by David Duffy
* * *
When I got back to my car, four teenaged boys were eying it appreciatively from the sidewalk. I grinned at them as I unlocked the door, and they grinned back, elbowing each other and pointing, before heading off to wherever they were going. I got in, undid the roof latches, and pushed the button to retract the top. The thirty-year-old engine started on the turn of the key. I closed the door. The Potemkin was ready to cast off.
The car gets a lot of attention. A bright red Cadillac Eldorado, built in 1975, the last year before emission controls, it has a white ragtop, red leather interior, and the largest V8 Detroit ever squeezed into a production-line chassis. It puts out 365 horses at 4,400 RPM. Gas mileage approaches single digits, but I don’t drive that much, so I tell myself that my carbon footprint is still smaller than most SUV owners’.
I love the Eldo because of its size and swagger. America’s persona at the height of the Cold War, when Nixon and Brezhnev tried to one-up each other in the eyes of the rest of the world and demonstrate that their system was the Chosen One. The Eldo was one way America stated, with emphasis, We are winning. I was on the other side at the time, a sworn enemy of the Main Adversary and everything it stood for, but I had been captivated by the pure ostentation of the car ever since I first saw its picture in a magazine. Then, as now, I’m easily intrigued by things American.
Buying one the first time I lived here, in 1977 as a junior officer in the KGB’s New York rezindentura, was both impractical and a quick way to end my career. When I returned in 1993 as a private citizen, I had no such constraints. I found one in Florida, with low mileage and no rust, flew to Tampa that afternoon, and drove it home. On the way, I christened it Potemkin, after the mutinous battleship made famous by Eisenstein’s classic film. More Russian humor.
I took the FDR downtown, got off at Water Street, and was immediately mired in traffic. Driving any car in New York is silly, but driving a boat the size of the Potemkin is a juvenile indulgence, one that almost makes up for a childhood without toys. I crawled the three blocks to my garage, raised the top, and reluctantly turned the Eldo over to José, the day manager, who takes care of it as if it were his own. Then I went up to the office to learn what my ex-wife had been up to for the last twenty years.
CHAPTER 5
Everything was quiet except for the hum of air-conditioning and computer fans, and Pig Pen. We rent the twenty-eighth floor of a nondescript steel-and-glass tower at Pine and Water. It’s about twenty times more space than I need, but Foos and the Basilisk require room, mainly the Basilisk.
The space is actually cheap. We got a great deal on a long-term lease in the wake of 9/11 when no one wanted to work downtown. I already lived on South Street, so I looked at the location as a plus. Foos lives in Brooklyn and never goes above Fourteenth Street, unless it’s an emergency. We’ve got million-dollar views of Wall Street, New York Harbor, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Statue of Liberty as a bonus.
I made my way through the banks of computer servers that separate the reception area from the rest of the space. Twelve floor-to-ceiling rows, each forty feet long with four-foot aisles in between. They sit on a raised floor under which run miles of cable and supplemental cooling ducts. Sometimes, when I want to lose myself in a problem, I pace the aisles in the dim light and the white noise of the fans. It’s a kind of alternative reality, a desert canyon of electronic intelligence. When I sense the machines trying to speak to me, I turn on the lights or leave.
Behind the server farm is a large open area with two seating arrangements—one organized like a living room, the other a big conference table and a dozen chairs. Around the perimeter are a dozen glassed-in offices and conference rooms, one each for me, Foos, and Pig Pen, and the rest for visitors we rarely have. Foos has converted a second office into sleeping quarters. He says he likes to work nights, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he moved in permanently. I prefer to leave work behind at the end of the day.
“Hello, Russky,” a large African gray parrot squawked from the office he calls home. “Pizza?”
His favorite food, which Foos indulges him, and he thinks everyone else should follow suit. He primarily likes the crust, but lately he’s developed a taste for anchovies. Lombardi’s in SoHo is his favorite.
“No dice. You’re already overweight, Pig Pen,” I said. “Not good for a parrot. Makes you look like a vulture with a dye job.”
He considered that for a moment, realization dawning that I wasn’t carrying the flat cardboard box that contains culinary nirvana. He muttered something I couldn’t catch, maybe a new word he was working on, and kept one eye on me while he gnawed, if that’s what parrots do, on the metal mesh of the cage that encloses his office.
