Charles interrupted. “Everybody be quiet, we have work to do.”
“Charles, what’s happening?” I said.
“We have to track the men who kidnapped George, and since Stanton locked the rooms we have to do it here, over the network.”
Tenzig sneered. “Why don’t we let Dean Stanton and security find him? It’s their jobs.”
“They’re not looking for him.”
A chorus of arguments answered him. I didn’t say anything, and Ladhi looked at me, pleading for me to explain.
Charles continued. “They’re not looking for him because Stanton wants to see what we’ll do. Like the accident at Yosemite.”
I could believe that Stanton had rigged George’s kidnapping, but the question I needed answered was, Why? Why would she do it? Especially so out in the open like this?
“It’s a test,” I said. Every minute of our days were planned and scheduled, we were watched so closely—and even the accidents were planned and monitored.
Out of curiosity, I called up the local news, an online site that gave a scroll of cultural events, residential information, and security alerts for the island. I went over the last hour of news—nothing about a kidnapping, no alerts to be on the lookout for men matching the kidnappers’ descriptions. This was totally out of any kind of public awareness.
“You’re all crazy,” Tenzig said. “And you’re going to get in more trouble than you already are, if not kicked out of the school entirely. I don’t want any part of it.” He pushed a button, and his box went dark and vanished.
“That’s okay, we didn’t need him anyway,” Angelyn muttered. “He’s just worried about how all this is going to look on his record.”
“I can’t look at every security-vid feed myself,” Charles said. “I’m tapping each of you in to a likely security feed and sending security pictures of the kidnappers from the hotel. We need to sync up the facial recognition program to go over the last hour or so of footage, to track them from when they left here. They’re probably at one of a handful of addresses—I’ve found their residences and where they work—so we’ll check those first. If you get a hit, tell me.”
“Can you bring Ladhi in on this so she can help?” I asked, and a moment later Ladhi’s handheld beeped.
We got to work. Charles sent me half a dozen links, and the boxes opened up on my screen. They all looked the same, security-vid views of streets and entranceways, gray sidewalks and redbrick walls, all well lighted. Even this late, the streets were crowded, partygoers and night owls bustling. Everyone seemed to be wearing coats and hats that hid their faces and made them hard to identify. But I didn’t have to see the faces—we were looking for George, with two men who matched a certain description. The facial recognition program started isolating traits and rejecting mismatches. It still seemed to go slowly, even with all of us covering different video feeds.
I started with the most recent footage and worked backward, going through each camera, helping the software by rejecting near misses. Then the handheld pinged a match, and the vid showed three bulky male figures, two holding firmly to the one in the middle. They turned the corner and left my view.
I hit pause and called out, “There, I think I got him, on feed, um…” I recited the ID on the security feed.
“Got it,” Charles said. “That’s at Fifty-second and Broadway. Angelyn, that’s moving into your territory, can you find them?”
“Looking, looking … Yes. I have them. They entered a building on Fifty-second, twenty minutes ago, I think.”
“And there we go. We’ve got them.”
“We can call security to go find him, now,” Elzabeth said. “Right?”
“Because that worked so well the last time,” I muttered.
“We’ll do better than that,” Charles said. “We’ll find a way to get him out of there ourselves.”
Angelyn said, “Can we, I don’t know, hire our own security?”
“You going to pay for it?” Charles said.
“I’ll pay for it,” Elzabeth said.
“I don’t think that’ll be necessary. We’re on an island that’s a tourist resort, aren’t we? There ought to be all kinds of services we can send to disrupt the kidnappers and give George a chance to escape.”
“Assuming he’s smart enough to take the opportunity,” I said.
Charles’s expression had turned pensive. “Good point. We need to find a way to call him. We don’t have to mount a rescue, just cause a disruption.”
He was in thinking mode, lips pursed, scratching his chin.