Crack-Up (37 page)
Authors: Eric Christopherson
Paranoia, you should recognize, is a survival skill—when it’s not getting out of hand.
It sharpens your instincts when disease isn’t dulling them.
I now followed its lead.
“Tell me about the project.
The one with John Helms and the meetings at DARPA in the Pentagon.”
“It was John’s project,” Pitt said, “at the start.
Not ours, not the FBI’s, not the
John came to us with it six months ago, not long after his company had been hired to develop some customized software for a newly-created private
US
database firm called, ‘Financial Datacorp International.’
The firm’s investors read like a Wall Street Who’s Who list.
Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, American Express, etcetera.
Some of the other founders are major foreign concerns, like Deutsche bank.”
“Why was this firm created?”
“Ostensibly, it serves as the financial industry’s response to the anti-terrorism regulations, the Patriot Act, and so forth.
These regulations require banks, for example, to conduct in-depth background checks on new and existing financial clients.
But in truth the database is being used for multiple purposes.”
“Including data mining?” I said.
“Correct.
The database is enormous.
It consists of risk relevant information from more than fifteen thousand public sources around the world.”
I whistled.
“Fifteen thousand.
What do you mean by, ‘risk relevant’ information?”
“As a practical matter, any information.”
“Really?” I said.
“Orwell warned us about Big Brother, but not Big Business.”
“With data mining, the one thing you can’t predict is what type of data will prove key.
So this database has it all.
We’re talking thick, rich dossiers on millions of Americans.
But the public doesn’t know that.
More importantly, it hasn’t any right to know, under current law.”
I shot up from my seat.
I gaped at Pitt.
“I get it now, I get it.
John Helms was a patriot, you said.
He supported the anti-terrorism fight.
And he knew all about data mining, knew what DARPA was trying to do for the
US
intelligence community with the Total
But Congress was a roadblock.
So when Financial Datacorp came along, when it hired his company to design its database software, John saw a way around Congress, a way to complete what DARPA couldn’t.”
Pitt smiled.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
Now it was me pacing the carpet.
“John Helms saw that what DARPA wanted to create—but Congress wouldn’t allow—already existed in the data warehouse belonging to Wall Street, or should I say, Financial Datacorp International.”
“Very nearly, yes.”
“And Financial Datacorp International planned to sell access to its database.”
“Thanks to the Patriot Act, government agencies have legal access to all commercial databases.”
I pointed an accusing finger at Pitt.
“So John Helms came to you—the Secret Service, the FBI, the
“Exactly.
He was designing a system that would allow us to lay our own, confidential government records systems on top of Financial Datacorp’s collected mass of public records, and create a kind of uber-database from which to do our data mining.”
“Holy shit.”
“Just think of it, Argus.
It’s a god damn miracle, that’s what it is!
The
The FBI can hunt down even the most completely unsuspected serial killers—and all their sick doppelgangers.
And don’t forget us, the Secret Service.
Don’t forget about us.
“From here on out, in every city or town the president or the VP ever visits, we’ll know who to watch out for, who to surveil, whether they’ve ever entered the justice system or not.
Because we’ll know Lee Harvey Oswald’s own doppelgangers, and Squeaky Fromme’s, and John Hinckley’s, and—”
“Pitt—”
“C’mon, Argus, get with it!
You haven’t been gone that long.
You and I both know, it was only a matter of time before we lived through another day in
Dallas
, circa 1963!
But now that doesn’t have to be!
Doesn’t ever have to be!”
“I wouldn’t count on it.”
“Wait’ll you see—”
“Someone hacked into your precious database, Pitt.
Used it to slay John Helms, to frame me.”
“What?
What the hell are you talking about?”
I stared out the window through the small crook of space between Pitt’s head and left shoulder.
I’d spied my very own doppelganger skimming the pool for leaves with a ten-foot pool net—an identical twin of mine, right down to the clothes on my back.
I closed my eyes and shook my head vigorously in an effort to make him go away.
Chapter 39
Nathan Pitt listened to me in wild-eyed silence, as if rendered mute by hare-brained chatter.
Three paranoid schizophrenics.
A naked flight attendant.
A deadly cult of puppet masters.
Hell bubbling up out of a deep, dark data mine . . .
