“The three outside there are from the FBI. I’m not sure about the one who was yelling, though. He may or may not be,” Kohan replied. He had been paying attention to them since they walked in.
Stephen didn’t turn to acknowledge Kohan. He walked straight to Becky. Becky thankfully recognized him, despite having had only a few occasions to talk to her. She took him aside before he reached her desk.
“What’s going on in there, Becky?”
“Walk with me,” Becky replied. She started walking to the cafeteria to get the coffee Alan had demanded.
“I think those two are from Homeland Security or something like that. I have no idea what they’re doing here. That’s all the front desk said before they were escorted to me. I first thought they were here on one of the usual information gathering sessions, or maybe a proposal for a collaboration. It sounds much more serious though.”
“Is this a routine visit?” Stephen asked hopefully.
“No. We have tons of government organizations stopping by here all the time. Atiq usually winds up having to talk to them because of all the data mining. But these two are definitely not here on a general fact-finding trip. It sounds like Atiq is in some kind of trouble.”
“Do you know what kind of trouble?”
“No. I was actually going to ask you if you knew what was going on,“ Becky replied. “They asked to see you, too, you know.”
“I heard.”
“Do you have any idea what this could be about?” she asked again.
He had quite a few ideas what this could be about. “No, I don’t know,” was all he said.
“Hmm. I better call Xiao’s admin to see if she knows what’s happening. Xiao will want to hear about this, if he hasn’t already.” Becky flipped open her cell phone, pressed a speed-dial button and was talking a moment later.
Stephen silently trailed behind her as she picked up the coffee.
“Xiao’s coming down, too,” she said finally, talking to Stephen.
“What do you think I should do?” Stephen asked.
“What do you mean? I think you should wait outside Atiq’s office until they’re ready for you. Do you want to grab some coffee too while we’re here?”
“No.”
When they returned to Atiq’s office, Becky disappeared inside with Alan’s coffee. Through the cracked doorway, Stephen caught Alan’s eye. In those few instants, Stephen felt and heard only the pulsing of his own heartbeat. For a moment, a deluge of panic convulsed through him. Then the door closed, and he was staring at Becky’s worried face.
He picked up his cell phone and sent a text message to Sebastin, but there was no reply. He called him. Still, no reply.
The panic was returning. He sent a text message to Molly. “Urgent. Go to the ACCL offices and find Sebastin. Tell him to come to the Ubatoo offices. Urgent.”
A moment later, his phone chirped with a phone call. Everyone turned to watch him. He could see by the number displayed that it was Molly, but he didn’t pick up. He composed a message back instead. “Can’t talk. Trouble. Homeland Security and FBI are here. Not sure why. Get Sebastin.”
A text reply came back: “On my way.” He hoped she meant that she was going to find Sebastin and that she wasn’t on her way to Ubatoo to see if he was okay.
Along with three men in FBI jackets, he sat outside Atiq’s office, motionless except for his knee bouncing up and down frantically. He didn’t notice the rest of the interns fixedly watching him instead of their computer screens.
Within thirty minutes, Molly had left her post at GreeneSmart, had found the directions to the ACCL offices, and was walking into their front doors. She texted a message back to Stephen: “At ACCL now.”
The office wasn’t what she expected; there was silence instead of the buzz of activity she had been anticipating. As soon as she walked in, she was ushered to a table by a man with a FBI coat on. She signed in, and was told to wait with the others for questioning.
“I don’t work here. I’m just here to see someone,” she explained to the person behind the makeshift desk.
“Okay, Miss. We’ll just be a few minutes. We just need to ask you a few questions and then you can get on out of here.”
Four minutes passed. “Look, I just need to give a message to Sebastin from my boyfriend. I really don’t know what’s going on here.” Everyone’s eyes were on her. She wondered how long they had been there. The man behind the desk looked at her, her drenched GreeneSmart uniform, and her clashing orange backpack slung over one shoulder and said, “Sebastin’s office is down the hall on the left. I think his assistant’s in his office. Go ahead on down.”
She left behind a hushed murmur of protest from the others waiting in the foyer, hurrying into the hallway before the guard could change his mind. She hastily walked the small corridor scanning the names on the plastic plaques until she found Sebastin’s office. A woman was standing helplessly as two men rummaged through the contents of the desk and shelves that had been haphazardly dumped on the floor.
“You’re looking for Sebastin?” the woman asked her, thankful for someone else to witness the disaster the two men were making. Both men in the room stopped their activity.
“Yes.”
“He’s not here. What can I help you with?” the woman said, moving toward her quickly and defiantly, happy for a moment’s reprieve from watching the other two men in the room.
“I need to get him a message. Do you know when he’ll be back?”
The two men kept staring.
“No. Sorry, I don’t. But you can leave your message with me.”
Molly surmised that there was no chance at this point it wouldn’t be read by the other two. She replied, in as even a tone as she could muster, “Please tell him to call Stephen the moment he gets back in. He’s waiting for his call.”
“Stephen who?” asked the lady. Molly wrote his name down. The lady showed no reaction.
