Direct Action by John Weisman Page B

She understood some of his emotional core. He was a case officer—had been for more than seventeen years. And case officers tended to compartmentalize everything in their lives. They had to, because most of the time they lived lies.
There was only a one letter difference between lives and lies. What a difference that v made. It wasn’t that Tom lied to her, either. It was that he compartmentalized her—as if she were stored in a drawer somewhere in his brain, and when he wasn’t out doing what he did, he’d open the drawer and let her out.
There was always a part of him that was, well, a part apart. She’d never sensed the sort of whole-soul commitment she’d always felt marriage deserved. He said he loved her. And he did. She understood that. But whenever she brought up the M-word, he’d shy away. Retreat behind his damnable case officer’s emotional bulwarks and raise the drawbridge.
And then he’d resigned from CIA and moved to Paris. Abruptly. And not explained why—at least, not satisfactorily so far as MJ was concerned. And now he wanted her to give everything up and move to Paris with the possibility that it would all blow up? Sans commitment? Merci, monsieur, mais non.
Second, there was the current war on terror in which America was engaged. MJ felt that given the crises that came one after another like aftershocks, she wanted to perform some tangible service that would help the U.S. prevail. Working at C-PIG—despite Mrs. SJ—provided that feeling of commitment.
But the unresolved personal situation left a big hole in her heart. God, how she missed him.
To compensate, she threw herself headlong into her work. What Marilyn Jean and her group did was spend their days perusing news photographs from the dozens of agencies that distributed pictures to newspapers and wire services all across the globe. The analysts would use a series of databases to evaluate the people in the photographs. They would first access the Department of Homeland Security’s Terrorist Threat Integration Center database. TTIC, as it was known, held six hundred terabytes of information in its direct-access files, including just over ten thousand photographs of known terrorists.
If TTIC came up dry, MJ would move on to the CIA’s BigPond photo database. There, she had access to photographs obtained from identity cards, passport and visa applications, driver’s licenses, as well as clandestinely taken surveillance and countersurveillance photographs. There were pictures obtained during case officer and agent debriefings, and footage covertly sluiced from government cameras in half a dozen national capitals across the globe. If something clicked, she’d play with the photograph using a secure program called IdentaBase. IdentaBase was one of CIA’s latest VEIL—Virtual Exploitation and Information Leveraging—programs. It allowed MJ not only to access the entire range of national security photographic databases, but its features also included a hugely sophisticated, computerized version of the old police IDenta kits, in which predrawn features—noses, ears, hairlines, face types, and so on—are matched part by part by witnesses.
The result in the old days was a composite drawing of a suspect. VEIL programs went a lot further. MJ could automatically match templated facial characteristics with the TTIC and BigPond photo databases—hundreds of thousands of mug shots and surveillance photos of known or suspected terrorists. Roughly a third of those pictures were new additions to BigPond, collected by CIA over the twenty-five post-9/11 months from its stations and bases worldwide. The rest were file photos from half a dozen other agencies—DIA, NSA, FBI, and the National Reconnaissance Office among them—that dated back as far as the 1960s.
The software made its identifications based on 127 separate and distinct points of recognition. Whenever MJ found something in the photographs she believed to be significant, she would flag the