“Pizza!” he tried again. He’s nothing if not persistent. Parrots don’t have lips, of course, which makes p a difficult letter to pronounce, something Foos didn’t consider when he named Pig Pen after the late drummer of his favorite rock band. “Pizza” comes out more like “rizza,” but we have no trouble understanding what he wants.
“Pig Pen Parrot picks a peck of pickled parrot pizza?” I said.
That got me an angry one-eyed glare. He can’t wrap his beak around the tongue twister, and it annoys him no end. I feel guilty teasing him, but it does serve to get him off the subject.
“Where’s the boss?” I asked.
“Boss Man. Pizza.” Pig Pen has a vocabulary approaching a hundred fifty words, to which he adds about a word every other week. He’s efficient. “Pizza” does double-duty for lunch and dinner. “Pancakes”—“rancakes”—serves for breakfast.
“Anything going on?”
“Twenty minutes, Lincoln, forty minutes, Holland.”
“GWB?”
“Flat tire, upper deck.”
“Mass transit?”
He gave me his “who cares?” look and went back to chewing the cage.
Foos furnished Pig Pen’s office with two large Ficus trees, some potted plants, three perches, a swing, and an electric fountain that burbles water over a copper plate and some rocks. He has a view of the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges. He also has a radio. It took him a day to learn how to work it and a week to determine his favorite station—1010 WINS. He pays special attention to “Traffic and Transit on the Ones,” although for reasons he’s yet to confide, he’s much more concerned with the state of bridges and tunnels than subways and buses. The day he learns to pronounce Kosciuszko, I’m putting him up for auction on eBay.
“Thanks for the update,” I said, heading for my office. “Do svidaniya.”
“Ciao…”
Language skills are my contribution to his education.
“… cheapskate.”
“What?” I turned back.
“No pizza—cheapskate,” he said, the feathers on the back of his neck ruffling as his head nodded up and down. I swear he grins when he knows he’s come out with a zinger. I left him to his self-congratulation.
My office is in the northeast corner, with a view up the East River and out to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (Pig Pen knows that one). I can also see the roof of the building I live in two blocks away, where sometimes my well-endowed upstairs neighbor, Tina, sunbathes topless on her roof deck, oblivious to the walls of windows that surround her. Unfortunately, she’s happily married to a former backup linebacker for the New York Giants, so the best I can do is look on from afar, with the help of a pair of Steiner 20 × 80 military binoculars.
Tina wasn’t out, so I checked my e-mail. A message from Foos with the subject “SLUMMING?” It contained a link to a series of pages containing the information the Basilisk had generated on the Mulhollands. I went to the kitchen and made a grilled cheese sandwich from the cheddar and multigrain bread I found there. I grabbed a beer and returned to my office, ignoring the parrot’s imploring calls for sustenance. One of the things I miss about Russia is the beer, which may not be the best in the world, but it has a distinctive flavor I got used to. Most American beer is tasteless. I buy th
e occasional microbrew, but mostly I drink Czech pilsners—Pilsner Urquell or Budweiser Budvar, sold as Chechvar in the United States because of a trademark dispute with the Busch behemoth in St. Louis. They’re dry, they have a lot of flavor without being too hop-heavy, and they taste something like home.
I looked at the Basilisk’s work while I ate. Plenty of information on Mulholland himself, but mostly what you’d expect—houses (New York, Oyster Bay, Palm Beach), investments, although most of his wealth was in FTB stock, memberships, charitable boards, and so on. He and his wife had a housekeeper, Marisa Cabarillas, living with them. The butler must live elsewhere. He garaged a Maybach limousine and a Range Rover down the block, to the tune of more than two grand a month. He traveled to Europe three times in the last year on a Gulfstream V leased by FirstTrust, stopping in London, Frankfurt, and Zurich each trip. In January, he’d used his black American Express card to purchase two suits at Huntsman, six shirts at Turnbull & Asser, a bracelet for the missus at Asprey, and a Mantegna drawing at Conalghi. The Basilisk told me where he stayed and where he ate. I could’ve had a record of his phone calls, but it didn’t seem necessary. One interesting fact—in the last two months, he’d moved several million dollars into a brokerage account at Morgan Stanley. He’d been a big—make that very big—buyer of FTB stock. Those purchases were all badly under water now, and if he’d been buying on margin, he was almost certainly suffering a credit squeeze of his own.
