by J. G. Sandom
“But why?”
“I don’t know. It’s too hot to think. Can’t you turn down the heat? Jesus Christ! It’s like a fucking sauna in here.”
Just then the lights dimmed and there was a small ping as the microwave oven came on. They both turned toward the main room. The lights flashed again as Decker dashed toward the curtained partition. Every device in the loft seemed to have switched on automatically.
The sound system blared. Have a holly, jolly Christmas. The blender and food processor whirred. It’s the best time of the year. The garbage disposal coughed and churned, coughed and churned as the lights on the Christmas tree started exploding like firecrackers. I don’t know if there’ll be snow, but have a cup of cheer...They watched helplessly as the toaster glowed red, overheated and suddenly burst into flames. Fire licked at the cabinet, found the tip of a dish cloth and started to climb up the wall.
They both ran toward the kitchen. As Decker passed the nativity scene, the blue bulb in the manger popped like a shot. A spark set the hay in the stable on fire. Barbie’s hair caught ablaze, Ken fell between the donkey and oxen, started melting, just as the troll doll of the Christ child caught fire.
Decker picked up the floor mat by the kitchen sink and began to flail at the nativity scene. Lulu grabbed a fire extinguisher from a wall rack nearby. As she sprayed bursts of suppressant at the foot of the flames, sparks leapt from the wall sockets. The lights glowed again and went out. It was suddenly eerily silent. The music had stopped. So had all the appliances. There was only the noise of the fire extinguisher as Lulu finished spraying the last of the flames.
It was pitch black now, save for the warm red and green glimmer of Christmas lights bleeding in through the window at the far end of the loft.
Decker and Lulu groped their way toward the balcony. Smoke filled the air and they were both coughing by the time they’d made it outside.
It was bitterly cold.
Perhaps it was the smoke which still stung their eyes, or the adrenaline that pumped through their veins, but neither of them heard the soft shuffle of movement right at their feet. Nor did they notice—as Lulu moved toward the railing, as she took a step back—the lumbering gait of her Dino-Bot...until it was simply too late.
Lulu tripped on the dinosaur. She teetered and fell. She reached out for the railing but missed, and then slipped with a startled scream over the edge.
CHAPTER 26
Wednesday, December 11
Decker reached out and grabbed her as Lulu slipped over the edge, swinging her back onto the balcony at the very last moment.
The Dino-Bot roared. It opened its mouth and moved a step closer.
Decker set Lulu aside and stomped on the toy dinosaur with the heel of his boot. The Dino-Bot tried to get up. It lurched to its feet as Decker stomped on it, again and again and again, until the robot was a mass of broken circuits and green plastic skin, and its red eyes had dimmed.
Lulu looked down at what was left of her dinosaur. “Dino,” she said. She began to lean forward, her hand reaching out for the Dino-Bot, when she suddenly straightened. She flew back to the railing.
It was as if she’d been stung or shocked by a taser.
She pulled out her iPhone. It was vibrating in her hand with the anxious stutter of insect wings. Lulu stared down at the device as if she had never seen a smartphone before. Then she looked back at Decker and put the phone to her ear. “Hello?” she began.
“May I speak to John Decker, please?” It was a man’s voice.
“It’s for you,” she mouthed quietly.
Decker shook his head, whispering back, “I’m not here.”
“He’s not here,” she replied. “Who is this?”
For a moment there was silence. Then, Lulu heard a click and the words, “I’m not here.” They were Decker’s own words, the ones he’d only just whispered, except now they were amplified. The phrase was repeated again and again at various speeds, followed by the words, “Ninety-nine percent match.” A moment later, the voice said, “I know that he’s there. Put him on, please.”
Lulu handed Decker the phone.
“Who is this?” asked Decker. “And why are you trying to kill us?”
The man at the other end laughed. “I’m not trying to kill you. On the contrary, John. I’m trying to save both of your lives. And mine too, if I can. Listen to me very carefully. I don’t have much time.”
The voice sounded familiar but he couldn’t quite place it. “Who is this?”
