Then, in his twenties, had come the "great awakening," he said, sounding like a Chinese communist dictator. Sterling was selling a lot of computers but not enough to satisfy him. Why wasn't he more successful? He wasn't lazy. He wasn't stupid.
Then he realized the problem: He was inefficient.
And so were a lot of other salesmen.
So Sterling learned computer programming and spent weeks of eighteen-hour days, in a dark room, writing software. He hocked everything and started a company, one based on a concept that was either foolish or brilliant: Its most valuable asset wouldn't be owned by his company but by millions of other people, much of it free for the taking--information about themselves. Sterling began compiling a database that included potential customers in a number of service and manufacturing markets, the demographics of the area in which they were located, their income, marital status, the good or bad news about their financial and legal and tax situations, and as much other information--personal and professional--as he could buy, steal or otherwise find. "If there's a fact out there, I want it," he was quoted as saying.
The software he wrote, the early version of the Watchtower database management system, was revolutionary at the time, an exponential leap over the famed SQL--pronounced "sequel," Sachs had learned--program. In minutes Watchtower would decide which customers would be worthwhile to call on and how to seduce them, and which weren't worth the effort (but whose names might be sold to other companies for their own pitches).
The company grew like a monster in a science fiction film. Sterling changed the name to SSD, moved it to Manhattan and began to collect smaller companies in the information business to add to his empire. Though unpopular with privacy rights organizations, there'd never been a hint of a scandal at SSD, a la Enron. Employees had to earn their salaries--no one received obscenely high Wall Street bonuses--but if the company profited, so did they. SSD offered tuition and home-purchasing assistance, internships for children, and parents were given a year of maternity or paternity leave. The company was known for the familial way it treated its workers and Sterling encouraged hiring spouses, parents and children. Every month he sponsored motivational and team-building retreats.
The CEO was secretive about his personal life, though Sachs learned that he didn't smoke or drink and that no one had ever heard him utter an obscenity. He lived modestly, took a surprisingly small salary and kept his wealth in SSD stock. He shunned the New York social scene. No fast cars, no private jets. Despite his respect for the family unit among SSD employees, Sterling was twice divorced and unmarried at the moment. There were conflicting reports about children he'd fathered in his youth. He had several residences but he kept their whereabouts out of the public record. Perhaps because he knew the power of data, Andrew Sterling appreciated its dangers too.
Sterling, Sachs and Pulaski now came to the end of a long corridor and entered an exterior office, where two assistants had their desks, both of which were filled with perfectly ordered stacks of papers, file folders, printouts. Only one assistant was in at the moment, a young man, handsome, in a conservative suit. His nameplate read Martin Coyle. His area was the most ordered--even the many books behind him were arranged in descending order of size, Sachs was amused to see.
"Andrew." He nodded a greeting to his boss, ignoring the officers as soon as he noted that they hadn't been introduced. "Your phone messages are on your computer."
"Thank you." Sterling glanced at the other desk. "Jeremy's going to look over the restaurant for the press junket?"
"He did that this morning. He's running some papers over to the law firm. About that other matter."
Sachs marveled that Sterling had two personal assistants--apparently one for the inside work, the other handling out-of-the-office matters. At the NYPD detectives shared, if they had help at all.
They continued on to Sterling's own office, which wasn't much bigger than any other she'd seen in the company. And its walls were free of decoration. Despite the SSD logo of the voyeuristic window in the watchtower, Andrew Sterling's were curtained, cutting off what would be a magnificent view of the city. A ripple of claustrophobia coursed through her.
Sterling sat in a simple wooden chair, not a leather swivel throne. He gestured them into similar ones, though padded. Behind him were low shelves filled with books but, curiously, they were stacked with spines facing up, not outward. Visitors to his office couldn't see his choice of reading matter without walking past the man and looking down or pulling out a volume.
The CEO nodded at a pitcher and a half dozen inverted glasses. "That's water. But if you'd like some coffee or tea, I can have some fetched."
Fetched? She didn't think she'd ever heard anyone actually use the word.
"No, thank you."
Pulaski shook his head.
"Excuse me. Just one moment." Sterling picked up his phone, dialed. "Andy? You called."
Sachs deduced from the tone that it was someone close to him, though it was clearly a business call about a problem of some sort. Yet Sterling spoke emotionlessly. "Ah. Well, you'll have to, I think. We need those numbers. You know, they're not sitting on their hands. They'll make a move any day now. . . . Good."
He hung up and noticed Sachs watching him closely. "My son works for the company." A nod at a photo on his desk, showing Sterling with a handsome, thin young man who resembled the CEO. Both were wearing SSD T-shirts at some employee outing, maybe one of the inspirational retreats. They were next to each other but there was no physical contact between them. Neither was smiling.
So one question about his personal life had been answered.
"Now," he said, turning his green eyes on Sachs, "what's this all about? You mentioned some crime."
Sachs explained, "There've been several murders in the past few months in the city. We think that someone might've used information in your computers to get close to the victims, kill them and then used that and other information to frame innocent people for the crimes."
