Page 86 of Ground Truth

Serendipity had provided millions of witnesses.

At least one of those witnesses had to know this woman and what he’d come to believe was her little family.

If he had the time and the manpower, he could ask around and eventually he’d find her. He knew he would.

But his resources were limited.

He had neither time nor manpower.

So he improvised.

He’d called in a favor to get a good copy of the video from one of his contacts at the BBC. From the video, he’d isolated two high-resolution images of the woman.

The angles and the lighting were far from perfect. He refused to let perfect be the enemy of the good here.

So he cheated a bit.

He used sophisticated facial recognition software to compare the video images to Greta Campbell Reed’s US passport photo.

The software wasn’t perfect either. Not even close.

But it could narrow the margin of error and reduce the resources he’d need to find Greta.

While Jarsdel brewed a cup of tea, the software finished its work. He studied the results and frowned. Not as good as he’d hoped.

The confidence score was low. Which meant there was a chance of a false positive result.

But to his eye, there was a match between the image of the woman on the street and Reed’s passport photo. It was at least worth exploring.

Next he compared the two video images with Greta Reed’s Florida driver’s license photo.

This time the confidence score was slightly higher. But not as high as it should have been if the same woman was the subject in all four images.

Jarsdel had found a few old candid snaps of Greta Reed on social media. He fed those into the software, too.

Perhaps because of the lighting conditions and facial expressions, the final confidence score was more ambiguous than the first one.

Not the result he was hoping for.

After all the effort, the original question remained.

Was the woman at the wedding in the balloon video Greta Campbell Reed or not?

The short answer was maybe.

For Jarsdel’s purposes, assuming that the womanwasGreta Reed was the way to go. Much more likely to keep Hedinger off his back than assuming they werenotthe same person.

Hedinger wanted the woman to be Greta and he wanted her found and eliminated. Quickly.

“As quickly as possible” was Hedinger’s answer when Jarsdel had asked when the job should be completed.

Eliminating Greta now had been his second choice.

Jarsdel reset the software with new parameters. This time he ignored the woman and focused on the man standing with her.

He ran the man’s image through the US passport database.

The assumption he wanted to confirm was that they’d known each other before the balloon video. If he could identify the man, that might help to find the woman.

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