Human (21 page)

While this trait made him very unpopular in college, it was also the key to his being noticed as an exceptional field agent at the CIA and ultimately brought him to the attention of the IAEC-FOU. After all, when one is unwavering in his belief that there are objective truths to be found, he is more likely to find them. Finding objective facts was exactly why the three men had reconvened at Julian's house after meeting with Kitty.

"Gentlemen," Gonzales said, "we have barely breached an outer circle, but I firmly believe that we may have gained information tonight which will inform our next contact. So let's get down to brass tacks. You've got the notes, Mr. Cruz, give us a quick briefing."

Josey turned his attention from the coffee maker to a black Samsonite briefcase he had placed by his chair. "I can do better than a briefing, boss, I've already sketched an organization chart based on what we learned at the steakhouse."  He pulled a piece of notepaper from the briefcase and lay it on the table. so they could all see it at once.

The paper Josey showed the other two men looked like this:

             
Elijah Smith  - (other family?)

Sam Takahashi

             
|

Kitty

             
  |

Julian

             
    |

Moviestar

             
             
Hermelinda

             
             
|

             
             
Baby

             
             
Myra

             
             
|
             

             
             
Private Investigator

             
             
             
Dr. Bayron

             
             
             
|

             
             
             
Sharky

             
             
             
             
Alice

             
             
             
             
|

             
             
             
             
(?)

             
             
             
             
|

             
             
             
             
Nursing Home

"And I trust you have already received C.I.P.'s on all of the individuals that Kitty named?"  Gonzales asked.

"They came in already. I have them on my laptop."

"C.I.P.'s?" Julian asked.

"Confidential Individual Profiles. Josey's a CIA man. The CIA is constantly gathering information from both overt and covert, public and private sources on every individual in the country. When he orders a C.I.P. all that information is compiled into a detailed profile. They didn't have that kind of technology when you and I were working together and I don't trust it either. But, when you see what he's got you're going to be amazed. So, lets start at the beginning and see how it all lays out." 

Cruz opened his laptop on the kitchen table and the three men moved their chairs so they could all see the screen. Julian was embarrassed that he was the only one who had to put on reading glasses. Screen after screen of photos and phone numbers and addresses and other information began scrolling by faster than the eye could see.

Julian knew that the CIA had the capability of producing information on almost any one of interest to the security of the United States and its allies. He was shocked to find out that this capacity extended to strippers, babies, and night nurses. He was also shocked to find out the depth of the information contained in each profile:  photographs (some appeared to be from high school yearbooks), tax return information, credit card usage information, cell phone records, medical and dental records, driving records, magazine subscriptions, public library checkouts, and much more. Most frightening of all to Julian, was a separate folder in each CIP relating to internet activity.

"How many pages of information do you have there?"  Julian asked as the screens flew by under his nose.

"A little under ten thousand, I'd say," Cruz answered.

"That's a lot of data, Mr. Cruz," Gonzales noted, "you stay here and start parsing it. Find me some patterns or anomalies in that mess. In the meantime, my old friend and I are going to do some field work."

             
Julian Waterstone glanced at his kitchen clock, it was already after 11:00 o'clock at night and he was tired. "I think you're on your own, Captain. This old man's bedtime has long since passed and I'm beat."

"Have a cup of coffee and come with me. I really don't think you'll mind. I want to see the Moviestar Bar and I believe you know the way."

Julian found himself pouring some coffee into his travel mug and putting on his jacket. He figured it was no use to fight. He recalled his first ever conversation with Gonzales fifty years earlier. He had never really forgotten it. "Private Waterstone," he said, "before you ask any questions I want to make it perfectly clear that I could kill you in less then 6 seconds. Now here's what I need."  Julian figured that time was now down to less than two seconds. But Julian was an older man now, and really didn't mind the idea of dying as much as he did when he was a private during the war. "Can I at least ask why are we going to the Moviestar now?"  He ventured.

"Six seconds," Gonzales replied clearly remembering his introduction of years past and shooting Julian a dirty look. Julian was taken aback at the apparent mind-reading trick. "Remember that?"  Gonzales said now smiling.

Julian spoke through an unexpected laugh, "I didn't forget."

