The Vanishing by Gary Brown (top 10 motivational books TXT) 📕

The longer he stared at Pennimore’s photo, the louder the little bell inside his head rang that told him something was wrong. Pennimore’s eyes spoke to him.

Oyama put the picture back into the file, closed the cover, took a final swig of water, and tossed the empty bottle into the wastebasket.

“Accident, my ass,” he muttered.

33

“DON’T YOU EVER leave this place?” Cynthia Rowe joked as she entered the computer lab, her short blonde hair bobbing up and down as she crossed the room. Her skin-tight leather pants accentuated every curve of her long shapely legs, and the suppleness of the leather crinkled with every step. Over her shoulder she carried a leather knapsack, which she tossed to the floor beside Justin’s chair. She untied the long sleeve yellow sweater she wore draped over her shoulders and wrapped it around her waist.

Justin barely looked up. He kept tapping away on the computer keyboard, watching the screen as he scrolled through an internet search. “That would require having a life,” he replied. “Too busy trying to catch the bad guys, I guess. Anyway, what are you doing here? I thought you were working an intelligence op upstate.”

“Wrapped it up,” Cynthia said. She nudged the knapsack with her foot. “I’ve got three memory cards in here that need to be downloaded, asap.”

“Run away with me to the Caribbean and I’ll have them ready for you in five minutes.”

Cynthia smiled. “How about I buy you dinner instead? What do you say, boy genius? Fajitas and a pitcher?”

“That’s hardly a compromise,” Justin replied, a hint of mock disappointment in his voice. “And stop calling me boy genius! I’m more than a brilliant mind, you know. You really should re-think my Caribbean offer. Besides, you’d look totally hot in a…”

Cynthia gave him a friendly poke in the side, then mussed his hair with her fingers. “Throw some ice on it, Romeo,” she said. She wrapped her arms around him in a friendly hug, pressed her cheek to his, and stared at the computer screen. “Whatcha working on?”

Justin sighed and rolled his eyes. “Sure. Get me all hot and bothered. Just my luck. I finally meet the girl of my dreams and she’s all business.”

“Speaking of business…”

“Okay, okay. A new client arrived today. Dr. Claire Prescott. She’s a friend of Martin’s. A real hottie too!”

“I’m festering with jealousy,” Cynthia joked. “What’s the doc’s story?”

“Her sister disappeared years ago, but we think we’ve got a lead on her already. Seems she’s mixed up with a cult called The Brethren. Ever heard of them?”

Cynthia shook her head. “Nope.”

“I’m not surprised. They’re pretty low key. The top man has got a rather nasty rep though.”

“Namely?”

“Joseph Krebeck.” Justin minimized the internet search he was working on and pulled up the file picture of Joseph Krebeck and Amanda; the same photo that appeared in Martin’s book. “Excuse the crappy photo. Looks like it was taken with a telephoto lens.”

Cynthia stood up. Her playful tone suddenly turned very matter of fact. She walked across the room to her desk, unlocked her filing cabinet, rummaged through a series of files, and removed a photograph.

“What’s the matter, Cyn?” Justin asked, surprised by her sudden change of mood.

“Can you run a photo enhancement on the girl in your picture? Maybe clean up the resolution and enlarge it?”

Justin nodded. “Sure. Why? Something catch your eye?”

“Just do it, please.” The urgency in Cynthia’s voice was disturbing.

“Geez, woman. Don’t bust a seam on me! I’m working on it already! I did a comparative analysis earlier for Martin. Let me see now... where did I put that file? Oh yeah, here it is.”

Cynthia’s concentration was fixed on the computer screen. “You say this is a file photo from Martin’s book?”

“Yeah. So what?”

“And you’ve already made a preliminary match?”

“Yes. Dr. Prescott brought a family photo with her, which I compared to this one. It’s a definite match. Now would you mind telling me what’s going on? Why are you so interested in this girl?”

“In a second.” Cynthia handed Justin the photograph from her file. “Do you have the photograph the doctor provided?”

“Yeah. I scanned it into memory to compare it with Martin’s photo.”

“Can you scan in my photo and bring all three pictures up on the screen?”

“Pul-eeze,” Justin joked. “Is the pope Catholic?”

Cynthia tweaked his ear.

“Ouch,” he cried. “Man! Put you in a pair of leather pants and suddenly you’re a dominatrix.” He turned to Cynthia and winked. “Did I ever mention that’s a quality I find extremely appealing in the women I date?”

Cynthia couldn’t help but smile. She shook her head. “You’re never going to give up, are you?”

“Not while you can still wear those pants,” Justin replied. He watched the screen as he typed the instructions into the computer. In seconds, the three pictures appeared side by side on the screen.

“Good,” Cynthia said. “Now, young Einstein, can you cross-reference all three women for similarities?”

“Sure. Just let me enter a few instructions and here… we… go.”

Instantly, the images on the screen began to flash. Dozens of lines criss-crossed the faces in the three photographs, extracting points of reference from each respective picture, creating three-dimensional profiles which rotated in circles from left to right. The word VERIFYING blinked on the bottom of the screen.

“What’s happening?” Cynthia asked.

“Magic, my dear,” Justin replied. “Technological magic. A facial recognition program is scanning the images we input from each of the photos and is creating a biometric signature. After that, a mathematical algorithm will normalize the pictures and reconfigure them so that they’re the same size, shape, perspective, resolution, and so on.”

The rotating images stopped. The profiles of each woman stared straight ahead from the screen. A matrix of inter-connecting lines flashed over each picture. The word VERIFYING was replaced with IDENTIFYING.

“What you’re seeing now is the matcher program at work,” Justin explained. “The program is trying to compare the normalized signature of your picture with the subset of the normalized signatures from the first two photographs already in memory. It’s looking for characteristic similarities