From Filth & Mud (13 page)

Karen heard pride in Manny’s voice, the dangerous, unexamined kind. “And what about the chrysalis design in this? Where do I fit into this equation?” She asked because she was noticeably absent in Manny’s description of the scientific and financial developments.

“Oh, of course, we haven’t forgotten about you. Like I said, you are integral to this. I will discuss it with Dr. LaPierre so that we can all meet and discuss how we move forward. Mr. Eckert will be pleased to meet you, I’m sure. He’s the CEO of BioSyn. Mr. Eckert is a nice guy and appreciates hard work and intelligence. He allows us pretty much free reign and he never micromanages the science part of the business. That’s all I care about, of course. Plus there are perks that come along with being owned by a large company. Look at this facility. It’s a blessing!”

“It’s sure something.” She tried hiding her concern though she could not quite filter it out of her voice. She followed the proud researcher out of the lab and back to the anteroom, where they helped each other with the complex safety decontamination protocols. The two exited the facility, Manny still speaking about the wonders that their breakthrough would provide to medicine and science, while she was silently perturbed by his grandiosity which bordered on the delusional.

Karen returned to Boston the next day with promises of meeting the venerable Mr. Eckert and Dr. LaPierre. She did not expect that her work would be stolen.

- - - - - - -

William LaPierre rode the elevator to the top-floor penthouse accompanied by two gorilla-sized security goons. He stood nervously, avoiding eye contact, staring at the digital display and hoping that the numbers would change faster. He could feel his knees bending beyond their locked position. They were starting to rattle, sending reverberations up to his clenched jaw. He needed a drink. He’d had a shot of scotch before stepping out of the company limousine; he should have had a couple more.

His mind was focused on what he would say but he knew that he’d manage to sound incompetent, scared, and untruthful. He did not know what was going on or why it was happening. He did not know how the situation had gotten this out of control so rapidly. He was a dead man. The elevator mercifully announced its arrival and the doors swished away into their recessed slots. He hesitated at first, but had no choice but to continue as the knuckle-draggers forced him physically forward.

William sat and waited, shifting nervously in his chair, as the two goons leered at him with piercing stares that stabbed holes through his back. The fear of a very real stabbing kept him pinned to the chair, though he wanted to run. His thoughts raced to the first time that he had revealed Lilith’s existence to Eckert. He had wanted to impress his new boss back then. Something inside of him had been seeking solace and Eckert seemed to be a likely substitute for Darcy’s business acumen. William suddenly felt like vomiting.

- - - - - - -

“Come on Bill where are we with this?” Eckert’s majestically coiffed hair tapered to neatly appointed sideburns. His perfectly tanned skin caressed his chiseled cheekbones and smoothed over his cleft chin.

“We…,” William stammered. He was always
Bill
when he was in Eckert’s presence.

“Don’t give me any excuses. I just want to hear the status… Just the facts, like in Dragnet, right Bill?”

“I never watched it.”

“I don’t care Bill!”

“I don’t know how to tell you this but the deliveries cannot go on as scheduled. All of the contracts need to be delayed until we figure out this bonding issue. It’s got everyone stressed out. I mean, why the hurry? Our Chinese partners have been very understanding about the process so far.”

“Bill we need to proceed now. I thought that you had this thing figured out. You came to me saying that the results in the clinic trials had been improved upon. Is Lilith fixed or not?”

“I know I did. The treatment is much improved. I’m just trying to understand.”

“Don’t! It’s not yours to understand. I’ve made my decision. We are going into production so that we can scale up for the Chinese trials.”

“But we are so far behind… It would be almost impossible at this point.”

“Get it done. I don’t care what you have to do.” Eckert eased suddenly, summoning a smile across his face, and turned to Bill, softly placing a calming palm on his shoulder. “You’re a smart guy. You’ll figure it out. Just tell them that something needs to be tweaked before we can deliver the final version. Call it a bonding issue or whatever other credible excuse you can come up with.” His grip tightened around Bill’s shoulder, it was no longer comforting as he led him out.

William stood in the elevator, numbed by the conversation. Eckert had been so intense. He had to make this right. He had to get back up to Syracuse by nightfall. He rode the elevator down to the waiting limousine. It would take him to BioSyn’s private hanger along the East River. William hated delivering bad news, but for the third week in a row he would be ordering his staff to work sixteen hour shifts.

December 2003: Fort Meade, MD

Colonel Davenport raised her head out of her palms astounded by what she had just heard.

“It’s not going to be ready in time.”

“What the fuck do you mean? Jesus! You people have had unlimited funding for how long now? You practically had the thing handed to you by our assets in Moscow and you can’t put it together? Is that what you’re fucking telling me?” She glared, daring one of them to say a word.

“Ma’am we’ve had problems making the software translate. The Russians have used it on a targeted basis. The algorithms work when you’re dealing with finite possibilities: small data-sets, a hundred people at most. Usually they know their target,” Aiden replied.

“So what you’re saying is that, for the NSA to get its man we need to know who we are going after in the first place? What the fuck? Let the FBI deal with that shit. We aren’t a fucking law enforcement agency. We are a fucking intelligence agency and we need to know shit before these terrorist assholes know it.”