"But since you asked..."  Gonzales continued as they walked to his car, "if you look at the chart that my partner made, you would notice that while there are lots of people we're going to be looking at there are only three places that we know of so far:  the SmithCorp Building, the nursing home, and the Moviestar Topless Bar. I seriously doubt it'd be easy to get into the SmithCorp Building this late, and I suspect the nursing home doesn't welcome midnight visitors. This Takahashi, he seems to be a daytime drinker, so If we try to get here before him tomorrow, that's probably going to be a little conspicuous. Since we really don't have any time to waste, I'm thinking there would be no better time to go to the bar than right now. We go, you let me take a look around, I'll place a few bugs around. Just introduce me as your old war buddy and have a few beers. Hell, cut loose if you want. The CIA's got your tab and I'm driving."

CHAPTER XVI.

Takahashi had been in Court all morning. Instead of going back to his office, he decided to stop off the Moviestar Topless Bar and Grill to have a quick drink. That had been nearly two hours earlier. Takahashi's office was barely an office. He had long since given up on practicing any kind of real law. He had never been comfortable at large law firms. Even though he was regarded as something of brilliant mind, especially when it came to strategic thinking, he had become more comfortable taking his place in the background and not in the spotlight. He was always, "of counsel" or "associating with" or "consulting on the case."  That way he never really had his own clients or needed his own staff or even needed an office for that matter. But he kept a little office anyway mostly just to take naps in or to sober up in before driving home preferring to spend the bulk of his day sipping beers and reading his papers and magazines at his usual seat at the Bar.

Even though they had completed the memorial service/press conference, Kitty had continued to work with Takahashi. She stationed herself in the reception area, answered the phone, sorted the mail, and straightened everything out. She brought in plants and flowers and made the whole place presentable. Takahashi was pleasantly surprised by how many people she knew who needed a lawyer. Every day she had some friend or associate come in who needed a contract looked at or who had been pulled over for driving while intoxicated. He genuinely enjoyed doing these little "quick-cash" kind of cases even though he certainly didn't need the money. He felt they kept him sharp and, even though Smith was actually paying her salary, he was always happy to give her little bonuses for the matters she referred.

It was therefore not unexpected that Kitty answered the phone when Myra called. "Sam Takahashi's Office," Kitty chirped cheerily.

"Oh, hi Kitty," Myra said. "Is Mr. Takahashi there?"

"No. Do you want to guess where he is?"

"Three sheets to the wind would be my guess." Myra answered.

"Do you want me to call him on his cell?"  Kitty asked.

"Yeah, I think this is something Mr. Smith wants handled right away. I was hoping to meet the two of you today."

"I'll get him back to the office. What time did you want to come?"

"I can be there at 3:00. You think you can sober him up by then? 

Kitty replied, "I'll see to it personally."

"Thanks, Kitty. See you at three then. Bye."  Myra said, hanging up the phone.

Kitty dialed Takahashi's cell phone number by heart. It rang and rang and rang and eventually went to his voicemail. She sent a text message: Meeting at ofc 3pm 2day. She waited a few minutes, but there was no response. She had more or less expected that she would have to go down to the Moviestar and personally escort him back to the office and fill him up with coffee. She didn't mind, it would be nice to see Frieda and the rest of the gang and it was just a couple of blocks away.  She grabbed her coat and walked to the bar.

To get to the tables, Kitty had to walk past the bar. "Hi, Kitty! How's the honest life, you lucky cunt!"  Frieda shouted out jocularly.

Kitty moved close to Frieda to avoid broadcasting her response, "It beats the hell out of dancing, chicky. Is my boss here?"

"You know he is, doll."  Frieda said as Kitty turned to walk into the stage area and then added as an afterthought, "...and tell him to settle his tab!"

Kitty lay her hand gently on Takahashi's shoulder so as not to startle him, but he looked up surprised anyway. "Myra wants to meet you back at the office at three. I told her I'd deliver you sober. Let's go."

Takahashi looked at his watch and saw that it was already 1:30pm. "What's it about?"  He slurred.

