“Sit down for a minute, I’ll do your shoulders.” I sat. She did my neck and shoulders, and as she started on my shoulders, looked at the laptop and asked, “Which one is the novel?”
I reached out and clicked on it, Word came up, and the novel ran down the screen. LuEllen was running her knuckles up and down the sides of my spine and I’d just said, “Jeez, that feels good,” when she stopped, leaned forward, and scrolled down the novel.
“What?”
“This isn’t right,” she said. “How do I get the next chapter up?”
I selected CH2 from the list. She read for a moment, then said, “She didn’t write this. This is a Janet Evanovich novel. I read it a couple of years ago.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” She reached out and touched the screen, which she did occasionally, and which always left an oily fingerprint. “Novels come on computer files now?”
“I know you can get some for PalmPilots… e-books. I didn’t know you could get them in Word format. Maybe the group steals them.”
She went back to rubbing my shoulders and said, “I couldn’t read a book that way. Maybe kids can. You know, people who had their first computer when they were babies.”
“Not a friendly way to read a book,” I said. “Great for reference stuff, though.” A thought struck me and I said, “Hang on a minute. Let me look at something.” I spent a couple of minutes combining the files into one large new file, then ran a search for the numeral 1. There was a single hit, but not relevant.
I got another nonrelevant hit with 2, but with 3, I got a hit on 39@1czt8*p* and on ll5f4!35lp0.
“She’s buried her passwords in the novel,” I said. Finding them felt like my fifth-grade Christmas, and I laughed out loud. “Pretty goddamn smart. Instantly accessible and completely portable with the data key, and totally invisible.”
“Wonder if she talked to Evanovich about it?” LuEllen asked. But she was pleased with herself; I know she was pleased because she gave me a noogie.
WE DROVE back to our wi-fi spot, signed in on Strom’s account, then took the next step, pushing into the files. I had two passwords to choose from.
“No way to tell?” LuEllen asked. We were set up right on the street, in a dark spot.
“Not that I see.”
“Do a scissors-paper-rock. You’re the first code, I’m the second one.”
We did a scissors-paper-rock, three rounds, and then she won. We put in the second code, and the remote computer cracked open like an egg.
“Shazam,” I said.
EVERYBODY probably has a few moments in his life when he feels like he’s fallen down Alice ’s rabbit hole. That’s what I felt like when I got into DDC Working Group-Bobby.
To begin with, DDC was the official name, with no Bobby-but Bobby was all over the place. The DDC, it seemed, was an actual experimental arm for a package of anti-terrorism techniques being developed by the military and the various intelligence organizations. One of their tests was to find Bobby, using a whole array of Web-scanning devices and surveillance.
I pulled a file labeled South and found an elaborate argument that Bobby was probably living in Louisiana, because analysis of the DuChamps name suggested a Cajun French background, and other analyses had already established that he probably lived in the Gulf states.
The South file noted a counterargument that suggested that Bobby was active in racial affairs, was probably black and therefore not Cajun at all.
“They were moving closer, but they had no idea of who he really was,” I said. “Not yet. Look, they were even analyzing phone-use patterns.”
“And they never got the word that Bobby was dead. Nobody told them.”
MOVING ON.
“Look at this. They’re talking about getting rid of money,” I said. I was astonished. “Jesus Christ, they’re running models, already. They’re talking about a few years.”
“They can’t.”
“Sure they could. They’re laying it out. Everybody carries a smart card from the bank, backed by the government. It has your ID right on the card, along with a little liquid crystal display to tell you what your balance is.” I tapped the screen, a photo of a working prototype of the card. “Use it for everything, but see, they require you use it for all transactions over twenty dollars. So you have a card and pocket change, and that’s it. No more illegal purchases. You couldn’t even buy your dope with pocket change, because anytime somebody showed up with a thousand bucks in twenties, they’d have to explain where it came from.”
“It’d totally fuck me,” LuEllen said.
“Depending on what you stole,” I said. “Jewelry, stamps, high-value stuff… take them across the border, sell them in Mexico.”
“For what? What would I bring back? Sombreros?”
“That’s a point. You might have to move down there permanently.”
WE DUG into a directory called Biometric. They were running 3-D cameras set up at FedEx Field that would examine faces and gaits, compare them to faces and gaits of known criminals and terrorists, and alert the monitoring authority in real time. They were using the faces and gaits of a selected sample of their own people, who would go to the stadium during games to see if the cameras could pick them up.
“You walk past a convenience store camera and a bell rings somewhere,” LuEllen said.
“More or less.”
The success rate was down at the 30 percent level, but was inching up; they were going for a 150-meter recognition distance. When the success rate moved past the 50 percent mark, the plan was to place the cameras in airports, shopping centers, car rental agencies, and in selected “observation points”-for that, you could read “across the street from the neighborhood mosque.”
“Eventually, you could track anyone,” I said. “All you’d have to do is be interested in what the person was doing. Take a few observational tapes, get your recognition formula together, and there you are. A guy couldn’t walk around town without the cops knowing who you were and where you were, every minute of the day.”
“Like 1984.”