The man who knows everything . . .
"Information?" His concern seemed genuine. He was perplexed too, though. "I'm not sure how that could happen but tell me more."
"Well, the killer knew exactly what personal products the victims used and he planted traces of them as evidence at an innocent person's residence to connect them to the killing." From time to time the eyebrows above Sterling's emerald irises narrowed. He seemed genuinely troubled as she gave him the details about the theft of the painting and coins and the two sexual assaults.
"That's terrible. . . ." Troubled by the news, he glanced away from her. "Rapes?"
Sachs nodded grimly and then explained how SSD seemed to be the only company in the area that had access to all the information the killer had used.
He rubbed his face, nodding slowly.
"I can see why you're concerned. . . . But wouldn't it be easier for this killer just to follow the people he victimized and find out what they bought? Or even hack into their computers, break into their mailboxes, their homes, jot down their license plate numbers from the street?"
"But see, that's the problem: He could. But he'd have to do all of those things to get the information he needed. There've been four crimes at a minimum--we think there could probably be more--and that means up-to-date information on the four victims and four men he's setting up. The most efficient way to get that information would be to go through a data miner."
Sterling gave a smile, a delicate wince.
Sachs frowned and cocked her head.
He said, "Nothing wrong with that term, 'data miner.' The press has latched on to it and you see it everywhere."
Twenty million search-engine hits . . .
"But I prefer to call SSD a knowledge service provider--a KSP. Like an Internet service provider."
Sachs had a strange sensation; he seemed almost hurt by what she'd said. She wanted to tell him she wouldn't do it again.
Sterling smoothed a stack of papers on his organized desktop. At first s
he thought they were blank but then she noticed they were all turned facedown. "Well, believe me, if anyone at SSD is involved, I want to find out as much as you do. This could look very bad for us--knowledge service providers haven't been doing very well in the press or in Congress lately."
"First of all," Sachs said, "the killer would have bought most of the items with cash, we're pretty sure."
Sterling nodded. "He wouldn't want to leave any trace of himself."
"Right. But the shoes he bought mail order or online. Would you have a list of people who bought these shoes in these sizes in the New York area?" She handed him a list of the Altons, the Bass and the Sure-Tracks. "The same man would have bought all of them."
"What time period?"
"Three months."
Sterling made a phone call. He had a brief conversation and no more than sixty seconds later he was looking at his computer screen. He swiveled it so Sachs could see, though she wasn't sure what she was looking at--strings of product information and codes.
The CEO shook his head. "Roughly eight hundred Altons sold, twelve hundred Bass, two hundred Sure-Tracks. But no one person bought all three. Or even two pairs."
Rhyme had suspected that the killer, if he used information from SSD, would cover his tracks but they'd hoped this lead would pay off. Staring at the numbers, she wondered if the killer had used the identity-theft techniques he'd perfected on Robert Jorgensen to order the shoes.
"Sorry."
She nodded.
Sterling uncapped a battered silver pen and pulled a notepad toward him. In precise script he wrote several notes Sachs couldn't read, stared at it, nodded to himself. "You're thinking, I'd imagine, that the problem is an intruder, an employee, one of our customers or a hacker, right?"
Ron Pulaski glanced at Sachs and said, "Exactly."
"All right. Let's get to the bottom of it." He checked his Seiko watch. "I want some other people in here. It may take a few minutes. We have our Spirit Circles every Monday around this time."
"Spirit Circles?" Pulaski asked.
"Inspirational team meetings by the group leaders. They should be finished soon. We start at eight on the dot. But some go a little longer than others. Depending on the leader." He said, "Command, intercom, Martin."
Sachs laughed to herself. He was using the same sort of voice-recognition system that Lincoln Rhyme had.
"Yes, Andrew?" The voice came from a tiny box on the desk.
"I want Tom--security Tom--and Sam. Are they in Spirit Circles?"
"No, Andrew, but Sam's probably going to be in Washington all week. He won't be back till Friday. Mark, his assistant's in."
"Him, then."
"Yes, sir."
"Command, intercom, disconnect." To Sachs he said, "Should just be a moment."
She imagined that when Andrew Sterling summoned you, you materialized pretty quickly. He jotted a few more notes. As he did, she glanced at the company logo on the wall. When he was through writing she said, "I'm curious about that. The tower and the window. What's the significance of it?"
"On one level it just means observing data. But there's a second meaning." He smiled, pleased to be explaining this. "Do you know the concept of the broken window in social philosophy?"
"No."
"I learned about it years ago and never forgot it. The thrust is that in order to improve society you should concentrate on the small things. If you control those--or fix them--then the bigger changes will follow. Take housing projects with a high-crime problem. You can sink millions into increased police patrols and security cameras but if the projects still look dilapidated and dangerous, they'll stay dilapidated and dangerous. Instead of millions of dollars, put thousands into fixing the windows, painting, cleaning the halls. It may seem cosmetic but people will notice. They'll take pride in where they live. They'll start to report people who are threats and who don't look after their property.
