Kill Process

by William Hertling

  “Breathe in,” Charlotte says, “long, slow breath out. Again, breathe in.”

  I struggle for air, gain control bit by gradual bit.

  “Go to your magic garden.”

  I hate her for telling me what to do, but I’ve spent so much time in hate. I don’t want to be there any more. I listen to her. The magic garden, another of the endless tools she shared, a special place to go where I feel safe. I imagine the beach in New York in the winter, the pounding waves off Fort Tilden, cold air blowing off the ocean, empty sand and dunes as far as I can see. Eventually I’m calm again.

  “Why?” I ask. “What’s the point of taking me to the edge of terror?”

  “Right now your fears, very justified and reasonable fears given your experiences, control you. A fear of something is not the same as the thing itself. It is smart to be cautious of a bear in the woods, but it’s not helpful to be so afraid you can’t discuss bears, or act intelligently when you encounter one. Eventually, if we keep returning to this uncomfortable space, your fears will lose their power over you.”

  “So it is all about power, after all,” I say.

  CHAPTER 25

  * * *

  AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

  Bend, Oregon. Chris Daly, Bureau of Research and Intelligence, field agent.

  CHRIS DALY flips to page eleven, handling his notebook with a gentle touch. He’s never accidentally burst one of the destructive solvent packs capable of dissolving both ink and paper, but it’s happened to agents in the field, who then suffer the embarrassment of being completely without mission instructions. Electronic devices, of course, have their own risks.

  Under the glow of a red flashlight he reviews the crude black-and-white map of surveillance cameras, plotting a path of least coverage to the congresswoman’s driveway where her red Tahoe is parked.

  He removes a Ziploc bag from an outer envelope, touching it only with his gloved hands. It contains a single folded sheet of paper with the Congresswoman’s name on the outside. They possessed the means to send an untraceable electronic message, of course. Unfortunately, the congresswoman’s zealous ban on electronic devices during her family vacation made the delivery of it a complete impossibility.

  There’s something to be said for a bit of old-fashioned fieldwork now and then, even if electronic methods are more efficient. He and his partner even broke in to bug the vacation house before the congresswoman arrived. He hadn’t done that in years. Standard operating procedure now was to hijack computer and mobile device microphones and cameras, which had sufficed for all except a handful of cases since he joined BRI.

  The high-desert sky here in Bend is clear, the stars bright to his dark-adjusted eyes, though from six houses away the Tahoe appears black in the starlight. The plastic bag is slippery under his gloved hand, the single sheet of paper within a minimal payload, four sparse lines of text. He had studied the congresswoman in countless photographs and videos, knew how she reacted to good news and bad, could tell her public face from the private one she used when she thought no one was looking. She would open this letter in a few hours, her eyebrows would raise slightly, then she’d frown, the corners of her mouth curling down, her forehead tightening. Because no one would be there to see her, she’d grimace, her teeth slightly uneven, the result of a biking accident in college. She’d once confided over instant messaging to a close friend that she hadn’t gone for medical treatment because she didn’t want her parents to know.

  Chris’s breath quickens, his grip tightening on the letter, as he strides faster in anticipation of her reaction. It isn’t possible to own someone like the congresswoman. She’s too principled to buckle under blackmail, even with powerful leverage on her. But she could still be manipulated.

  She’d been fighting the Bureau of Research and Intelligence for months now, scrambling to unveil BRI’s charter and gain oversight via the House Committee on Intelligence. Once she read the note, though, she’d be outraged and distracted. Her attention would turn away from BRI and back to one of her earlier passions: gun control.

  Once upon a time, leverage meant searching for useable dirt on a person. Once found, it would be applied blindly. BRI has refined the process, using dozens of psychologists and data analysts crunching profile data, to turn the application of leverage into a science with predictable outcomes. What did you want from your subject? Compliance, cooperation, distraction, anger, apathy, suicide? Archimedes said “Give me a place to stand, and with a lever, I will move the whole world.” For BRI, profiling is the place to stand, intel the lever; and the objective is not moving the world, but manipulating targets of interest.

