Invasion of Privacy (7 page)

The next morning Mary sat on the edge of her bed reading the newspaper. The headline read “FBI Agent Killed in Dripping Springs Shoot-Out.”

“Veteran Special Agent Joseph T. Grant was killed yesterday in the line of duty. The shooting took place at approximately 3:15 p.m. outside of Dripping Springs on the grounds of the former Flying V Ranch. FBI spokesperson Donald G. Bennett stated that Grant was interviewing an informant deemed cooperative and unthreatening when the informant drew a weapon and shot Grant in the chest. The informant, whose name is being withheld due to the sensitive nature of the ongoing investigation, also died at the scene. Grant recently transferred to Austin from Sacramento, where he had been the assistant special agent in charge.”

A color picture ran above the fold. It showed Joe’s car with the windshield shattered, shot through. On the ground, visible between the milling law enforcement officers, lay a body draped by a sheet. The informant, identity unknown.

Mary stared at the photo, trying to imagine what had happened, how Joe had allowed an informant to get the drop on him. She looked closer. The informant lay several steps away from Joe’s car. From the pool of blood on the ground near his head, it appeared that he had been shot there, not in the car. Questions formed in her mind. Discrepancies with Bennett’s nervous and contradictory explanation.

She could hear Joe’s voice, snippets of the message. “Everything’s copacetic. Tell Sid. He’s one of the good guys.”

So there were
bad guys
?

The door to her bedroom opened. A curvy, attractive woman dressed in yoga tights and a lululemon jacket entered.

“All right,” said Carrie Kramer. “That’s enough of that. There’s a bunch of gals downstairs who are waiting to give you a shoulder to cry on. They’ve brought enough carbs to fill two refrigerators. I hope
you and the girls like chicken potpie and grits. That’s what passes for comfort food around here.”

Mary put down the paper. “I’ll pass.”

“How ’bout some coffee?”

“Maybe later.”

Carrie sat down on the bed next to her. She was Mary’s newest next-door neighbor and the best friend she’d made in God knew how long. Carrie was her age, a mother of two girls and wife to a husband who, like Joe, worked far too many hours. Mark Kramer taught electrical engineering at UT and had recently taken a consulting job at the new Apple campus. Joe had “the job.” Carrie’s husband, Mark, had “the lab.” Like Mary, she was a de facto single mom.

Then there was the matter of their looks. Both were blondes a few pounds from being “athletic,” with hair cut to their shoulders; they were more or less the same height, with blue eyes, ready smiles, and a little too much energy. They couldn’t go out without someone asking if they were sisters. This led to spirited banter about who looked older. In fact Mary was older by a year, but in the name of détente and neighborhood peace, they decided to respond that they were the same. They called themselves the Texas Twins.

“You hanging in there?” asked Carrie.

“I can’t stop from thinking,” Mary began, “what might have happened if I’d just answered the phone.”

“It wasn’t your fault you missed Joe’s call. These things happen.”

“I wasn’t there when he needed me. I knew it was a mistake to let Jessie play with my phone.”

Carrie laid an arm around Mary’s shoulder. “You can’t go back, sweetheart. What’s done is done. There’s no saying you could have helped him anyway.”

“He called me at 4:03. I didn’t hear his message until after Don Bennett phoned two hours later. I sure as hell could have done something.”

“You told me he didn’t tell you where he was or what he needed. Who would you have called if you had gotten the message?”

Mary stood. “I don’t know…someone—anyone. Two hours, Carrie. Why didn’t I…?”

“Because it slipped your mind. Because you couldn’t have known what Joe was calling about. Because you’re a human being like the rest of us.”

“And then I went and erased the message. I don’t know how, but I did.”

“How do you know it was you? Machines screw up all the time. Mark’s iPad just goes and shuts down sometimes. He’s always yelling about losing this or that.”

“They don’t lose the last message your husband ever sent you.”

Carrie studied her. “What are you getting at?”

Mary dropped her hands and paced the room, exasperated at her inability to recall her actions. “All I know is that one minute the message was there and the next it was gone.”

“So someone else erased it?”

“I left the phone in the car when I went into the hospital. I guess someone could have broken into my car, erased the message, then locked the car back up. But even then there’d be a record of it on my message log.” Mary knew her Sherlock Holmes. Eliminate the impossible and what remains, no matter how improbable, is the truth. “You’re right. It was the phone. It had to be. Something just happened.”

“Take it to Joe’s office. Give it to what’s-his-name…Dave—”

“Don Bennett. Joe’s boss.”

“Have him take a look at it.”

“I don’t like him. He practically tried to rip the phone out of my hands last night. He scares me.”

“The FBI scares me, too, hon, but I trust ’em.”

“I know them better than you.” Mary tried her best to recall Joe’s words. She closed her eyes and saw them hovering just out of reach. “It’s just that I can’t remember everything he said.”

“Give it time. It’ll come.” Carrie nodded toward the door. “And the girls?”

