying special attention to one area of the face when shaving was, she knew, consistent with wearing a disguise or a prosthetic. She’d seen Tom prepare disguises and that’s how he did things.
    Okay, let’s assume disguise . She played with the software for a while. After half an hour she had composited seven distinct full facials. There was one with mustache; one with Ayatollah-style beard and another with close-cropped Yasser Arafat stubble; one barefaced, one with full head of hair, another one balding, and a final one with shaved head. After MJ finished playing with noses, chins, and cheekbones, she had more than forty images. Then she keyed up the IdentaBase facial recognition database and let it do its magic.
3:26 P . M . This made no sense. No sense at all. None of the more than twoscore composites had caused the recognition software to hiccup.
    MJ sighed. Back to the drawing board. She focused on her first composite—the one in which she’d erased the kaffiyeh and reconstructed the left side of his face.
    By now, she’d given him a name. She called him Khalil, because that was the name of a Palestinian terrorist in John Le Carré’s novel The Little Drummer Girl, a book she’d read in college.
    Okay, Khalil, MJ posited as she stared, what if you had plastic surgery so the Israelis couldn’t identify you?
She blew up the photo, then scanned it as closely as she could to see if Khalil’s face bore any signs of cosmetic alteration. When she saw—or at least thought she saw—possible changes, she tried to conjure up what he’d had done to himself.
It took her hours of trial and error, but she finally put together something she was happy with. The Khalil she now stared at certainly was different from the man in the original photograph—and yet he was the same man. She’d made small but significant changes: enlarged his upper lip, reduced the prominence of the cheekbones to make his face slightly more oblong, extended the hairline just a tad lower onto the forehead, and taken the Roman-like hook out of the nose.
6:45 P . M . MJ sent Khalil’s image to the IdentaBase software. Six minutes later, she’d gotten the hiccup she was waiting for. The software pulled ninety-two points and a name.
The name was Imad Mugniyah. MJ went white. Imad Mugniyah was the world’s second most wanted terrorist. The founder of the Islamic Jihad Organization. The man who’d blown up two American embassies in Lebanon and killed 241 U.S. Marines. The man who had kidnapped and tortured to death CIA’s Beirut station chief William Buckley.
She’d once seen one of the CIA’s two photographs of Imad Mugniyah—and the guy in that picture, which dated from 1988, looked nothing like either the individual in the Reuters photo or the composite she’d sent to IdentaBase.
And yet there it was in black-and-white: ninety-two