“Exactly like that. The camera in the front room.”
THEY were testing programs that would intercept phone messages-the implication was all phone messages-and would analyze conversations for words and phrases that might indicate illegal activity.
“Like how would they do that?”
“You’d say, ‘Why don’t we get the rest of the Al Qaeda sleeper cell together and spend some time building dirty bombs and talking in Arabic about chemical, biological, and nuclear warfare with which to blow up these infidel dogs.’ The computer would then automatically record the message, figure out from the vocabulary that something was going on, and alert a live monitor.”
“Wouldn’t a terrorist talk in code?”
“I don’t know, a lot of them are kinda stupid. Even if it didn’t work on terrorists, if they got this set up, it sure would let them fuck with everybody else.”
THE group was also looking at real-time language translation with a heavy emphasis on Chinese and Central Asian languages, and was talking about a new generation of databases that could handle amounts of data several orders of magnitude greater than anything we yet had.
The giant databases would also be tied to the money-card program, because the databases would be used to analyze virtually everybody’s purchases-all of them-looking for “suspicious” activity.
The group was also talking about a highly developed computer model that would, in some sense, predict likely futures, so that the government could begin taking early action to avoid whatever outcome it wanted to avoid.
The idea was to intercept futures that led, say, to revolution in Saudi Arabia. The problem was, if it worked, there was no way that it would not be used to prevent the opposition party, the party out of power, from winning an election. That would happen almost at once-probably as soon as the program was running. I mean, it was just too good not to use.
THE final directory
was called Background and showed what could be done by operational units, spies, working with good database search programs. Rent a porno movie? They’d know it. Move a chunk of your portfolio from Intel to Boeing because you’re a government worker with an inside source on new military contracts? They’d know that and link the pieces within seconds of the transaction. Kid gets C’s in school? Case of the clap in the Army? Prescription for Xanax or Viagra? Go on vacation three times in a row with the same woman, not your wife, in the next seat on the airplane?
They were already running the program on fifty-odd subjects. Some of the names rang bells, but only vaguely, until LuEllen said, “This guy’s a senator. From Wisconsin.”
“Holy shit,” I said. I scanned down the list. “I think they’re all senators. Or congressmen. Look, here’s Bob. Congressman Bob. Jesus-look at the stuff. This looks like the stuff that Carp’s putting out there. The Bobby file. What the hell are they doing with this stuff?”
We’d been slumped over the screen and LuEllen suddenly sat up and looked around. “Kidd, unplug the goddamn thing. Let’s get out of here. C’mon, let’s get going.”
Her nervousness affected me, too. I pulled the plug on the wi-fi and we drove away, slowly, as always. LuEllen said, after a while, “You know what’s so weird about all of this? One thing, anyway?”
“What?”
“That you could get into their files. They’re this bunch of rocket scientists down in the basement talking about databases the size of the moon-they’re talking about building the Death Star-and some broken-ass hacker gets into their system and it all pops out.”
“Thanks. I wasn’t completely sure my ass was broken,” I said.
“You know what I mean. They can’t even secure themselves.”
“We might be coming to a time when nobody is secure. When nothing is secret. You sit up in your chair and behave yourself, or your little secret is on CNN.”
“I’m moving to fuckin’ Argentina,” she said, disgusted.
“They’d have it in Burundi,” I said. “Once the technology is demonstrated, it’ll get used. Pakistan and North Korea have the bomb and they can’t even feed their people.”
We drove around for a while, thinking our own thoughts, occasionally looking out the back window, and then LuEllen said, “I’m glad people don’t live forever. I don’t think I want to be here when all this gets worked through the system and gets established. It’s like…”
“A nightmare,” I said.
BACK at the hotel, I started opening files that I’d simply snatched, without reading, from the DDC database. Usually when I was doing laptop stuff, LuEllen was restless and moving around, watching TV, shopping, playing golf, whatever; now she was glued to my elbow.
The working group was a secret inside the intelligence community. The Senate committee, as the intelligence oversight group, knew about it, without apparently knowing all of the details. The senators apparently got everything about the biometric research, about the money card proposals and the telephone intercept analysis, and the future map, but may not have known about the Background files.
Not that an experiment was taking place, at any rate. And some of the items in the Background section made me think.
“You know what? Bobby was inside this project. He was in their system. Look, they’re talking about the senator’s daughter’s DWI case, and about the Bole-blackface tape.”
“Maybe that’s why they were so worried about him.”
“No, no-but that’s why Carp went after him so hard. He suspected Bobby was in there, or maybe the operation hinted what a guy like Bobby might have. But I bet that’s what got the ball rolling.”
WE FOUND more about Carp, too. Carp had sent a memo around repeating a rumor that Bobby had sent computers to poor black kids and suggesting that the name of a poor black kid be dragged through sites Bobby was known to inhabit. He even had a name, a young computer freak he’d known in New Orleans.
The idea was summarily rejected-a notation on a separate file called Carp a “technician” who seemed “obsessed” by Bobby, even though it was possible that Bobby didn’t actually exist, but was some kind of elaborate hacker construct. The memo suggested that Carp’s “access to group personnel” be limited, which might have been a reference to the sexual harassment problem.
