by Melissa Good
“That was my second contract.”
“Holy crap.”
“That’s what I said.”
KERRY REGARDED THE man sitting across from her with some bemusement. “So, Carlos, Mark tells me you’re an artist?”
The big, square jawed man across from her, dwarfing her chair, nodded. “I paint,” he said. “And I do three dimensional stuff. Like metal sculpture and carved leather.”
“Really,” Kerry said. “That’s impressive. I’m always blown out by people who can do art. My mother-in-law’s an artist.”
“Yeah?” the man said. “Local?”
“She lives off South Beach. Cecilia Roberts.” Kerry saw the start of recognition. “I see you’ve heard of her.”
“Sure. Seen her stuff in the galleries down there. Nice,” he said. “But y’know, unless you’re mainstream it don’t always pay the bills.”
“That’s what she says, too,” Kerry said. “So you freelance as a security guard?”
He nodded. “Yeah. I lift weights and stuff and I look the part.” He grinned. “But I’m always booked for late shift or mids, y’know? And I like to work on my stuff at night. Doesn’t work for me during day hours for some reason.”
Kerry leaned forward and rested her elbows on her desk. “Well, that would work for us, because at least right now, we’re closed at night. We work pretty much eight to eight. We kinda need someone around.”
“Mark told me. He was freaked.”
“I was freaked, he was freaked, my partner was freaked. It was just a full on freak show here,” Kerry said. “But also, we’re working on some government contracts, and we think it would be a good idea to have some security around.” She tapped a pencil on the desk. “You interested?”
He nodded. “I like Mark. We went to school together,” he said. “I knew he was tied up with that big company and that’s not my style. This is different.”
Kerry’s eyes twinkled. “Not most of our styles, apparently. So we can do this one of two ways. We can hire you on direct, or, if you want, if you have a company of your own, we can contract you.”
He shook his head. “Don’t ask me to do all that company stuff. I can’t even do my paperwork for my art. I’ll come work for you. I’ve got some buddies, if you get like you need night guards, that would love to do some hours, too, this is a nice area.”
“Most of the time.”
“Those vet guys—I seen them,” Carlos said. “I think I can handle them.”
“I think you can, too,” Kerry agreed. “To be honest, I’m pretty sure Dar could have handled them, but you know we’re business owners and respectable women, so I think it’s better to hire some nice, big strong guys instead.”
Carlos chuckled. “I’ve been hearing about Dar for like twenty years,” he said. “Be cool to finally meet her. Mark’s got all kinda stories.”
“Yes he does.” Kerry smiled. “She’ll be back tomorrow. But for now, let’s walk you down to personnel and we can get you started. Also, we can talk about what kind of money you want.”
“Right on.” He stood up, towering over her. “Mostly us contract guards, we get minimum wage. No one sticks around real long.”
“Probably that’s why.” Kerry led the way toward the stairs. “I think someone with your experience should be worth more than that, don’t you?”
“Oh, lady, I like you already.”
DAR LEANED BACK in her chair and folded her arms, rocking her head back and forth a little to loosen the muscles on either side of her neck. “Next objection?”
The door opened and Gerry poked his head in. “Dar? Car’s here from the White House for you.” He looked at the scribbled full white board and the scattering of notepads with boxes and lines on them on the table. “We doing all right, boys?”
Dar stood up and pushed her chair in. “Let me go meet with them, Gerry, so these guys can answer you honestly.” She winked at the group, then slipped out past Easton where an aide was waiting. “You for me?”
The aide nodded and smiled. “I’ve been assigned to accompany you, Ms. Roberts,” he said politely. “Please follow me.” Dar amiably did
“Least I have my driver’s license this time,” she commented.
“Ma’am?”
“Last time I went to the White House I had no ID,” Dar said. “Day or two after 9/11.”
“Oh my goodness,” he said. “What did they do?”
“Well, they wanted to talk to me badly enough to let me in, but they sure as hell weren’t happy about it.” Dar followed the man out a side door to a black sedan, whose driver opened the back door for them. The aide slid in and Dar joined him. “This is going to go a little better I suppose.”
The aide eyed her. “You’re pretty calm for someone being taken to meet the president.”
Dar half shrugged, deciding not to admit to the stomach flutters and lump in her throat. After all, it was just another person, and one she didn’t much like.
Her handspring buzzed. She pulled it out and found a message from Kerry waiting. “How does she know when to do that?” she wondered, selecting it.
Hey, hon!
Guess what? I hired a security guard. Here’s a picture of him! His name’s Carlos and he’s a friend of Mark’s.
Dar studied the picture, her eyes widening at the massive figure.
“Holy crap.”
The aide leaned forward. “Ma’am?”
“No, sorry.” Dar went back to the message. “Just a note from home.”
He’s an artist who does this on the side, but I hired him full time because he wanted to work day hours, not night like everyone else wanted him for. I gave him a benefit plan and brought him in on a salary, since I want him to be in charge. He has friends who would be interested if we needed to go 24/7 or something like that.
Dar looked at the big, rugged, honest face in the picture and felt a sense of relief. “Dad’ll like him,” she muttered under her breath, then keyed in a reply.