Aiden had never served in the armed forces, but he couldn’t help but call Col. Davenport,
ma’am
. She’d probably castrate him if he didn’t, either way he wasn’t about to find out.  “Ma’am the program is not fully functional because we just don’t have the computing power available. It practically doesn’t exist outside of a few corporate labs and they’ve been working on these things for decades. The variables alone are exponential.”

“So it’s not a data problem?”

“Yes, it is a data problem, but it’s exactly that there is
too much
data to handle.” Aiden tried to let that sink in for a moment. The NSA, in all of its glorious wisdom, and in a fit of extreme overreaction to the September 11
th
terrorist attacks, had decided to tap into every major communications network around the globe. They had borrowed oceanographic research submarines to dive down to the depths of the oceans where massive telecommunications cables lay buried beneath miles of water. There they had spliced into them and had run parallel cables to buoys overhead. These buoys transmitted the data to geosynchronous satellites which would relay the data to massive collection centers throughout the eastern seaboard. The problem was that the collection centers did not have the necessary storage capacity for the immense and ever increasing dataflow of the Internet. The NSA was now propositioning Congress to expand its dark budget to the tune of another $50 billion dollars over the next two years in order to construct enormous data centers out west somewhere on federal land.

And now, here they were, two years after the attacks, inundated by data and without a clear idea of what to do with it. Of course, the NSA’s answer to the mess was to keep building storage sites until they figured it out, because somewhere in all of those zettabytes of information there had to be the proverbial needle. The NSA’s mindset was that if it was tasked with finding the needle in the haystack, by God it would collect every haystack. Shit, it would collect the switchgrass before it was even culled and dried
.
Aiden had heard that they were planning on building yottabyte capable facilities out in the middle of Mormon country, Utah. The whole exercise seemed pointless at times and if not for the billions of dollars that Washington was throwing around, no one would have taken them seriously. But, who could turn down all of that money? Aiden’s company had been awarded a $500 million dollar contract and stood to earn a few hundred million dollars more over the next few years: a handsome fee to service the software platform that they were creating. Aiden would never admit this aloud, but he would have attempted the project at cost, just to see if it could be done, and if
he
would be the one to pull it off. Why not? It was the stuff of science-fiction.

- - - - - - -

Present Day: Silicon Valley, CA

The last ten years had been a boon for Aiden and his company, Collier Analytics. While all of his competitors had been concentrating on creating the next social network or online massive multiplayer games, his little software firm had concentrated on one thing, mass data collection, and boy was it profitable. His elite group of software coders, some called them hackers, had managed to design a beautiful little string of code that could tap into every single one of those social networks, games, and every last strand of the Web. When infiltrated, this elegant code would monitor all of the activity on a particular device to include Internet usage, key strokes, programs executed, and word documents. The code would activate cameras and microphones on all networked devices and begin to clandestinely record and analyze any activity within sight or hearing. It would then rate the activity in terms of threat level in a covert game of “
hot or not
”. Rhea Patel coined the term. She was one of Aiden’s best coders and had a penchant for valley-girl speak and expensive handbags. Most of the coder underground credited her for writing the originating code that would eventually spawn the entirety of mobile-dating apps, ubiquitous in every bar.

Aiden’s team had come to call the little code, “Cupid”. Cupid’s job was to make
hot
matches and ignore the
nots
. Once Cupid made a hot match it would gather the IP address of the user and the suspect data, which had triggered the hot match. This information would then be parsed into small, encrypted, data packets and be sent out into the Web bouncing around the globe through remote servers that were inconspicuously owned by the NSA. Once the information arrived at Collier Analytics, it was decrypted and reviewed by an independent program called “Aphrodite”. Aphrodite would confirm or reject Cupid’s matches. If Aphrodite
loved
the match, then an analyst on Aiden’s team would be notified. Aiden ensured that all
love connections
were forwarded to him concurrently. Knowledge meant power in his business, and he was not about to abdicate any of it, least of all to an overly-eager analyst with delusions of grandeur, or worse yet, one motivated by some
cause nobles.

Collier Analytics had done a remarkable job developing both Cupid and Aphrodite. Cupid had a confirmation rate of 99.992% and in the years since going live, Cupid and Aphrodite, the basis of Project Yente, had identified three active terrorist cells which had yielded the arrests of fourteen individuals. Fourteen arrests however, were not enough to satisfy the Bureau of Homeland Security or its superiors in the White House. The NSA believed that Project Yente was flawed. They had to, because they had to show their superiors at DHS and the White House that the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on electronic and signals intelligence were yielding results. No, they weren’t happy with Project Yente, and that unhappiness was trickling down on Aiden’s head. The NSA’s critique was that Project Yente was far too constricted. The reason that it had yielded so few results, in their opinion, was not because there were not any more terrorists out there, but rather that Cupid and Aphrodite were too discerning in their design. The NSA wanted a broader dredging net with smaller holes and they didn’t care about sifting through bycatch to get their fish.