“Call me X. Mr. X,” he replied with a laugh. “Like that Galaxy Being from The Outer Limits. You remember that episode, John.”
“What do you want from us?”
“You need to find out what happened to Matt.”
“Matt? Matt who?”
“Matthew Zimmerman. Remember, John. Every war begins with a single murder.” The phone went suddenly dead.
“War? What war?” Decker said. “Who’s Matthew Zimmerman? Hello. Hello!” But it was useless. The caller was gone. He handed the phone back to Lulu.
“What does Matthew Zimmerman have to do with all this?” she asked him.
“Who’s Matt Zimmerman? The name sounds familiar but—”
“MnemeScape? MyHealthQuest? You know. The Web entrepreneur.”
“Oh, right,” he replied. Now, Decker remembered. Zimmerman was the archetype of the reclusive Net billionaire, a kind of Howard Hughes of the Web. Decker had studied his theories on neural network predictive modeling while writing his thesis at Northwestern. “I don’t run in those circles,” he said. “And what does he mean: Find out what happened? What happened to Zimmerman?”
“He died a few months ago. In Vermont, I believe. Some kind of car accident.”
“Car accident?”
“It was all over the news.”
“Great,” Decker said.
Lulu turned toward the door. “Hope you like Maple syrup with your pancakes because that’s what we’re having for breakfast.”
“We? I thought you told me you wanted no part of this.”
“It’s a little late for that now, isn’t it? Whoever’s trying to kill you, Special Agent Decker, is now trying to kill me.”
“But we don’t even know who he is, this Mr. X. Why should we trust him? He could be leading us right into a trap.”
“He could be but what choice do we have? Do you want to turn yourself in? Go back to the NCTC?”
“No, I...” Decker looked over at her. “No, I don’t. Not when there’s a possible mole at the Center and everyone thinks that it’s me.”
“Then, unless you have a better idea, some stronger lead, I don’t think we have much of choice, do we? We’ll have to trust this Mr. X, at least for the moment. How’s Tony King?”
“What?”
“Tony King—your new name. You’re a reporter at large for The Washington Post. If you need me, I’ll be in what’s left of my workroom, chalking IDs.”
“You’re a woman of many talents, Lulu.”
“You have no idea.”
CHAPTER 27
Thursday, December 12
“You know the speed limit’s sixty-five on this stretch of highway,” Decker said as they puttered along I-91, northbound towards Brattleboro.
Lulu stole a quick glance at him before turning back to the road. “Is that a comment about my gender or my race, Special Agent Decker?” She made it sound as if Special were anything but. “Sixty-five is the speed limit. Not the mean, or the median, or the best velocity to optimize fuel efficiency.”
“Sorry I said anything,” Decker replied. They had been creeping along in this manner, going barely fifty, since leaving Boston. It was maddening. He had slept for the first forty minutes or so of the journey, as soon as they had slipped into Lulu’s Ford Fusion. Except for a catnap or two, Decker had been unable to sleep at Lulu’s; the place had still reeked of smoke. So they had left the city before dawn, heading northbound on I-93, before turning westbound on 495 toward Vermont.
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Dawn broke as they drove north of Quabbin Reservoir. The landscape was mottled with snow. The pine trees in the narrow passes looked brittle and thin, barely holding on to the hardscrabble soil.
“Tell me about Zimmerman,” he said, trying to backfill the void.
A semi whisssshed past.
“What you want to know?”
“What you know.”
“Not much, really. Just what I’ve read in the press. Grew up poor. No, that’s not true. Grew up rich, at least for the first few years of his life. In Wellsley, Massachusetts. Then his parents divorced and his mother and he moved to the South End. Dad was some insurance big-wig. Actuary. His mother became a school teacher after they split up. He got a scholarship to Harvard, where he did really well, but he dropped out after only two years to start MnemeScape.”
Over the next decade, she continued, Zimmerman designed and built an entire portfolio of websites, each architected to generate particular data about online users: MyHealthQuest, a vertical market healthcare search engine; MnemeScape, a social network designed to capture, curate, appreciate and share members’ digital memories—from photos to videos, audio and text; and ShopBorg, an intelligent agent designed to fetch the Net for eCommerce.