When I’d finished, the Secret Service director broke his silence, not to ridicule me, but to summon an analyst from the agency’s Office of Protective Research by telephone.
The
Treasury
Building
, where the analyst was on duty in the bowels of Secret Service headquarters, was only three miles away.
We met the analyst at Pitt’s front door less than twenty minutes later.
“Dan Chase,” Pitt said to me by way of introducing a mole-eyed young man in a JC Penney blue suit with a twitchy mustache and a narrow head tilted to one side, as if submissively exposing throat to his pack leader.
“Dan is one our data miners.
Trained him at Carnegie-Mellon.
Dan, I want you to listen closely to Argus, and tell me whether his notions are technically feasible.”
“Yes, sir,” Dan said.
“As you wish, sir.”
He offered his throat to me.
Then recognition crossed his face.
“Argus?
Argus Ward, you mean?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“Any weapons on you?”
“No, sir.”
“Call me paranoid, but I’m going to frisk you anyway.”
I patted him down.
He was clean.
Pitt led the way back to his office.
Dan couldn’t take his eyes off me.
“I’ve seen the tape,” he said.
“We’ve all seen the tape.
Of you and President Cooper, I mean.
In real time, in slow motion, backwards, forwards, frame by frame.
But I still don’t get it.
How did you know?
The assailant hadn’t blinked an eyelash when you took your initial step forward to blanket the president.”
“I tripped,” I said.
“Thus are legends born.”
It was a stock response, built for laughs, though no one laughed this time.
The truth—involving my disease—wasn’t easy to explain.
“Let’s get on with this,” Pitt said.
“A few questions first,” I said to Dan.
We all remained standing on the Persian carpet.
“How many millions of Americans would I find represented in the agency’s data mine, combined with that private data mine belonging to Wall Street?
Because I know you’re able to query the two as if they were one, thanks to that dead patriot John Helms and his firm’s customized software.”
“Argus!” Pitt said, like a warning shot against sarcasm.
“It’s how you dodge all the congressional constraints,” I continued.
Dan’s face registered surprise, Pitt’s anger.
“I told you,” Pitt said, “it’s all perfectly legal.”
“It’s a loophole.
And you well know, Mister Director, that if Congress ever finds out about it, they’ll seal it shut fast.”
“Just ask your question,” Pitt told me.
“Just answer my question,” I told Dan.
“Uh . . . well, sir, we have data—at least some data—on every citizen in the country.
Roughly two hundred and seventy million people.
But how much data we have per individual varies greatly, ranging from—”
“How much data on known criminals?”
“Plenty, sir.
We have a complete criminal history for every American citizen born after eighteen sixty.
Arrests, convictions, dispositions.
We have FBI intelligence on—”
“And what do you know—or what could you unearth—about the multitudes of people who’ve never been convicted, or arrested, but are, in any event, guilty of a crime, or susceptible to committing one?
By virtue of a predisposition, I mean.
Or a desire.
Follow me?”
He nodded.
“We could identify them, sir.
We are, in fact, identifying individuals predisposed to attempts at political assassination.
I’m working on that project team myself.”
“But you could, in theory, develop a method for identifying potential perpetrators of any crime, am I right?”
“Well . . . Yes, sir.”
Recalling flight attendant Elizabeth Hardtack and her unseeing plane passengers, as well as Baltimore furniture store owner, Bernard Simpson, I said, “And finally, Dan, what about the people who are, let’s say ‘inordinately susceptible’ to breaking the law as a result of blackmail, other forms of coercion, or simply being conned?”
Dan blinked as if blinded by harsh light, or startled by a lurid, never-before-seen color.
He cleared his vulnerable throat before saying, “We could identify them too, I think.”
“You think?”
“Forgive me, sir, but it would be easier on me if you could, uh, provide a concrete example.”
“Surely.
Let’s say I wanted—it doesn’t matter why—to see a woman committing indecent exposure.
A flight attendant stripping naked on an airplane, let’s say.
I’d be willing to pay her.”
Dan’s mustache snickered.
“Okay.”
“So find me a candidate.”
I waited with crossed arms as the data miner, training his mole eyes on the vast complexities of Persian carpet, dug through his own data banks.
Pitt stepped away to his expansive window view.
I didn’t dare look outside again.
The omnipresent hum of the white noise generator broke once with a crackle, as if an electronic bug had been zapped.