  Chris steps out on the black asphalt and walks down the middle of the road for the next two houses, outside the range of the front door security cam on his right and far enough away from the limited view of the backup camera on the Lexus SUV to his left. Though BRI isn’t aware of backup camera exploits, they still consider them a potential threat.

  He finishes crossing the street and steps up to the Tahoe with purpose. Rolling the plastic bag and enclosed paper up tight, he inserts it into the slot where the bike rack will grip the frame of the bike. He continues his walk, noting with pride he did the drop in less than a second.

  He walks around the block, gets back in his car, and drives off, the electric engine silent in the night.

  * * *

  Modern vehicles, especially electric cars like the one Chris drives, contain so many sensors and computers they require multiple days with BRI techs to be blacked out before they can be used on operations. SOP was to find and fry every RFID transponder, scramble the onboard GPS, remove manufacturer telemetry transceivers, augment the standard firmware with new code to continually erase charge and driving logs, and then, because the vehicle’s central computer would freak out with so many offline systems, suppress all the warning messages and error lights that would otherwise light up the dashboard.

  Of course, Chris carries nothing electronic. His partner, Daryl, monitors everything from their temporary base of operations, a rented house two miles away.

  He pulls into the driveway a little past 5 A.M., gets out, punches the code into the garage door keypad (he couldn’t bring the transponder in the car, as its unique code could give him away), and drives into the garage. He hits the inside switch, and the overhead door closes with a rumble.

  He’s exhausted from the long night, almost dizzy with fatigue. He opens the door to the basement. “I’m home, honey.” Daryl doesn’t answer. “Well, don’t get your panties in a wad. I made the drop.”

  He descends the stairs, and Daryl appears, sitting at a desk, glancing between windows on three computer monitors.

  She pulls headphones off one ear. “I saw. Pretty good, but I made you.”

  She points to the corner of one window, looping a clip of his drop: him approaching the Tahoe, pausing, his arm visible with the Ziploc bag reflective in his hand for a flash, and then moving on. He would have noticed it too.

  “She’s not trained and there was nobody there.”

  “You still don’t win any points for style.”

  Standing alongside her, he glances down, not at her face, but her neck, imagines his hand there, the pulse of her carotid arteries under his fingertips as he slows the flow of blood to her brain. He really can’t afford getting mixed up with Daryl. Any hullabaloo back at the office, and he gets cut off from BRI. He laughs instead. “Don’t bust my chops. You’re sitting behind a computer.”

  “Whatever. Your phone was buzzing when I went upstairs for coffee.”

  Back upstairs he grabs his phone off the counter. Most phones are trackable, though this one is indirectly connected, all of the text messages and calls redirected from another phone with a different number. Without a phone these days, basic communication becomes a bitch. He flips through the text messages, pauses and smiles at a photo from the waitress in Seattle, then stops when he sees a message from Joe: “I’ve got tickets to the game.�
��

  Joe’s his agent, because anyone who’s got product to sell needs an agent. Joe connects him with buyers for fifteen percent of the deal, freeing Daly from having to deal with customer acquisition and negotiation. Keeps him cleaner, too, if it comes down to that.

  He yells down the stairs, “I’m gonna get some shuteye.”

  “We gotta be on the move by noon.”

  He nods, which nobody can see, and heads up to his bedroom. When his laptop boots, it prompts him for a password. There are several encrypted partitions, a technique BRI uses for plausible deniability. If he puts in one password, the hard drive and operating system will contain an innocuous set of apps and documents. If he instead enters an alternative password, he gets access to his BRI profile. Of course, the same technology BRI uses to hide from the scrutiny of the rest of the world can also be used to hide from BRI. He puts in his third password, and he’s soon chatting with Joe.

  Joe> The client wants a deep dive profile on Angelina Benenati, from Portland, Oregon.