“Does he have Stephen’s number?” the lady asked.
“Yes, he does. Do you know Stephen, by the way? Have you ever arranged any meetings between Sebastin and Stephen?”
“No. Sorry, the name and number don’t ring any bells.”
“You are Sebastin’s assistant, right?”
“Yes. I’m the assistant for the whole office. But I don’t know Stephen. Sorry.”
Though she knew she shouldn’t have, she lowered her voice and continued. Concerns about her own meeting last night were rising. “My name is Molly Byrne. I was invited to one of your meetings last night. It was in a house on Parkstone Way. Were you the one who arranged that meeting or was it someone else at ACCL?” The moment she said the words, her mouth went dry, and the turbulence of the blood pumping through her heart became deafening.
The lady’s voice thrust her back to reality. “No. It wasn’t me, and I don’t think anyone here arranged any meetings this week. I would definitely know about that. I don’t know of any facilities on Parkstone Way either. But you said it was in someone’s house?”
“Yes. A few men were there. I think some were from here. The e-mail I received inviting me to the meeting looked like it came from ACCL.”
“Sorry. I don’t know anything about it. But it does sound a bit odd. We’ve never held meetings in people’s houses. We have our own facilities or they’re held here. But, if you want, I can check if someone else here knows anything about it.”
Molly eyed the two men who had now gone back to looking at the few remaining files that weren’t on the floor. “Don’t bother right now. Looks like you have your hands full. I’ll come back later, another day.”
“That’d be best. Where did you say that you and Stephen were from again?”
She needed to think clearly. Just make something up, anything. “We just met Sebastin at a lecture he gave about ACCL. I work at GreeneSmart,” she said, clutching her nametag. She was hoping it was true that he gave talks, and that the uniform was enough to dispel any doubts of her story.
“Okay. I’ll make sure he gets this, that is if there’s anything left of his office once these two are done with it,” she said loudly, directing her comments to the two men behind her.
Molly walked back down the hall to find the same faces waiting in the same chairs. She walked past the desk where she had signed in earlier.
“Why don’t you stick around a few minutes, Miss? We still have a few questions to ask you,” a voice called out loudly.
She stopped in her tracks and turned around. She was about to say something about missing her shift at GreeneSmart or making up a lie about needing to pick up her kid from daycare, but said nothing instead. She sat down in the same chair she had risen from a few minutes earlier.
When she was certain nobody was taking note of her anymore, she opened her backpack and started typing on her phone to get a message to Stephen. “FBI here. Sebastin is not. Am stuck here for questioning. Are you ok?”
Before a message could come back, she found the man behind the makeshift desk staring directly at her. She put away her phone and her backpack and sat without moving. She listened for the phone to ring or for the beep of an incoming message, but neither came.
The man lied—it was not a few minutes. It was several hours before she was called back to Sebastin’s office for questioning. Those hours gave her ample opportunity to let her mind wander. How many people on EasternDiscussions had had similar encounters? The more she thought about where she was and the stories that were posted on her web site, the more agitated she rightly became. This was not a good place to have walked into. Sahim would certainly have a lot to post about tonight.
Back in Sebastin’s office, the two men who had been there during her last visit were gone. This time, only two women who looked like they may be twins were waiting in the room for her. No pleasantries, straight to business. One of them held the note on which she had scribbled Stephen’s name and number. But it was the one without the note who started the questioning. “Stephen Thorpe is your boyfriend? Let’s start there.”
For the second time that day, she was overwhelmed by the sound of her heartbeat as the blood was swiftly pulled down, leaving her face ashen white.
-WHAT I DID THIS SUMMER-
August 11, 2009.
Waiting outside Atiq’s office with three stoic guards arranged around the door and Xiao pacing back and forth was a nerve-racking experience. Stephen couldn’t imagine how it could possibly get any worse inside the room. Xiao was an accumulation of nerves and energy waiting for the moment to explode. Between taking calls on his cell phone and having his assistants sprint from their offices every few minutes to ask him questions or remind him of missed meetings, Xiao would glance expectantly at Atiq’s closed door. Other than Becky delivering lunch as she had been ordered, Atiq’s door hadn’t opened since he had arrived. For three hours, Stephen had done nothing but wait silently.
“You’re Stephen, correct?” Xiao asked, finally noticing him.
“Yes, sir.”
“They wanted to see you as well? Have you spoken to them yet?”
“No. I’m still waiting for them to call me in.”
“Do you have any idea what this is about?”
Stephen wanted to tell him about all the work he had been doing with ACCL and Watchlist. He was certain that, under absolutely any other circumstances, it would be incredibly well received. But this was not one of those circumstances. He simply replied, “No, sir.”
“You have no idea at all?” Xiao asked crossly.
Stephen had never spoken to Xiao before; most people at Ubatoo hadn’t. He couldn’t believe this was the first opportunity he was being given. What he would have done for even a few minutes of Xiao’s time on any other day. Again, he succinctly replied, “No, sir.” Even as he said it, he knew that someday this would be remembered by Xiao as the lie that it was.
