by Mike Bogin
Bishop shook his head and laughed aloud recalling the range from disbelief to outrage out of the Vision Partners. It looked like Nussbaum wouldn’t make it out alive.
“I am not here to offer what you want to hear!” Red Pants shouted. “I am here to disrupt, deconstruct, and disentangle outmoded visions. Get you up off your fat wallets and excite some big free-swinging dicks!”
He rapped along like confidentiality was one more meaningless, outmoded concept and he was about to prove it. Stephen had balls. He asked the Partners to think of an American city and raise their hands. The member he picked chose Cleveland. Cleveland instantly appeared on the wall behind him. He waived his hand in the air and a cursor followed his gestures on the map. He stopped at an arbitrary point, clicked, and spread his hands, running out to wide radius right over the center of the city, and then snapped his finger at the circle. The map populated with hundreds upon hundreds of overlapping black camera icons. His tone changed. No longer the irreverent buffoon, he narrated a vision that not one Partner could ignore.
“Gentlemen,” he instructed, “these icons represent the video camera feeds running right now from approximately a one mile radius from this point.” He pulled down a menu and stopped at “Count.” “There are 1,859 live feeds coming from this area. I know this because the bandwidth demands from streaming video draws a very specific web signature. These cameras include public traffic cameras, business feeds, home security, personal web cams, police units, and more.”
The Vision Partners giggled, choked, and were appalled and enthralled in equal measure. He delivered a digital map of every movement one member had made during the prior week, from locations across his home town to flights on his private jet and every spot where he had used his cell phone, his credit cards, and his ATM. He showed, in real-time, the whole route as another Partner’s sixteen-year-old son drove Dad’s new Porsche without permission. In the street cams, the kid’s face behind the wheel was clear as day.
Stephen splashed the logo of a publicly-traded company on the wall, and then embarrassed its CEO by showing the audience how eleven percent of paid employee time was being spent on social media and pornography.
Before exiting the stage, he held up his Smartphone to show his own view looking back at the Vision Partners looking on the wall just like they were appearing on the big screen at a sports stadium. He swept his arm through the air and, just like magic, the names of every person on the screen tagged instantly onto their pictures. He had all those titans of American industry eating out of his hand.
He never did give his name, his company, or anything else. Never handed out a business card. Just vanished, leaving every Partner in the room asking who the hell that guy was and how could they get hold of him. Most brilliant marketing Bishop had ever seen. He was pretty certain that most of the technology was proprietary and confidential, but it didn’t take much time being around APA and Vision Partners before distinctions like national security secrecy dissolved away.
At the presenter’s luncheon afterward, Stephen scaled back to size, but his insights were no less piercing.
“I wouldn’t say that you have no value,” he conceded to Bishop, “only that you won’t be valued.” Human intelligence is “distributive,” Stephen argued. “It’s a budget suck from hire to grave.
“Smart money will continue to flow to technology,” he predicted. “Tech expenditure focuses large contract budgets, which leads to A++ bankable income streams, which leads to the big payday. It’s all about the numbers; the liquidity event, IPO, or a straight buyout doesn’t matter as long as it drives eight or nine figures to the top.”
That one succinct paragraph summarized why Bishop had jumped to the private sector.
Stephen later explained when they were one-on-one, how “we have millions of cameras that are operating in the Cloud right now and more coming online every minute. Millions of cameras that together, used in aggregate, offer power we can harness and utilize both commercially and politically. Single cameras, just like one set of eyes, represent the past. The volume of data that up to twenty years ago might take a lifetime to collect we can now gather, and parse, within a nano-second. Soon we will literally be able to pick out one grain of sand from an entire beach or one person from all of Planet Earth. We have the capacity to fly cameras in the troposphere eight miles above the surface of the planet—that’s 10,000 feet above the height of Mount Everest—and pick out specific individuals. In less than four seconds, we can identify 90,000 people in a packed football stadium and find one specific person in his seat.”
Until he had met and collaborated on consulting projects beside Stephen, Bishop was quick to dismiss technology. He recognized now that he found it threatening and he could even admit as much, after three drinks. Technology wasn’t ever going to replace human intelligence; instincts and hunches and the read on the other guy’s face weren’t going away. But couple that with what Stephen could bring to the table and together they could toss a wide net that not much was going to get through. Bishop prepared a proposal and directed the encrypted file to Stephen Nussbaum’s secure website, then texted Stephen to look at the message. He sent the text and he hoped, number one, that Nussbaum was at least somewhere in North America and, number two, that his time could be had.
*****
The forensic accounting produced nothing. No windfall Wall Street trades driven by any of the deaths. No mergers or acquisitions. None of the thousand names left on the list of trained snipers correlated to significant lump sums going into accounts.