  Chris> Anything specific?

  Joe> They wouldn’t say.

  The reality is all clients want something. Nobody wants dirt. They use the dirt to achieve something, a specific desirable outcome. Chris was more likely to generate the outcome they wanted with all the resources of BRI at his disposal. Problem is, clients don’t like to say what they want. They lose plausible deniability. They risk losing face. So they beat around the bush and ask for data when they should ask for outcomes. Of course, Chris charges more for outcomes.

  Chris> Fine. I’ll have it in two days. Make sure they understand I can procure the outcome they want. Upsell them, for Christ’s sake. That’s what I’m paying you for.

  Joe> Faster turnaround time, more clients this way. Margins are better on pure data.

  Fact is, Chris likes to get his hands dirty. It’s not about the money. He likes to bring the subject to the point where they pray for release and they’ll do anything to get out. There’s nothing quite like the rush when they have no power and he has it all.

  CHAPTER 26

  * * *

  I RING THE BELL, a dog barks, and there’s yelling inside. Footsteps approach the door and it opens.

  “You must be Angie! I’m Owen.” He holds out his right hand to shake. I flip my left hand over, and he glances at my stump as we shake.

  “Thanks for seeing me.”

  “No, no, thanks for coming over. Sorry I couldn’t meet at my office. The nanny called in sick, and my wife is out.”

  I see various faces, all boys, peeking in from down the hall.

  “Come meet my kids.”

  They’re nearly a spitting image of Owen, and they’re all in slacks and dress shirts. I turn back to Owen, who’s in jeans and a hoodie.

  He catches my glance and shrugs. “My wife has much better taste than me.”

  He looks comfortable in his skin, like he knows his place in the world. I realize that I’m in a strange man’s house, and we’ve shaken hands, and yet I’m okay.

  “Kids, time to play Minecraft.” The kids cheer, he doles out iPads, and they grab seats in the living room. “Let’s talk in the kitchen,” he says to me.

  His kitchen is larger than my living room, dining room, and kitchen together. In fact, I’m pretty sure my studio in college was smaller than this one room.

  He gestures toward a big island with bar stools in the middle of the room. “Grab a seat. Can I get you some coffee, tea, or water?”

  “Coffee, please.”

  “Make yourself comfortable.”

  I pull out my laptop, log in, and bring the presentation up.

  Owen fiddles with a Technivorm Moccamaster, by far the world’s best coffee machine outside of a dedicated barista making pour-overs in your kitchen. From the way he’s looking at it from different angles, I’m suspicious about whether he’s ever used it before.

  Even from fifteen feet away I can see he’s got the brew basket lever in the wrong position, and the setting on his burr grinder is way too fine. I bite back the urge to say something. The coffee doesn’t matter. It’s the money I need.

  After thirty seconds, I can’t help myself. I clear my throat, and he glances at me. “I could show you a few things.”

  “Really?” He spreads his arm wide, inviting me to take over.

  “First we need the right grind for the flat bottom basket.” I throw away what he’s ground and launch into a fifteen-minute lesson on how to use his expensive coffee setup.

  We’re both watching the Technivorm do its magic when I catch the time on the microwave. Shit, it’s twenty after, and he told me I only had half an hour. I wasted most of my precious time making coffee. Double-damn. I made a man coffee. I’m sending all the wrong messages.

  “Can we get started?” I say, and nod toward my computer.

  “Sure, sure.”

  Mat had me practice the pitch countless times. I memorized different versions: two minutes, five minutes, ten minutes, and twenty minutes. With slides projected, slides on my laptop screen, and no slides at all. “The trick,” Mat had said a week earlier, “is to make everything sound natural and fresh, while still making every emphasis and pause occur perfectly. You need a very good reason for every word and sentence you’re uttering. What are you trying to communicate and why? Get that right, and it’ll go perfectly.”