"As I'm sure you know, that was the thrust of crime prevention in New York in the nineties. And it worked."
"Andrew?" came Martin's voice from the intercom. "Tom and Mark are here."
Sterling ordered, "Send them in." He set the paper he'd been jotting notes on directly in front of him. He gave Sachs a grim smile. "Let's see if anybody's been peeking through our window."
Chapter Nineteen
The doorbell rang and Thom ushered in a man in his early thirties, disheveled brown hair, jeans, a Weird Al Yankovic T-shirt under a shabby brown sports coat.
You couldn't be in the forensics game nowadays without being computer literate but both Rhyme and Cooper recognized their limitations. When it was clear that there were digital implications of the 522 case, Sellitto had requested some help from the NYPD Computer Crimes Unit, an elite group of thirty-two detectives and support staff.
Rodney Szarnek strode into the room, glanced at the nearest monitor and said, "Hey," as if he were speaking to the hardware. Similarly when he glanced toward Rhyme he expressed no interest in his physical condition whatsoever, only in the wireless environmental control unit attached to the armrest. He seemed impressed.
"Your day off?" Sellitto asked, glancing at the slim young man's outfit, his voice making it clear he didn't approve. Rhyme knew the detective was old school; police officers should dress appropriately.
"Day off?" Szarnek replied, missing the dig. "No. Why would I have a day off?"
"Just wondering."
"Heh. So, now, what's the story?"
"We need a trap."
Lincoln Rhyme's theory about strolling into SSD and just plain asking about a killer wasn't as naive as it seemed. When he'd seen on the company Web site that SSD's PublicSure division supported police departments, his hunch was that NYPD was a customer. If that was the case, then the killer might have access to the department files. A fast call revealed that, yes, the department was a client. PublicSure software and SSD consultants provided data management services for the city, including consolidation of case information, reports and records. If a patrolman on the street needed a warrant check, or a detective new to a homicide needed the case's history, PublicSure helped get the information to his desk or squad-car computer or even his PDA or cell phone, in minutes.
By sending Sachs and Pulaski to the company and asking who might have accessed the data files about the victims and fall guys, 522 could learn they were on to him and try to get into the NYPD system through PublicSure to look at the reports. If he did, they might be able to trace who had accessed the files.
Rhyme explained the situation to Szarnek, who nodded knowingly--as if he set up traps like this every day. He was taken aback, though, when he learned what company the killer might have a connection to. "SSD? The biggest data miner in the world. They got the scoop on all of God's children."
"Is that a problem?"
His carefree geek image faltered and he answered softly, "I hope not."
And he set to work with their trap, explaining what he was doing. He stripped from the files any details about the case they didn't want 522 to know and manually transferred those sensitive files to a computer that had no Internet access. He then put an alarmed visual traceroute program in front of the "Myra Weinburg Sexual Assault/Homicide" file on the NYPD server. And added subfiles to tempt the killer, like "Suspects' whereabouts," "Forensic analysis" and "Witnesses," all of which contained only general notes about crime-scene procedures. If anyone accessed it, either hacking in or through authorized channels, a notice of the person's ISP and physical location would be instantly sent to Szarnek. They could tell immediately if the one checking out the file was a cop with a legitimate inquiry or was somebody on the outside. If so, Szarnek would notify Rhyme or Sellitto, who'd have the ESU team head to the location immediately. Szarnek also included a large amount of material and background, such as public information on SSD, all of it encrypted, to make sure that the killer spent plenty of time in the system deciphering the data and giving them a better chance to find him.
"How long will
it take?"
"Fifteen, twenty minutes."
"Good. And when you've got that finished, I also want to see if somebody could have hacked in from the outside."
"Cracked SSD?"
"Uh-huh."
"Heh. They'll have firewalls on their firewalls on their firewalls."
"Still, we need to know."
"But if one of their people is the killer, I assume you don't want me to call the company up and coordinate with them?"
"Right."
Szarnek's face clouded. "I'll just try to break in, I guess."
"You can do that legally?"
"Yes and no. I'll only test the 'walls. It's not a crime if I don't actually get into their system and bring it crashing down in a really embarrassing media event that lands us all in jail." He added ominously, "Or worse."
"Okay, but I want the trap first. ASAP." Rhyme glanced at the clock. Sachs and Pulaski were already spreading the word about the case down at the Gray Rock.
Szarnek pulled a heavy portable computer out of his satchel and set it on a table nearby. "Any chance I could get a . . . Oh, thanks."
Thom was bringing around a coffeepot and cups.
"Just what I was going to ask for. Extra sugar, no milk. You can't take the geek out of the geek, even when he's a cop. Never got in the habit of this thing called sleep." He dumped in sugar, swirled it and drank half while Thom stood there. The aide refilled the cup. "Thanks. Now, what've we got here?" He was looking over the workstation where Cooper was perched. "Ouch."
"Ouch?"
"You're running on a cable modem with one point five MBPs? You know they make computer screens in color now, and there's this thing called the Internet."
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