Xiao continued to look at Stephen for a second longer, as if trying to divine whether he was telling the truth or not. The attempted divination was interrupted with Atiq’s office door opening. Xiao rushed in before anyone could step out and slammed the door behind him.
Within a minute, Rajive escorted Xiao out of the office and irritably called out Stephen’s name. Stephen stumbled up from his chair, foot and leg asleep from the hours he had been sitting motionless. He gave Becky a final look of desperation, and limped into the office. Becky shut the door ever so quietly behind him.
Stephen sat in the first available chair at a small conference table that Atiq had squeezed in his office. Neither Atiq, nor the other two, acknowledged his presence until Alan started talking.
“Do you know why you’re here?” Alan asked.
“I think so,” Stephen replied.
“Why don’t you give us an update on what you’ve been doing? I think we’d all like to hear it.”
“How much trouble am I in?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out.”
Stephen wasn’t sure where to start. He figured that if Alan and Rajive were here, chances were they probably already knew more about what he had been doing than Atiq did. He hadn’t told Atiq or Jaan anything about his latest project.
“I’ve been creating a tool that allows our users to see how likely they are to wind up on government watch lists.”
Once again, the room was shrouded in silence. The three others, who had been absently looking in three different directions, were now intently watching him. None revealed whether this was the information they were looking for.
Stephen waited for someone, anyone, to say something. Nobody did, so he continued, unsure of what else to do. “I’m not sure how many details you want. It’s basically a project for mining our users’ behaviors, with their permission of course, to determine how likely it is that they will be suspects that are monitored on some government list.”
“How far are you with this, Stephen?” Atiq asked. His lips were visibly quivering.
“I’ve generated the underlying association graph. The signals to propagate around it are sparse, but my hope is to bootstrap it with more basic mining and with more user-contributed information. The graph is pretty big. It’s going to take roughly 800–1,000 machines to process the billions of connections in it. I haven’t run it yet, though. There were a few bugs that slowed me . . .”
Alan was irritated with this blather. He interrupted loudly with a question, “Who else is working on this project with you?”
“Nobody yet. I’ve been trying to get interest, but so far no takers.”
“Who else knows about this project?” Atiq asked.
“I’ve only told Yuri and Kohan the details. I think I told Aarti a little bit, too—but not much. I don’t know who they’ve told.”
“How does Sebastin Munthe fit into all of this?” Rajive asked.
Stephen was a bit puzzled. “He’s the one who gave me the data to start with.”
“CL-72B, you mean?” Rajive said.
“CL-72B? I don’t know. It was a list of books from which I generated 5,000 names, that’s all I know. I don’t know if that’s CL-72B.”
“This work you are doing, this new project, it’s for Sebastin? It’s basically finding all the people who read those books?”
“No. No. This is my own project. I just did the little bit of work that Sebastin had for me for ACCL a while ago. I was just doing this as a research project, so I had something to show for the summer here.”
“What work did you do—” Rajive started.
He was cut off by Stephen. “Oh. Sorry. Sorry to interrupt. But I just wanted to let you know that it’s not about the people who read the books, by the way—that was just the seed set. From there I looked at their common online behavior—searches, web site visits, and so on. I found the people who had shared interests from the initial set of people who read some of the books on the book list that Sebastin gave me and expanded it greatly—”
“You did all of this yourself?” Alan interrupted.
“Yes. Why?”
> Rajive sat quietly, taking it all in. This is all it takes, one person.
Alan continued. “Let’s get back to the work you did for Sebastin.”
Stephen gave the details of his analyses and the results he had found. About how the first list that Sebastin had given him was likely comprised of two interspersed parts, the first a set of random books, and the second the set of books that were probably of actual interest. Rajive shook his head side to side in disbelief, as he sunk back in his chair. All the hard work and planning was torn to bits because some kid thought a list of books “just felt stupid.” Stephen justified all the extra work he had done for Sebastin because he couldn’t convince himself of the importance of books by themselves. His audience listened without a word.
Stephen was feeling a bit more confident now. He was discussing material that he knew inside out. Surely, they could see he did his job well, that whenever he was asked to help someone, he did it wholeheartedly, and gave his best. Finally, he told them about the extensions to the projects that Sebastin had asked for in the restaurant. Along with this, though, he had to admit that he had not yet had time to complete that request. Stephen closed his review by asking if they would like to see all the lists he had generated for Sebastin—as long as it was okay with Atiq to show them. Atiq consented in utter resignation.
Stephen walked to Atiq’s computer, as Atiq instinctively recoiled away. Stephen opened the e-mails he had sent to Sebastin. Together, all four scrolled through the lists quickly, with Rajive taking ample notes.
“Did you do any other work with Sebastin? Do you know what he was going to do with these lists?” asked Rajive.
“No, that’s all the work I did. I was going to do more, but I ran out of time. As for Sebastin, I think he was going to contact the people on the list and arrange meetings to ensure they were aware their actions were getting them in trouble,” Stephen replied. He hoped that was a satisfactory answer. He didn’t want to tell them about the meeting Molly had attended unless he had to.
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