Good job! He looks like a tank. Now I feel better about sleeping alone in Washington tonight. On my way to meet the Prez, wish me luck.
She sent the note and then relaxed back in her seat.
“Was the meeting going well?” the aide asked, after a few minutes silence. “The General was wondering.”
“I think it’ll be fine. I was about halfway through convincing them,” Dar said. “Lot of objections, but I like that.”
“You do?”
She nodded. “Means people are thinking, not just going along for the ride. That’s always good for everyone. The more questions, the better.”
The aide eyed her. “You’ve never been in the military, have you?”
Dar smiled. “No. I think that’s why Gerry hired me for this.”
“I think you’re right.”
THE FIRST MEETING was with Bridges, in his office again. He had a group of four men with him and he wasn’t about to let them have the kind of free for all that Dar had just experienced with the military IT staff.
“All right, people.” He sat down behind his desk. “So now that I’ve told everyone we’re doing this, let’s do it.” He looked across the table at Dar. “You got your plan ready?”
Dar nodded. “I have a blueprint and a starting point. I have database designers working on the framework.”
Bridges grunted. “This got higher profile than I thought, faster than I thought, even though I’m the bastard who’s supposed to think of all this crap,” he admitted. “Laughed my ass off when I was told not to use your former company, by the way.”
“So did Kerry’s mother,” Dar said.
Bridges chuckled dryly. “Bet she did. But because of that, this thing has to show results PDQ.”
The other men in the room just listened quietly, notepads at the ready, waiting to be given directions. Dar found them annoying.
“How long will it take for that?” Bridges asked her.
Dar thought about it. “I can probably prototype it in sixty days
,” she said. “It’ll mostly be raw and wire frame, but you’ll have an idea of what it’ll do.”
Bridges considered that. “Might need to be sooner.”
“Do you want it to work?” Dar asked, bluntly. “Or just be smoke and mirrors. I can do smoke and mirrors in two weeks but it’ll do zero useful crap for you.”
He chuckled again. “Let me get back to you on that one,” he said. “I see you remember our last dance.”
Dar smiled briefly.
“You really think you can do this?” Bridges asked. “No one wants to look like an ass. I don’t want this to be paraded around CNN for a year and then turn out that we wasted our money and got nothing for it.”
Dar steepled her fingers and rested the tips of them against her lips as she considered. Finally she exhaled. “If you’re asking, can I create a system that lets you intelligently search a massive data flow, then yes. If you want to know if I can pull some magic rabbit out of my ass and prove it works by catching a bad guy? I don’t know.”
Bridges lips twitched. “We can fake the second,” he said, with blunt honesty. “What I don’t want is some smart ass to get into that system and find out it doesn’t actually work.”
“What I give you will work,” Dar stated, then stopped talking.
Bridges waited. Then as he realized nothing more was forthcoming, he grunted. “Okay.” He looked at the four men. “Your jobs, people, are to give this woman whatever it is she asks for in the way of access, data, people, authorizations, keys to the executive bathroom, you name it. She’s got carte blanche to use an outdated saying that doesn’t mean much anymore.”
Dar, having come to the meeting expecting to have to sell her design again, was silently startled.
“Yes, sir,” the oldest of the four said. “We understand.”
“Do ya? If this thing works, it means there’s a chance...” he looked at Dar. “A chance that some jackass somewhere in some government building sitting at a screen might find something that will prevent 9/11 from happening again. You all got that?”
They all nodded.
“The bloody idiots on Capitol Hill know about it,” Bridges said. “It wasn’t my idea to tell them,” he added, as an aside to Dar. “In fact, the next time I’ll know who not to tell. Now I’ve got congress-idiots calling me every ten minutes worried about privacy. Privacy!” He lifted his hands. “Idiots! They’re all worried their damn affairs are going to end up in The Washington Post!”
Dar remained silent, her hands folded on the table.
He turned to her. “So what are you going to tell them about privacy?”
“I’m going to tell them the truth,” Dar said. “If they ask me.”
“Nice.” He sighed. “My next career’s going to be on a farm somewhere feeding chickens.”
Dar shrugged slightly. “You can’t search through all that data manually. It’s just not possible. So either you know what questions to ask, and the system finds what you’re looking for, or you trust the algorithm to make the connections and toss up something you hadn’t anticipated.”
Bridges frowned at her. “Are you telling me something like, this thing will have intelligence?”
“To a degree, yes.”
All of them were staring at her. “Is this some kind of science fiction?” the older aide asked, hesitantly. “Because it sounds like it.”
“Rockets were science fiction once,” Dar said. “At some point you reach the Turing test, and the programs become so advanced it seems like there’s intelligence. Once you have something that can judge and evaluate data points, and return a result based on their weighting of them, how different is that than how you, or I, decide what to have for breakfast every morning?”
Bridges pursed his lips and made a sputtering noise with them. “Think I’ll just tell them I hired a voodoo practitioner and they’re killing chickens in some back office of the Pentagon. It’ll scare ‘em less.” He stood up. “C’mon, woman. Let’s go get the dog and pony show over. I’m guessing you got some work to get done.”