Kitty, tried lifting him from under his shoulder, but he wouldn't budge. "Listen," she said, "She didn't tell me what it was about so, I assume its not something she wants to talk about over the phone. She just said its something Smith wants handled right away."

"As long as it isn't more lost Russians..." Takahashi mumbled as he stood up and stumbled toward the door.

"Take care of your tab, Mr. Takahashi." Kitty instructed him as she led him out. She was so used to his intoxicated ramblings that she had no curiosity at all about his lost Russians remark.

Takahashi fumbled in his pocket and put two crumpled hundred dollar bills on the bar.

Kitty maneuvered Takahashi down the street, into the office building, onto the elevator, and ultimately onto his desk chair. She brought him a large cup of coffee from the kitchenette which Takahashi raised to his lips, inhaling the steam as if it were a bouquet of roses. She had no idea how he did it, but he already appeared to be sharp and sober. "You better have a breath mint before Myra gets here," she said while handing him one, "they're never going to hire you again if they think you're drunk all time."

"Kitty,"  Takahashi replied, "I've known Smith for more than 60 years. Believe me when I tell you, he would never hire me again if he thought I had stopped getting drunk all the time."

Myra arrived a little before the 3:00 meeting time carrying a large briefcase. Kitty led her back to Takahashi's office and turned to leave. Myra stopped her, saying, "Actually Kitty, Smith wants you in on this too."

Kitty was surprised, but not unhappy. She came back in and sat in one of Takahashi's client chairs next to Myra.

Myra pulled a large file out of her briefcase and handed it to Takahashi. Takahashi started looking through the file and then looked up at Myra quizzically.

Myra explained, "those are the plans for the data center which houses Mr. Smith now. He wants to build an exact duplicate, but he does not want it to be traceable back to him ever. He said to set up whatever dummy entities you need to set up. He said, even you're too close to him for him to feel safe that the project won't connect to him. That's why he wants Kitty to be the front-person on the project, she will deal with the contractors and the laborers and the real estate agents and the staff on behalf of some untraceable company. He said this has to be kept completely secret. Only the three of us are going to know. Not Dr. Bayron, not Hermelinda, no one but the three of us in this room."

"Why?"  Kitty asked.

"I only have an inkling of an idea, guys, but my suspicion is that he's going to try to duplicate himself. As for the secrecy?  He said he's just cutting the cards. Honestly, that's all I know."

"Do we have a budget?"  Takahashi asked.

"He said it will probably cost around ten million dollars. He said to use the bearer bonds and that you would understand what that meant."

"I do," Takahashi replied. "Smith is a keen player."

Smith had in fact been giving Takahashi high dollar bearer bonds for safekeeping for many years. Takahashi kept them in a vault in a bank in Saratoga. He hadn't calculated the total value for many years, but it had to be at least $10,000,000 worth. Takahashi remembered telling Smith how dumb it was to collect bearer bonds, but Smith insisted. "You just never know when you're going to need to move a few million dollars under the radar," Smith said as if he were referring to a crumpled twenty in a secret compartment in his wallet.

Elijah Smith's office in the conference room on the seventh floor was spacious and Sharky, Bayron, and Hermelinda each sat on different sides of the table in the center of the room facing the monitor which showed Smith's voice as a green oscilloscopic wave. He had toyed with an animated face whose lips moved in sync with his words on the monitor, but it made the baby cry and Hermelinda called it spooky so he went back to his oscilliscopic wave. On the conference table in front of them and on view to Smith as well, was a black box about the size of a shoebox.

"Okay, Sharky, its your show my boy," Smith said, sounding more human everyday.

"Well, this is essentially just a router," Sharky began, "just like any kind of broadband router. In fact, most of what's in here is just snarfed from an old router we had. So its very simple. Now the Internet itself uses a set of protocols that we nerds call TCP/IP. These protocols are used for different functions over the internet. One of those protocols is called SMTP which is the Simple Mail Transmission Protocol. As it stands now, any data in any other internet protocol is locked. It cannot go in or out of Smith's closed system."

Sharky looked at Hermelinda after he said this. She was the only one in the room who may not have already understood this part of his presentation. But she nodded to let him know that she understood.