“Let’s say you want to go to Cancun,” she explained, “and you want to stay in this kind of hotel and do these kind of things but you only want to spend X dollars. The site sends a bot out to look for bargains mapped to your preferences and then brings them back to your email.”
“That’s a weird mix of investments,” Decker said.
“Not really. Not if you think about it. The purpose of each of his sites, besides being monetized by Google ads, was to help generate personality profiles of users based on the data points generated by all the sites in the portfolio.”
“I use some of those sites,” Decker said.
“So do hundreds of millions of other people, all over the world. That’s what Zimmerman was after,” said Lulu. “More than an avatar. A very sophisticated, integrated personality profile—using tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of data points—for each consumer who visited his virtual communities. An online ambassador. A cyber-doppelgänger. Your virtual you.”
Your virtual you, Decker thought. “But why?” he continued. “I mean, what was the point of having those profiles?”
“To target them for advertising, of course,” she replied. “Customized marketing messages. And, it turned out, to leverage that data for some other rather nefarious motives as well.”
“Like what?”
“Like corporate espionage. He’d begin with the data he gathered from the sites in his portfolio, combine it with other data streams from Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and such, merge and purge it with offline demo- and psycho-graphic information, and then mine it for trends.” She chuckled. “Here’s one example I remember in particular because it’s rather inspired. For some of his pharmaceutical clients, he’d track when folks were chatting and posting online about how they were worried about losing their jobs, how they were getting their résumés together—that sort of thing. By mapping such online chatter with geo location data gathered from smartphones and IMSI cell site simulators, even if he couldn’t identify the individuals doing the chatting—which was rare, regardless of their privacy settings—he’d be able to infer they were working for a particular pharmaceutical company. If there were enough folks in one location chatting like that, he’d be able to tell his pharma clients that the company was probably the target of a hostile takeover bid, or that a drug trial was floundering. That kind of information is worth a lot of money to folks in the private sector.”
Decker found himself staring at Lulu. It wasn’t just her odd looks, her dyed hair and piercings, or her diminutive form—although she was certainly curvy in all the right places. Maybe too much so. No, it was despite that, thought Decker. There was something about her.
“You know,” he said, “you look nothing like her, not at all, but you kind of remind me of Emily. My ex-wife. Dead wife. You know. Never mind.” Now, of course, he regretted his outburst. What was wrong with him? I’m tired, he thought. That must be it. The jet lag, not to mention the attempt on his life.
“Don’t get any ideas,” Lulu said. “I’m only on this expedition because I have to be. Someone tried to kill me, remember. They tried to blow up my loft. They also tried to kill you. So, for better or worse, we’re stuck here together, at least for the foreseeable future. The sooner we figure out what’s going on—who’s behind this thing and what they want—the sooner we can go back to our lives. Our individual and separate and uniquely distinct personal lives.”
“I didn’t mean anything,” Decker started.
“Good.” She hunched over the steering wheel once again and continued to stare at the distant horizon.
“Frankly, I’m the wrong person to ask about all this social stuff, anyway,” Decker added.
“It’s because we got that damned coffee in Westminster, isn’t it? I knew we shouldn’t have stopped. Now, you just won’t stop talking.”
“No, really,” he added. “Who wants to keep tabs on all the people you didn’t want to know back in high school? I mean...People talk about the faceless Web. I think it’s got way too many faces.”
“Oh, I caught that piece in the Times. The one by Pamela Paul.”
“You have a remarkable memory, Lulu. Anyway, I’m not on Facebook, or Google+, or Twitter. Given what I do for a living, we’re not exactly encouraged to join social networks. Besides, I don’t want to see pictures of your kids’ braces or the scar from your recent sigmoidectomy. Not really. TMI, man. TMI. And my life isn’t that interesting that I need to be constantly talking about it.”
“You’re probably right,” Lulu answered, glancing over at him.
“Thanks.”