Obligingly Dar stood up and followed him out the door. They walked down the hallway of the executive office building, heading down some steps and through what appeared to be a tunnel.
“Lay off the sci-fi with him,” Bridges said. “He doesn’t like it.”
“No problem,” Dar said.
They walked down the long hall and up another flight of stairs, then through a door and they were in spaces she’d seen on television. Dar just tried to keep her mind blank and let the flashes of whitewashed walls and tall ceilings just move past her, very glad she had Bridges leading the way.
Then they were down another hallway and in front of a door, and her guide was rapping on it. “Bridges,” he called out.
The answer filtered through the wood. “Come in, Mike.”
“Ready? Doesn’t matter.” Bridges worked the latch and shoved the door open, entering the room and drawing Dar after him.
It was one of the smaller offices, Dar realized. Not the big oval one, but impressive enough. There were pictures and hangings on the wall, a plush carpet with the seal of the president on the floor, a huge desk, and behind it a somewhat scruffy looking man in a pullover with blinking eyes and a folder of papers in one hand.
“Mike, hey. Who’ve we got here?” the man asked, his expression brightening on seeing Dar and his posture straightening. “Hello there, ma’am.”
The irony was so crunchy Dar felt like she was chewing on year old Frosted Flakes.
“This is—” Bridges turned. “What the hell is your real name?”
“Paladar Roberts. But everyone calls me Dar.”
The president put his folder down and stepped around his desk, extending a hand. “Well, hello there.” His grip was dry and firm. “You’re the computer lady, right?”
“Right,” Dar said, releasing him. “Nice to meet you, Mr. President.”
“Hey, great. Thanks for coming over.” He pointed to a pair of wingback chairs in the corner. “Let’s sit down a minute and you can tell me what this is all about. I want to understand what we’re trying to do here.” He glanced at Bridges. “Tell them to send one of the photogs in, Mike. I never like to lose a chance to get a picture of me with a good looking woman.”
“Sure.” Bridges gave him a droll look. “Be right back, Roberts. Remember, no sci-fi.”
Dar accepted the surrealism and took a seat in one of the chairs, hiking a knee up and circling it with both hands as the president took the other chair, wishing belatedly she’d brought Kerry with her.
Without a shadow of a doubt, Kerry would know far better how to deal with this. “So.”
“So.” He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees in an oddly adolescent posture. “What did you say people called you? Dar?”
She nodded.
“Mike tells me that you’re going to work up something for him that will let him find bad guys living here,” the president said, in a straightforward way. “Call me George, by the way.”
“All right,” Dar responded. “It was explained to me that you want some way of delving into the public Internet and sifting through all that data to find things that could harm us.”
The president smiled. “You got it,” he said. “So you’re doing that?”
Dar cleared her throat. “I’m going to try,” she said, honestly. “I’m going to develop an intelligent set of automatic filters that will be programmable by the people who work for Mr. Bridges, and you, to try and do that.”
Bush thought about that for a minute and Dar remained silent. Finally he looked back up at her with an unexpectedly sharp stare. “People ain’t gonna like us messing with the Internet,” he said. “They don’t want the government sniffing all up in their business, you know what I mean?”
“I do,” Dar said. “They won’t like it at all. Just the idea, from an ISP, got everyone in an uproar and all they wanted to do was target advertisements.”
“Yep,” Bush said. �
�But this thing...you said it was automatic? Like machines are doing it?”
Dar nodded. “The idea was...” She found herself to her surprise laying it out for him as she hadn’t for Bridges. “The programming algorithms are designed to find connections.”
He nodded, but remained silent.
“And they deliver the connections to analysts, who can decide if they really are connections, or not,” Dar said. “You can’t have someone looking at everything, it’s too much.”
Bush was still nodding. “So the machines are looking, and they only kick it to a human when they find something they don’t like.”
“Yes.”
The president smiled and gave her thumbs up. “Got it,” he said. “So we can tell people—we ain’t snooping on you. It’s just a machine looking for patterns. No one’s watching you look for porno.” He winked. “See, Mike just cares about results. I care about results, too, but I’m the one who has to put their mug on television to take the blame for all of it.”
“More or less, yes. The interface will look on its own for things that fall out of baseline,” Dar said, smiling at him. “So if it sees a larger number of airline tickets being purchased one way, in a short period of time, it’ll assemble that for review. But also,” she lifted a hand. “It’s to give the analysts a way to look for something in natural language.”
“Like, anyone buying a lot of fertilizer components today that never did before?” Bush asked.
“Yes.”
He smiled again. “You’re a smart lady.” He paused, watching her. “Your dad’s a war hero, huh? I heard that.” He glanced up as the door opened and a slim young man entered with a camera. “Hold off a minute, Josh.” He put his hand up, then waited for the man to back out. “Thanks.” Then he turned back to Dar. “Navy was it?”
“Yes,” Dar said. “Though he probably wouldn’t call what he did heroism. Just a job.”
“My daddy says that, too,” Bush responded. “And I always told him he’d be a hero to me if he’d done nothing but catch crabs off the coast of New England.”