Aiden objected at first, but when confronted with the possibility of Project Yente losing its funding, he relented. His decision to play ball had been handsomely rewarded with a no-bid, off-the-books contract from the NSA’s black budget; Homeland Security’s unquestioned source of operational funds. It was spent unilaterally, and always in an ethically suspect manner. Aiden recalled the dust up in Cyprus in 2009 when the newly-sworn President’s son had stabbed his girlfriend to death in their penthouse suite after a night of binging on synthetic cannabinoids. She, unfortunately for the President, was a Mossad operative, who may or may not have been working his son as a source. In either case, there were reparations to be paid to the Israeli government, and fabricating a believable death cost money. There had been suspicion that the Russians may have known about the kerfuffle, but if they had, they never raised it. Cyprus was the money-laundering playground for Russian oligarchs and the Kremlin was known to keep close watch on the investments of the Russian leader’s closest friends.

Aiden shook his head and dismissed the thought as he looked through the latest batch of Aphrodite matches that now cluttered his screen. “Garbage,” he muttered as he threw the tablet onto the chic, Italian design, Progetto 1 desk of his home office which overlooked the entirety of the palatial, modern-style home that his wife had designed ten years ago. She hadn’t been around for the last two, but she still called when she needed money. He couldn’t blame her really. She was only thirty and he was closer to fifty; closer than he’d ever thought he’d be. He had never allowed himself to take their relationship seriously, though he did love her, but he was a realist, and she was in it for the money, and that was okay.

Aiden looked at his phone, one missed teleconference so far; subject: debugging matrix. He was glad he missed it. He abhorred getting out of bed before 10 a.m. generally and he was allergic to work specifically. He didn’t do much coding these days anyways, so it wasn’t as if the company couldn’t function without him. He was a tech dinosaur and could hardly keep up, but he had a good excuse to not be present nowadays; his talents were needed elsewhere. He was the company’s face and name and he was the only one capable of raising the capital to keep their venture going. That task had gotten significantly easier since Project Yente had come online. Now he only needed to stroke the egos of a few Defense Department generals and intelligence officials to get his funding. He shuttered at the hustle of the old days
.
Back then, his time had been spent in Washington, D.C. lobbying hard for every pretty penny. He had wasted countless hours and millions of dollars greasing the palms of every congressman that could help him secure funding for a new cyber-security pilot program that none of them had heard of, or were interested in. It was 1996 and the Internet was young and dominated by dial-up modems and America Online. Most of Congress wasn’t aware of its existence. To them, it might as well have been a series of tubes where messages were sent via a container propelled by a vacuum pump. The only thing that Aiden could point to back then as an example of the potential power of this tool was how it was used to avoid total annihilation of the Earth in the film ‘Independence Day’. Not surprisingly, that argument had not been persuasive.

The D.C. of yesteryear had been a more fiscally prudent place. That is to say, a lot of money had to be spent on convincing politicians to keep or expand funding for every federal program. Washingtonians were being wined, dined, flown, and blown in the most expensive bars, restaurants, private jets, and by the best escort services throughout their constituencies. It was a good time to be a politician and one of their aides, but it hurt to be Aiden and they knew it. So, for as much as he hated ass-kissing his present suitors at the NSA, he feared having to return to the base halls of the Capitol Building with his hat in hand. No, life in the NSA’s harem, as a concubine, had its benefits. The primary ones being, that he never had to ask for money, and that he didn’t have to tell anyone what he was doing.

Besides raising money for Project Yente, the only preoccupations that Aiden allowed himself over the last decade were his frequent trips to Russia. These were not pleasure trips, though he often enjoyed time on the ski slopes. No, these were recruiting trips. While most technologically gifted American kids now dreamed of writing the next billion dollar code hoping to follow in the footsteps of Zuckerberg, Dorsey, Glass, Stone, and Williams, their Russian counterparts were making names for themselves in more nefarious ways. Why wouldn’t they? Twenty-first century Russia had proved to be every bit as bleak for those without money and power as all of the previous centuries before it. For those Russian nerds who were not lucky enough to make it to California through their politically connected parents, there were not many alternatives to a life of petty hacking and identity theft. Eastern Europe had grown into a cybercrime hub throughout the early and mid-2000s and most of the kingpins were a tight-knit group of twenty-somethings from the old Soviet bloc.

So when the FSB or Troika organized crime syndicates came a calling with their promises of riches, many of those whiz kids could not resist the opportunity to graduate to the big time. Aiden had been intrigued by this land of skilled, cheap, and truly capitalistic labor. He frequented Darknet sites in search of the best coders available. He was often surprised to find the sheer celebrity status of some of these coders. One such coder, who was rumored to be seventeen years old and went by the name, Tovarich, had designed the code that had brought down several major U.S. retailers during Black Friday. The attack had caused untold millions of dollars in network damage and hundreds of millions more in lost revenue. Tovarich’s exploits soon became the stuff of legend after he revealed on a Russian, hackers-only, social network that he had created his infamous code over a weekend bender fueled by several liters of vodka, too many bowls of marijuana to keep track of, several grams of cocaine, and a nearly inconsumable amount of energy drinks.