Eva Mulholland lived at 211 East Seventieth Street, in an apartment that set someone back $5,250 a month—Dad, no doubt. Her occupation was student. She had $1,489 in her checking account. Her credit card charges indicated an affinity for the restaurants of Tribeca and the boutiques of SoHo and the Meatpacking District. She’d spent Christmas in the Caribbean and spring break in London and Moscow. Being a Mulholland wasn’t all bad.
Not all good, either. Eva had a record—a guilty plea to a marijuana possession charge two years earlier and another to shoplifting three months ago. Two suspended sentences—and two stints in rehab. Before the first bust, she had three thousand dollars deposited into her checking account every month. Electronic transfer from her father’s account. Since she got out of the detox center on Riverside Drive that had set her folks back sixty-five thousand dollars (for the first visit), her allowance had been cut by two-thirds. Dad’s idea of a tight leash.
The thing most of us don’t think about—or don’t want to think about—is how much information we generate on ourselves every day. Our appetites, our preferences, our habits and routines, our families, jobs, and finances. Most everything we do leaves a trail. Every phone call, e-mail, Web search, cash withdrawal, purchase, bill payment, trip, car rental, insurance claim, you name it. The trick is connecting up all those data points, among the billions and billions of others permanently stored in data-miners’ databases, to put together a profile of a person or tell you what someone is up to. That’s what the Basilisk does better than anything out there. I know. I use everything out there.
Having dispensed with the warm-up acts, I turned to the main event. The file on Felicity Mulholland was illuminating—up to a point. She’d married Rory in 2004. If I were being spiteful, I might have expected her to have led the Upper East Side trophy-wife life since then. I was wrong. No charges at Madison Avenue boutiques. No lunches at overpriced French restaurants where nobody pays attention to the food. A few evenings out—concerts at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center—but not many. She paid regular, not overly frequent, attention to her hair, face, and nails. She’d taken a Christmas trip to London, flying coach, but stayed only one night at an innocuous hotel in Hammersmith, and flown home the next day. Paid cash for the airline ticket. No shopping, no theater, no restaurants. She made a similar trip in February. Polina and I had lived in London. My first foreign posting with the KGB. She’d never shown any interest in Hammersmith.
Before she married Mulholland, Felicity used the last name Kendall and lived in a rental on West Fifty-eighth Street for two years. Before that, she didn’t appear to live anywhere for three. Before that, she lived in a studio apartment in Queens, near LaGuardia Airport—a single woman, no Eva, no kids of any kind. All of which was accounted for by the fact that the real Felicity Kendall died when she was struck by a drunk driver on Queens Boulevard in 1997. Polina picked up her identity in 2000. The Basilisk came up empty on Polina Barsukova, which suggested she was already using another name when she arrived here. Hard to avoid concluding that Polina had something to hide. Question was, from whom? My leading candidate would be husband number two. Jealousy was part of his makeup, he believed firmly in getting even, and he had a reputation for cruelty and ruthlessness that I knew to be one hundred percent well deserved.
I’d heard they’d split, but that was ten years ago. I’d also heard she’d been carrying on an affair with Kosokov. They both dropped from sight after 1999. Guess I’d assumed they’d gone off together, to the extent I’d thought about it. I’d been exiled, after all, partly by her, partly by the Cheka, partly self-imposed. I might not even be thinking about any of this today without Ivanov’s item on Kosokov this morning. That was another factor to be considered.
A loud arrrr-oooo-gahhhh reverberated through the space. Our doorbell—Foos’s contribution to office ambience. He likes to hit it on the way in. Pig Pen called out “Pizza!” in response. A few moments later, the hulk of a six-foot-five mountain man dressed in black filled my door, holding a half-chewed slice.
“Man, you are definitely hangin’ in the wrong ’hood,” the boom-box voice boomed.