  I thought Mat’s idea of preparation was insane, but now as I effortlessly flow into the ten-minute version of my story, everything coming out smoothly, I give thanks in my mind to his rigor.

  Five minutes in, Owen gets up, pours coffee, and comes back to the table with two mugs.

  I’m in the middle of explaining about distributed notification when he takes a sip. His eyes open wide. “My God, that’s stunning. Sorry, go on.”

  I smile and continue.

  Ten minutes pass, and Owen’s phone rings. He swipes to send the call to voicemail. “Let’s keep going, if you’ve got the time.”

  “Sure.”

  The kids interrupt us once, and Owen starts a movie for them. While we talk, he gets dozens more messages and calls, which he ignores. We’re still going strong, on a second pot of coffee when his wife comes home, and he introduces us.

  “You didn’t make her coffee, did you?” She turns to me. “A crazy amount of money for that machine, and he’s never figured out how to use it.”

  “Angie taught me how to use it.”

  “You are a miracle worker! Honey, whatever she’s selling, buy it.”

  He smiles at me. “We’re going to keep working, if that’s okay. The kids are watching TV.”

  “I’ll check on them.”

  She leaves, and we return to work.

  “I get why it’s important, Angie. If you get this to scale, I see the potential for revenue. It’s not clear you can be successful, though. You’re encumbered by two big challenges: user acquisition and partner acquisition, and they’re mutually dependent on each other. Your success requires other companies to adopt your social platform. Why should they, if you don’t have any users? But if nobody adopts your API and platform, then you’ve got nothing unique to offer your users. A couple of reference implementations built in-house.”

  “We have AI chat.”

  “It sounds like a gimmick.” He sets down a handout I’d given him.

  “It increases the fun factor, which extends the average time people spend on the system and ups the number of people they invite. It’s a key feature.”

  “Now you’re developing two products. You’ll need extra funding. You even want to buy hardware. Nobody uses their own hardware anymore. It increases your capital needs when you should be running lean.”

  “I know we’re facing challenges. We can solve them with funding.”

  “The risk is huge,” he says, leaning back in his chair.

  “The opportunity is bigger. What if you could have been an angel for Tomo? What would that investment be worth now?”

  He shrugs. I’m losing him. From
the other room I hear his wife talking to the kids.

  “Are your kids on Tomo yet? Or Picaloo?” Picaloo is owned by Tomo, their conduit into the younger crowd.

  “No, thank goodness. We haven’t had to cross that bridge yet. Though our oldest has asked.”

  “Why do you say ‘thank goodness’?”

  “Kids on social media?” He laughs. “What’s not to worry about? Cyberbullying. Sharing pics. Creeps.”

  “Tomo doesn’t have enough measures to protect them. In part because that cuts into their profit model, but also because they’re only one company. But with our service, there could be, no, will be, a slew of companies to step in to address those problems. Cyberbullying detection. The ability to filter inappropriate content. Turn off advertising. Imagine a safer place for your kids to go, with an experience you customize. You make the choices, and you’re in control. Isn’t that worth something?”

  He nods. “I’ll consider it. I’ll get back to you within the week.”

  I leave with no idea what Owen thinks, or whether it went well or not.

  * * *

  When I get back in my car, I glance at my phone for the first time in hours. I’ve got messages from everyone: Amber, Thomas, Igloo. They’ve each sent multiple messages. I head toward the east side and call Amber.

  “Well?” she says.

  “I’m not sure. I thought it was going great, and then everything went cold toward the end.”

  “Did he like the idea?”

  “He loves the idea, but he’s not sure we can pull it off. He said he’ll get back to me in a few days.”

  “Oh. Well, don’t mention that to Kevin.”

  “Kevin?”

  “Yeah, we’re having dinner with him today. I worked briefly with him on a project a few years ago. We want him. Amazing UX guy. He can code too, so we can avoid hiring a front-end developer for a while longer.”

  “Whoa. Did you think I was going to come back to the office with a briefcase of cash?”