Lulu laughed. “I know one thing. I know that if you and a bunch of your FBI friends came over and ransacked my computer, you’d be like, ‘What’s this obsession with this kid from sixth grade, and why have you looked at her picture like a million times?’ Funny how when you’d never sneak a peek at someone’s physical diary, you have no compunction in stalking them online. Creeping’s creepy but a lot easier using Foursquare. Oh, I forgot. You trashed my Alienware laptop. Never mind.”
“Pre-pubescent, sixth grade girls, huh? Really? Not that I’m judging.”
“Fuck you.”
“Frankly, I don’t care to know about all the interesting parties and dinners other folks are attending while I’m getting home late from work yet again...just in time for some cold TV dinner and to watch my daughter pass out.”
“You ever get tempted to leave the Bureau for more lucrative pastures?” asked Lulu. “I just saw this study from McKinsey that estimates we’ve got a shortage of something like 150,000 to 200,000 or so ‘deep analytical experts,’ and a million and a half ‘data-literate’ managers. Big data’s exploding, Special Agent Decker, doubling every two years. All those countless digital sensors in industrial equipment, in cars, electrical meters and shipping crates measuring movement, location, temperature, vibration, humidity, and so on and so forth. All those sensors on websites measuring user behavior. Researchers often find a spike in Google search requests for terms like ‘flu symptoms’ and ‘flu treatments’ two weeks before folks begin showing up in hospital emergency rooms. And housing-related search terms are a greater predictor of housing sales than the prognostications of our best real estate experts. Folks like you—guys who know how to manage terabytes of data, to decode and unscramble it—are much in demand. Zimmerman bounced back and forth between the public and private sectors. You know: The revolving door of the military-industrial complex.”
“And look what happened to him. Thanks but no thanks,” Decker answered. “I like what I do. How about you? Why haven’t you left for a job at Booz Allen or Allied Data Systems?”
Lulu laughed. “Not my cup of tea. I mean, look at me. I’ll leave that to folks like Gen
eral Flapper. He worked at Booz Allen for a spell. Most senior intelligence officials have taken a turn or two in the private sector. Pays on the average twice as much as the Department of Homeland Security. Maybe you don’t need the money, being a best-selling author and all. Then again, you’re kind of a techno-curmudgeon, aren’t you—for someone who works in intelligence? I’m beginning to see a real pattern here.”
“Not a curmudgeon. I’m just skeptical about the value of all this linking together. Crowd-sourcing is cool if you’re looking for the lowest common denominator solution, the least offensive, least off-putting reply. But it’s individuals, not crowds, one or two guys, guys like Zimmerman, who end up having the greatest impact. Black swans. Like Benjamin Franklin or Nikola Tesla. Like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. In the end,” Decker said, turning back to look at the road, “it’s just some guy acting alone who changes the world.”
“Some guy? You mean some brilliant and beautiful girl,” Lulu said with a laugh. She stepped on the gas and the car roared to a blistering sixty.
CHAPTER 28
Thursday, December 12
It all started with a blueberry pie. Decker had had a strange yen for it not long after Emily had passed in the crash. Becca had long since recovered from her few cuts and bruises. It had been a Sunday, he remembered. So, he had walked down to the Dean and DeLuca on M Street and picked up a few odds and ends: flour and eggs, whole milk and fresh blueberries. But, as good as it was, and it was absolutely incredible, it wasn’t enough. For some reason, Decker had found himself making another pie right after that. And another. And another.
In the end, he was up for three days.
By the time people started noticing at work, he had already made dozens of pies, so many in fact that he had started giving them away to Miriam’s Kitchen on Virginia. At least someone was eating them.
This obsessive behavior lasted three months, more than two of which Decker spent homebound, simply baking. Pies mostly. Blueberry, strawberry, apple, pear and peach. Boysenberry, raspberry, cloudberry, lingonberry. Then cakes and breads, and even a fortnight of tortes. In the end, it didn’t much matter. As long as he was using his hands, and putting something in the oven, and taking it out when it was perfectly done. As long as it looked brown and delicious and the room was filled with the scent of cooked dough.