Then there had been a recent exchange of memos, begun after the Bobby attacks started, suggesting that they “keep all bases covered” by contacting Carp to see if he had had any contact with Bobby. Heffron and Small, the two guys we’d seen at the trailer, and who had gone into Carp’s apartment building the night before, had been delegated the job. There was a note from Small suggesting that somebody else be sent, because neither he nor Heffron knew Carp by sight, but an answer from the department head said that nobody else could be spared at the moment and that “ID photographs should be sufficient… this is a completely unofficial contact.”
We looked through the available stuff that would indicate that the group was investigating or was even aware that Heffron and Small had been killed, but there wasn’t anything in the system yet. Not on the files we’d copied, in any case.
I also found myself in the system: a report on my face-to-face talk with Rosalind Welsh. “Subject is approximately six feet tall and athletic,” LuEllen read. “… in a pursuit, deliberately burned a car to destroy any biometric evidence. He is considered exceptionally dangerous, and may be traveling in the company of a young female accomplice.”
“Must have seen you from the helicopter,” I said.
“That athletic-and-dangerous shit makes me hot,” LuEllen said.
“I can handle that,” I said.
THE night before, LuEllen, in her moment of intimacy, had told me why she might quit stealing. This night, with the lights dimmed, I had a couple of fingers hooked inside the front elastic band of her underpants, and we were going through some kind of juvenile what-does-this-feel-like routine, when I absolutely geeked out.
I’m not a geek. I’m an ex-wrestler and an artist. But I gotta admit, I was easing her underpants down and the words just burped out of me: “Jesus Christ, it won’t work.”
“Won’t work?” LuEllen pushed up on her elbows, confused, with a certain tone in her voice.
“Not that, dumb-ass,” I said. It must have been churning around in the back of my brain. “This data search stuff won’t work. They’ve got a fundamental problem. It won’t work.”
She yawned and asked, reluctantly, I thought, “Why not?”
“Suppose they get every database in the country hooked together and they start looking for patterns. Going through all the data, looking for terrorists, looking for criminals. Okay, got that?”
“Um.” Her interest was under control.
I kept talking; like I said, geeking out. “Okay. Suppose this data-mining method has amazing capabilities. If it’s ninety-five percent accurate-which is way, way more than anything I can even imagine-one person in twenty would still get past them. A false negative.”
“So it’s got holes.” She was a little more interested.
“More than that. It’ll also point a finger at one person in twenty who is absolutely innocent. If you ran it against, say, the population of the U.S., that’s…” I did some figuring. “That’s fifteen million false positives. Fifteen million people who you think might be guilty of something, but who are absolutely innocent. Victims of random error. Unless you take a closer look-surveillance, wiretaps, that sort of thing-there’s no way to tell them apart from the real positives you get. No way at all.”
“Fifteen million?”
“That’s it. At ninety-five percent accuracy. Nothing is that accurate. I don’t think anything ever will be. There’s just too much fuzz and bad information in the system. How in the hell do you do hard surveillance on fifteen million people?”
“So it won’t work.”
“Nope.” I flopped flat on my back. “Nothing they can do to make it work-not that they won’t try. And t
hey gotta have people smart enough to know it.”
“Then why are they doing it?”
“Funding, probably. Jesus. This whole goddamn data-mining thing is another five-hundred-dollar hammer.” I reached over and patted her on the leg. I was so pleased.
After a moment of silence, she said, “You’re such a fuckin’ romantic that sometimes I can’t stand it.”
Chapter Thirteen
LuELLEN HAD BEEN AWAKE half the night, occasionally poking me to ask, “Are you still awake?” and then following with a disturbing question. Like “What are our chances?” and “Why do you think Carp cracked Bobby’s computer?” and “Would Bobby really put the decryption codes on the same computer?”
“Our problem is,” I groaned late in the night, “is that we really didn’t know Bobby. We thought his security was almost perfect, but some low-rent federal technician figures out a way to get to him.”
She pushed herself up on her elbows and was looking down at me in the dark. Somehow, she still had nice-smelling breath. “We know they’re looking for us. Looking for you and me, I mean. Personally.”
“They have been since the satellite heist,” I said. “I never gave a shit before. We were covered.”
“So what’s going to happen?” she asked.
“Well, in the next three minutes, I’m going back to sleep. Unless you stick a finger in my ribs again. Christ, I almost pulled a muscle.”
“Why do you think Carp cracked Bobby’s computer?”
“Because I haven’t seen anything, anywhere, about the Norwalk virus. That’s the biggest thing he’s done so far, and I can’t find any trace of it in the DDC files.”
WHEN we finally got up the next morning, LuEllen insisted that we get out the tarot cards. I dug out the card box and did a spread called the Celtic Cross, which I like because it combines simplicity and flexibility. The Hanged Man came up again, but this time, as the basis of the problem rather than the outcome. The outcome spot was taken by a card from the minor arcana, the King of Cups, in the reversed position.
The Hanged Man’s Song Page 15