Sharky continued, "Now the reason all of these TCP/IP protocols work is because, to oversimplify things for a minute, there's a tiny tag placed on every packet of data transmitted over the internet which describes where the data came from, where it is going to, and how it fits with other packets of data. A router basically assigns those tags and sorts out data both going out and coming in based on those tags. What I did is, I modified the router to put one more tag onto every data packet that comes in or out of the closed system. That function occurs both after Smith transmits data and before he receives data. That way you can't strip or alter the tags."  Sharky said looking at the camera, pausing to see if Smith reacted to that point.

Smith responded, "Yes, that was your condition Sharky and your caution is respected, even if I don't like it."

Sharky continued further, "So every packet of data in and every packet of data out has this special tag on it and the special tag gets recorded in what I've been calling a lock box before it passes in or out of the closed system. Really its basically a log file that can tell us where every piece of data going out went and where every piece of data coming in came from. As that data gets moved from place to place, or manipulated in any way it validates itself by confirming itself against the data that spawned it. I call this chaining. Each chain is anchored by tagged data. So we only have to find the first generation of data to destroy all of the data which initiated with Smith."  Sharky again looked around for reactions. Not seeing or hearing anything in the form of an objection or request for clarification, he continued.

"If Smith creates a dangerous anomaly any two of the four of us can use our keys to activate the kill scenario. Here's what will happen:  because the dropbox knows where every single piece of tagged data is, it simply sends a kill pill to all the data bearing the tag on both sides of the router. The tagged data will simply disappear. Zap. Gone. Because the later iterations based off of the tagged data will be disconnected from the chain, they will be unable to confirm themselves and become, for lack of  a better term, dust in the wind. Even if data packets had their tags somehow stripped, they would never be able to find their way back to Smith and thus would be useless. Just kind of empty data. Data with no place to go and no place to come back to."

"Why does it have to kill the data on both sides of the router?" Dr. Bayron asked.

Sharky blushed a little bit, even though he knew Smith and Hermelinda understood, it was still uncomfortable to talk about. "Well, the only way to clear the tagged data is to disconnect it from the log. The minute the tagged data cannot confirm itself against the log it ceases to function. Because later iterations of the source data are tethered to the tagged data, that generational data also ceases to function. The dropbox itself only tracks the original data packets. I tried to model it in such a way that second, third and later generation data packets could be assigned a tag from the dropbox and in my model, but even with only second generation data being tagged it instantly created billions of new data tags every day and the rate at which it was creating them was increasing exponentially. It would have shut down the entire internet in a matter of days. So instead of having generational data uniquely tagged, I created the chaining system whereby generational data need only be able to recognize its immediate predecessor so that only the source data gets a unique tag. That chain of tethers must eventually lead back to the source data and if the source data is destroyed, then so is everything in its chain."

Dr. Bayron nodded his head, but now Hermelinda seemed confused. Sharky addressed his next remarks to her.

"So to the extent Smith receives any data back as output from some external source, say a Wikipedia article, that information will be riddled with god knows how many chains of data all of which become nothing more than clutter when the originally tagged data can no longer validate itself. This is why, in Mr. Smith's own words, and  I apologize for how blunt they were, but this is why he called it a kill switch."  Sharky felt that this explanation wasn't making sense. He decided to approach the explanation a different way.

"Okay, look. It's like this. The difference between a human brain and a computer is that a computer is like a shopping mall. Over here is where they make cookies and over there is where they sell shirts, and if you want to get your shoes fixed you go over there. But in a human brain, everything is happening all over the brain all at once. If something goes wrong with the shirt store, you close it down and no one else really cares. But if something goes wrong with one part of the brain, all other parts end up being effected by that. As an example, if I learn something today, lets say that two plus two equals four, a whole new series of connections is created. This knowledge can effect my personality, my perception, my memories-- everything. So assume Mr. Smith gets some new piece of information from the internet. That one piece of information doesn't go just to one place, it actually effects the structure and processes of the mind. Remember-- he's not a computer. The computer simply runs the model, but in the model, changes are being made all of the time and every change effects all parts of the mind. So if the two plus two equals four information suddenly got ripped out of his consciousness, he wouldn't just be unable to add, but every process which was effected by that data would be broken.