The first time you meet him—maybe a few times after that—Foos is an intimidating sight. For openers, he’s two hundred sixty pounds big. The weight is evenly distributed. He’s not fat, but no one would call him muscled either. His preferred form of exercise is walking to his next meal. He’s in his midforties, with a sharp face and black eyes—but unlike Mulholland’s, his sparkle with curiosity and humor. A large, pointed nose runs left to right as you look at him. His mouth opens mostly on the right side, adding to his lopsided appearance. He wears heavy black rectangular glasses with chunky lenses and carries a thick mane of black curly hair that cascades around his shoulders, arms, and chest. If he ever cut it, the barber would need a pickup to haul away the clippings. Everything about him shouts eccentric, if not downright strange, and in his case, you can judge a book by its cover. Some people march to their own drummer—Foos has his own rock group. The thing I can never figure is, whenever he shows up with a new girlfriend—roughly every other month—she looks like she stepped out of a Ralph Lauren ad. He, of course, treats this like it’s perfectly natural. As Artie Shaw once observed, women aren’t attracted to Mick Jagger by his looks. Artie should know—he married Ava Gardner and Lana Turner.
“Didn’t see many of your friends up there, that’s true,” I said. “Bernie asked me to help. Mulholland’s his biggest client.”
“Ah, the Cardinal Consigliere. That explains it. He knows all the best people.”
“He helps pay the rent.”
“True enough, much as I don’t like to admit it. But you and Bernie have all you’re getting from me. If there’s any justice, that scumbag will do at least five years.”
I hadn’t been completely honest with Mulholland about my business. I do have a partner. We have a handshake deal that I’ll never disclose his involvement. In fact, our entire partnership is based on a handshake, which can be nerve-racking since Foos is unpredictable, to put it mildly. “Scumbag” is the moniker he applies to most of our clients, especially the successful ones, his views unmitigated by his own fortune. But he has special reason to dislike Mulholland.
Foos, or Foster Klaus Helix as his birth certificate says, is a certified genius and certainly paranoid. Maybe all geniuses are a little wacko, I don’t know, he’s the only one I’ve ever met. He grew up in Palo Alto and dropped out of high school, but by the time he was twenty, he had a Ph.D. in mathematics and computer science from Stanford. He came
east to take a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the place Einstein hung his hat for thirty years. He got interested in relational data, as he calls it—what one thing can tell you about another, what two things can tell you about a third, what three things can tell you about a thousand. That led him to the work being done by companies like ChoicePoint and Seisint and LexisNexis, which maintain some fifty billion data files on virtually every American—people in other countries, too—which they make available to marketers looking for new ways to sell people things they don’t need and government agencies looking for new ways to keep an eye on the body politic under the pretext of fighting crime, terrorism, or whatever evil comes along to supplant terrorism. State security by another name.
Fifty billion is a lot of files to organize, search, correlate, and compare, and Foos found each company’s software lacking in some respect. He set out to write a program that would do better than any one of them—or all three combined. He succeeded. He started his own company and soon had a client list that included half the Fortune 500 and several hundred federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies—and FirstTrustBank.
Foos was more naive in those days. He was horrified to discover FTB was using his technology to determine whom to bombard with junk mail and telephone marketing offers for new “free credit cards with special introductory interest rates” that jumped to eighteen percent after the first six months. He cut them off. FTB, which had a contract, took him to court—and won. At which point, Foos—I thought the nickname referred to the foosball game every dot-com company had to have, but he swears he’s never played—had an epiphany, not unlike the men who worked on the Manhattan Project. He’d invented his software because it could solve problems better than what came before. In the right hands, it could be used for a lot of beneficial purposes—catching a serial killer, for example, or shutting down a financial scam before it sucked in too many victims. In the wrong hands, it was downright, deeply, totally invasive. Of course, it was impossible to keep it out of the wrong hands—those belonging to men like Mulholland. Foos sold his business, pocketing $100 million on the deal. Then he went to work on a new and improved version—on the grounds that he needed to keep track of what the bastards were up to—which he dubbed Basilisk after the mythological beast, the most poisonous creature on the planet. There’s a painting of one in our reception area—rooster’s head and legs, body of a hawk, a dragon’s scaly wings, and a serpent’s pointed tail. It’s damned ugly. He also started a foundation, endowed with half the proceeds from the sale. STOP, or Stop Terrorizing Our Privacy, has the self-appointed mission of monitoring, exposing, and thwarting the data-mining activities of marketers, advertisers, data collectors, cops, spies, lawyers, bureaucrats, and anyone else Foos sets his sights on.