Bishop made discreet contacts with his North Carolina resources in the world of private security contractors. Nothing there. Again shooting blanks. Every one of these contractors knew angry, capable men, except that none of them would supply names. But the calls produced at least one key ancillary value that Bishop noted. Demand for ex-military personnel for private contracting had fallen so severely that skilled individuals and experienced squads were begging for work. He could turn out six-dozen mission-ready contractors in a day, every one of them ex-Special Forces. Long-haul carriers and an entire fleet of helicopters were sitting in hangars. Wire the funds and they would be airborne.
Stephen rejected the assignment as unmanageable, plus he was overbooked with current engagements. Then Jeffers offered him something that made Stephen do a one-eighty. Bishop didn’t know what it was, but it made Stephen sit right down and started his fingers flying across a borrowed keyboard.
Later on, Bishop learned that Stephen was setting up filters and routing internal chatter coming through NSA. NSA filters were pulling data from the Defense Department, FBI, CIA, ATF, and fifteen other agencies. Jeffers offered to set Stephen up with a backdoor key.
Then everything changed, including Bishop’s contract. The shooter hit Central Park West. Central Park West hit home; the shootings trumped every other focus. Every APA member was tripling his personal security measures; for Jeffers, hiring Bishop became automatic.
Jeffers was forced to cancel the Vision Partners upcoming directors meeting. He had no choice, no matter how much flak he expected to take. Two-thirds of the most solid attending contributors, his reliable core, suddenly had scheduling conflicts. Central Park West wasn’t Long Island; this was ground zero, way too close to home. The Vision Partners were either hunkering down or making distance; men who hadn’t taken vacations since their college Spring Breaks suddenly were taking their families to Antarctica and the Ngorongoro Crater.
Carlton Jeffers struggled to capture daily talking points that seemed to strike the right tone. “War on Job Creators” polled a weak 21 percent response. That was the top number from nine taglines that made the overnight cut. He couldn’t very well say nothing at all, but any direct reference to the killer or to the attacks circled right back to income inequality. Meanwhile, Emerson Elliot was on the radio in national syndication with ‘Bullets for Billionaires’.
“We are adding a new segment today, listeners. I’m calling it the ‘You Can’t Take It With You Dead Billionaires Club.’ Current New York City count is seven billionaires down, with eighteen billion between them, and sixty-one billionaires to go. Yeah yeah yeah… I know, these guys are all philanthropists. There’s the Anthony Parrish hall at MOMA and Morris Levy has wing at Mount Sinai. Boring! Callers, if you want to call in with sob stories, don’t cry about dead guys with four hundred thousand-acre ranches or their own private islands,” Elliot said.
“Let me tell you about Charles Dubois. This guy had his own Caribbean Island, right, and the place was set up for Armageddon. We’re talking wind and solar power, hydroponic food gardening, and enough wines for like the next hundred years. Now get this… the guy has wind and solar power for himself, but he made his fortune in oil and gave big bucks to Vision Partners to crush everything competing with Big Oil. Call in and tell us what you think of this hypocrite!”
Every segment of Emerson Elliot’s program kept chipping and eroding his life’s achievement at the helm of Americans for Patriotic Action and he had nothing. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he howled.
“Get me the Attorney General,” Jeffers shouted at his admin. “I’m putting a stop to that sonofabitch!”
*****
Copycat crazies seemed to be popping up in a dozen places and the world’s most sophisticated police forces were playing a game of Whack-a-Mole with nothing to go on except size thirteen shoes.
Nussbaum couldn’t correlate size thirteen to any of the names because nobody except the Belgians kept a digital record of the shoe sizes of their individual soldiers. Nine percent of American soldiers since 2000 wore size thirteen, up from an average of only five percent during the period from 1950 through 1999. A lot of good that did.
Bishop followed the talk radio angle because Jeffers was obsessed. Limbaugh and Hannity banged away at how “the present administration is so against job creators they’re letting this happen!” but Emerson Elliot held the traction.
Stephen wasn’t interested. Technology had displaced politics and only the politicians failed to notice. Talk radio was a distraction for the masses.
Nussbaum had applied his software to scan every digital record for repeat visuals to show a face, a physique, anything appearing in each vicinity. Nada, zip, donut. From Sands Point to Sag Harbor to the Central Park West attacks, the only evident correlations were wealthy victims and a single sniper. One in the burbs, one nearly out to the Hamptons, and then the next right above Central Park. Two nighttime attacks, one daytime.
“I refuse to worry about deliverables,” Stephen remarked to Bishop. “Thousands of law enforcement people from a couple dozen agencies haven’t produced squat.”
“That’s OK for you,” Bishop countered. “You tech guys are in good shape for the next twenty years. Guys like me are going to be bleached bones out in the desert.” Bishop could not even confirm for Jeffers that it was the same shooter each time.
Stephen looked over at Bishop’s downcast face. Bishop’s fresh whiskers were white. They had been brainstorming until past ten at night, talking through motives and goals, analyzing the shooter’s target selection and details from each attack.
“We have our own problems,” Stephen responded. “Your world is gated by pre-requisite career experience in law enforcement; I’m only as good as the next Russian or Korean or Chinese whiz kid coming out of the woodwork.”
