9. Battle Angel
My eyes flicked from one perspective of the girl-knight to the other. “Joan of Arc?” I suggested. Her face brought to mind the famous illustration of Joan by Albert Lynch.
“Alita the Battle Angel,” said Katz. “The big eyes, right?”
I made a neutral grunt. I’d heard of the movie.
“And there’s the triple cross,” she murmured.
“I think it’s a papal cross,” I said. “But upside down.”
“Does that make it satanic?”
“Not necessarily. The cross of Peter the Apostle is inverted to symbolize his humility and sacrifice. The Church considers Peter the first Bishop of Rome, and the popes since then his successors. But Saint Peter’s cross has only one bar. I’m not sure what this one is supposed to symbolize.”
She gazed at the picture, her head tilted. “Look, there are more.” She pointed here and there.
The skull that crowned the tree had an inverted three-barred cross on its forehead. The knight in the motorcycle helmet wore one on a chain around the neck.
“Oh, shit!” said Katz, suddenly.
It came to me a second later. “Did Lohman ride a motorcycle?”
“Yes and no,” said Katz. “He has an old hog that he picked up cheap from a customer of his auto shop. He has a picture of himself posing with it on the PD alumni website. Neighbors said he only took it out a few times. He never joined a club.”
I studied the picture. It was dense with symbolism, unsettling, strangely compelling. Celtic runes and Greek letters emerged from tree bark, wolf fur, chain-mail. The knighted biker. The armored angel, pointing. I need you.
“So, someone posted this picture just for Lohman,” I mused. “Orders from an angel to a loyal, valorous knight who’ll get his just reward.”
Katz nodded. Her eyes were bright with excitement. “A personal message on a site where everyone’s anonymous and messages are there for all to see, as Lohman said. Nobody commented on this picture—probably no one else knew what to make of it. And he said that’s mine, about the triple cross, like the angel uses different symbols to communicate with other people.”
“It’s well done, don’t you think?” I said. “Artistic.”
“Artistic and … strange. And I’ve seen something like it before. It was another case.” She spread her fingers on the laptop’s touch pad, expanding the image until it became pixelated. She moved it around. “See where one object crosses another, like the angel’s fingers around the cross? The foreground object merges into the background like they grew out of each other. It’s like … frost crystals on glass.”
I saw what she meant. The brushwork, if it was brushwork at all, made a curious feather-like pattern. The effect was visible as blurring when the picture was at a normal size. When zoomed, elements of the picture merged with branching filaments.
Katz glanced at me, her eyes gleaming in the monitor’s glow. “I don’t think it’s a photo of hand-painted art or done in any of the big-name graphic design packages—I’ve had to examine lots of pictures made using them. This is pretty distinctive. I’ll ask the guys in the photo lab to look at it.”
“It’s strange in another way, too,” I said. “There’s a mashup of symbols from different cultures and periods. A guy like Lohman might know the papal cross, but probably not the rest of it.”
“Maybe it only mattered what it meant to him.”
“But would this tell him to kill a specific priest in Philadelphia?”
Katz wrinkled her nose. “Dunno.”
I leaned back in my chair, folded my arms, conscious that I’d used a similar pose with Lohman. Habit. “If this picture was a trigger, a call to action, whoever sent it must have primed him already.”
“With earlier messages, you mean. Lohman did say ‘pictures’, plural. There was the floor plan, at least.”
I nodded. “Can your system trace who posted this one?”
Katz gave that sideways quirk of her lips. “Pythia already tried to trace all the postings, but it only unmasks if it’s allowed to. With this one …” She moved the cursor over the Anonymous tag.
A small notice popped up, all initials and numbers, gobbledygook to me.
Katz interpreted. “It says the picture was posted to the BetterDead server in Russia from a relay in the US. It arrived in the US through the Tor network—the free privacy network. The Tor node it arrived from was in Austria. So, from Austria to the US to Russia—that’s all it could discover. Sometimes Pythia can trace a message through the Tor network, because the paths use compromised nodes. Compromised when some agency got a warrant or FISA order to tap them, and the node administrators were sloppy. But a pro set up this one. The Bureau would have to ask the NSA for help.” She glanced warily at me. “But they almost never help.”
“The pictures themselves might give us a clue, if there’s a history of them.”
“Maybe. And maybe there’s a fast way to dig up the history.” She brought up a chat window, selected a name, then typed into it.
eKatz: Alex, you there?
A moment later, the chat window went ’ting’.
Alex: Yasu k bisous, mia Katze
Katz quirked her lips in apparent annoyance. She typed while I tried to work out what language Alex was using.
eKatz: Got company and need help - something urgent. Can u talk?
Alex: Ooh fili, un mignon/ne elpizo!!!
eKatz: Technical help
Alex: Whatever you desire. Positions or safety?
“God damn, Alex,” muttered Katz. She gave the ‘Call’ button an angry click.
I suspected Alex had strayed from the Bureau’s policy on appropriate communication.
The video window popped up. It showed a glass wall and a white bookcase with a toy panda bear on one shelf. Katz looked back from a frame in the chat app’s corner, with me beside her, shaggy-haired and stubbly. Then the view swiveled and Alex slid into it. When the picture steadied, I regretted my tweedy jacket and horrible shirt.
Alex, framed by an office whiteboard, was jaw-droppingly beautiful.
Katz said, “Dr. Arklow, meet Dr. Alexandra Evangelos. She runs Pythia Tech Ops. Alex, this is James Arklow, a registered consultant I’m working with. He has a TS clearance.”
Dr. Evangelos—Alex—parted shapely red lips in a wide grin. Her teeth were perfect and as white as the display could make them. Her dark hair fell in a rippling cascade across the shoulders of a shimmery blouse.
“Wonderful! I’m so happy to meet you, Dr. Arklow. Please, how can I help?” Her voice was like molten chocolate. I could not doubt her happiness to meet me and desire to help. Her accent was neutral—North-Central perhaps—though irrationally, I’d expected something exotic.
I cleared my throat, waggled some fingers. “The pleasure is mine.”
“It’s work, Alex,” said Katz, frowning. “I’m sending you a link.” She dragged the link to Lohman’s angel picture into the chat.
Alex turned her gaze to the side as she studied the picture on another monitor. That afforded me a view of her face in part profile and of the curve of her neck. She might be in her early thirties. She might have been created yesterday from olive butter and ambrosia.
“Oh, it is a most unlovely thing,” murmured Alex.
“See the three-barred crosses?” said Katz. “Can you train a Pythia to look for other images with that feature? If you zoom in, the picture elements merge distinctively, too.”
Alex studied the picture a minute longer. “The cross will be easy,” she said, her voice low and resonant. “Vikram will have a recognizer trained in an hour. It will take longer to train for the boundary effect.”
“Thanks, Alex, you’re an angel,” said Katz. After goodbyes, she resumed scrolling through the endless web page at blurring speed.
I had a feeling it would be a long afternoon, and that I’d be grateful for the eyedrops.