*****
Look over this fortified structure. Get to know it. We have twenty infantrymen outside supported by an armed transport with a turret-mounted M240. We have a twelve man security unit inside and you cannot identify their habits or positions from exterior observation. We have concrete vehicle barriers, a forward checkpoint and a secondary one. We have motion-sensors, infra-red heat sensors, sound triangulation to instantly locate the firing position of any shooters. You are the enemy. You have a six-man squad armed with AKs, RPGs, and grenades. Your mission is to penetrate, locate and assassinate two senior officials, kill them both and inflict maximum damage. You have moles inside supplying basic intel, but not trained for armed support. Where are we vulnerable? Each of you has thirty minutes to set a preliminary tactical plan. Begin.
Spencer debriefed himself. He was his own worst critic, as usual. Police units had closed on his position inside four minutes. Spencer suspected sound-monitors and confirmed his hunch from reading the newspaper the next day. They had to have used the monitors to triangulate onto his position. How else could they have moved in so fast?
From his fallback location, he watched their forensic teams scouring the rooftop. He had all his casings. They had his footprints. Through his scope he saw them photographing and casting molds under their portable halogen lighting.
“Better target selection moving forward,” he admonished himself. No more rooftops. But the reaction to his attack on Central Park West had shaken the rich to their core. They couldn’t protect against attacks to their category. They couldn’t hide.
“They know they’re vulnerable, Captain,” he said aloud. He had accomplished that much. Maybe he had taken out some of the eighty-five people who owned more wealth than three billion of the poorest people on the planet. He hoped so. It would have helped to have a list, but he couldn’t find the names anywhere.
Captain Sam dreamed of a viral reaction, but Spencer kept his feet on the ground. Other people might not follow his lead, but what rich person wouldn’t be looking over his shoulder, paranoid at every sound?
Spencer stuck his Baretta semi-automatic behind his belt and rode the number-two subway line to Wall Street, then he stood for an hour fifty feet from the door to the Stock Exchange. Tourists photographed the bronze bull and pointed to the ticker sign. But none of the people rushing in and out with their plastic clip-on badges looked rich; every one of them looked late for a meeting with somebody a lot more important than they were.
After giving up on the NYSE, he went around the corner and stood in line at Starbucks. He ordered a drip coffee and a bagel and had them in a seat by the window.
The immediate problem was that the targets were drying up. There was nothing obvious left in the Times or the Post; no more galas in the city, no more royal birthdays in the Hamptons. He scanned Yelp and TripAdvisor for expensive restaurants, but then he didn’t want to shoot down some regular family out going out somewhere fancy to celebrate a birthday.
Do you attack one at a time, he asked himself? Each time he did that would ramp up exposure for diminishing returns. So where do you find super rich people who are laying low? Where do rich people go that regular people don’t?
The auction house attack added a new layer: until then each victim was American. He liked bringing the listening device into play; wiring the bouquet to generate his own intel may not have equated to military satellite photos and live drone feeds he often reviewed on missions in Afghanistan, yet it was satisfying. He liked that he had originated the idea on his own.
CHAPTER FIVE
You call in artillery or air and you eliminate the enemy without exposing your squad. But you also kill the twenty non-combatants inside this compound and who knows what shit storm hits after the dead baby photos go online. So you put yourself and your men into harm’s way. In this exercise you will take on your instructors. You will formulate and execute upon the techn
iques we worked on to eliminate your targets, minimize collateral damage, and bring your men home in one piece.
Spencer felt the urge to go back to the scene of the crime. There was no upside to it; he knew that it was cocky, but he walked through Straus Park just a few blocks away from Central Park West, taking unnecessary risks while knowing better. He was off-routine and missing his edge. Everywhere he went, he expected an ambush that didn’t come. Sending the microphone into the auction house then ambushing targets in the daytime right in the center of the city left him addled in the opposite direction, hyped with adrenalin.
He went up to an old man seated on a concrete bench and initiated the conversation. The man’s white cane drew him in.
The man knew about the killings. “Lots of angry people out there,” the man said simply. He thought it was sad.
Spencer returned to the room he rented, tingling along his scalp and into his fingertips. Walking in the open left him surging even more, filling him with the dangerous illusion that nobody and nothing could stop him. The serotonins spoke to invincibility; was he on a mission from God?
He needed to run. Miles and miles, away from people, in rocks and mountains where the terrain demanded that he feel himself, where he could demand of himself, where he could forget himself. He was a gambler on a hot roll. If that feeling continued, it could only end one way. The awesome neurochemical highs would get him killed.
He moved places again. He’d done that twice already, each time into cheap sub-par accommodations that even in New York were too basic to attract anyone looking longer-term. No kitchens, no insulation, no questions. Right after his conversation with the blind man, he moved again, taking himself out of the city, where he found a trailer that had been towed for the last time sitting on blocks inside a trailer park advertising hot showers, a coin-operated laundry, and free Wi-Fi.