“Jessie is in her room with her door locked. Gracie woke up and cried until she fell back asleep. They’re in shock.”

“Does Jess know about the message?”

“No,” said Mary forcefully, surprising herself. “I won’t tell her. It wasn’t her fault I missed the call. She was just doing what she always does.”

“She’s really into that tech stuff,” said Carrie. “Programming and creating apps.”

“Her summer school teacher told me that some people just get it, and Jess is one of them. He said she has the gift.”

“Mark was that way, too. Turned out good for him, even if he is still a geek.” Carrie stood and came closer. “What’re you going to do, hon?”

“I’m not sure. I can’t imagine moving again. The schools are good. Grace likes her new doctor. Besides, where would we go?”

“I’d imagine you’d want to be nearer your folks.”

“They’re all gone. I’ve got a brother floating around on an aircraft carrier somewhere in the Pacific, and Joe’s got two sisters in Boston. That’s it. I don’t have anyplace to go.”

“Texas has done right by us. You could do worse.”

“Do I have to become a Republican?”

“Mandatory after five years—otherwise they kick you out.” Carrie went to the door. “Can’t keep your fan club waiting forever.”

“Five minutes.”

“Take ten. I’ll stall for you.” Carrie winked and closed the door.

Mary picked up the newspaper again. She looked at the shattered windshield and the body on the ground. She contrasted the picture with Bennett’s muddled explanation of what had occurred. Something didn’t match. Or, as she’d heard some good ol’ boy say, “That dog don’t hunt.”

Mary walked to the bathroom, washed her face, put on makeup, and brushed her hair. It wouldn’t be right to show them how devastated she was. The admiral wouldn’t stand for it.

She picked up her phone on the way out, pausing at the door to access the calls log. She spotted the number she wanted right away.

“Federal Bureau of Investigation. How may I direct your call?”

“Don Bennett, please.”

It was not this hot in England.

Ian tried not to hurry as he crossed the broad expanse of lawn known as the Meadow. Christ Church, and the comfort of his air-conditioned office, were ten steps behind him and already he was sweating. He continued up Dead Man’s Walk, then cut over to Merton Street, passing Oriel and University before reaching High Street.

Oracle had its “Emerald City.” Google had its “Googleplex.” Ian had his own private Oxford.

There was New College and Radcliffe Camera and the Bodleian Library. There was even the River Isis. The buildings were exact replicas of the originals, built from the same English limestone and mortar on a three-hundred-acre plot of land overlooking Lake Travis, five miles from the Austin city limits. A little bit of England in the Texas Hill Country.

He crossed the High and entered a warren of alleyways, heading toward Brasenose, the “college” that housed ONE’s research-and-development labs. Each “college” contained offices, a cafeteria, and a quad where employees could get outside and recreate. New College housed the Server Division. Oriel housed Online Sales. And so on.

Great Tom sounded the quarter hour. Like the original hanging in Tom Tower, the bell weighed six tons and was cast from smelted iron. It tolled over a hundred times at nine each night, not in memory of the original students enrolled in Christ Church, but to celebrate each billion dollars of ONE’s annual sales. In the year of our Lord 2015, Great Tom was programmed to toll 201 times each night.

“Ian!” It was Peter Briggs, coming out of the White Stag.

“Come on,” Ian called. “They’re waiting on me.”

Briggs pulled up alongside him. “That bastard May’s remarks made it into an article about the race in the Reno papers.”

“The sports section.” Ian had seen the piece while doing a little background on Gordon May. “Right before the part about the race stewards denying his objection.”

“He sounds serious.”

“Like I said, he’s a sore loser. Now everyone knows it. Anything else about John Merriweather comes out of his mouth, we’ll sue him for defamation. Shut him up once and for all.”

“That’s what I like to hear.”

“To think,” said Ian, dismissing May’s monstrous accusations. “John Merriweather was a dear friend.”

The men walked a ways farther, leaving the main campus and continuing along a paved road toward the R&D facility, a black glass rectangle the size of a city block surrounded by a twenty-foot-tall fence.

“This is it, then?” said Briggs as they passed through the security checkpoint. “You get the cooling system all squared away?”

“That’s what we’re going to find out.”

“Better have,” said Briggs. “Utah’s ready to rock ’n’ roll. They don’t like delays in D.C.”

Ian ignored the admonishing clip to his voice. “Let me worry about D.C.”

“Whatever you say. You’re the boss.”

It was an object of beauty.

Ian ran a hand over the face of the machine. An undulating wave of black titanium as alluring as a centerfold’s curves glimmered beneath the lab’s soft lighting. Form married to function. The ONE logo had been painted across the panels in electric-blue ink that seemed to lift right off them. The apotheosis of design and intellect.

Titan. The world’s most powerful supercomputer.

Half a dozen engineers were conducting last-minute checks of the equipment. All wore hoodies or fleece. One sported a down parka. Outside, the temperature was pushing 100°. Inside, it was a chill 58°.

“Ah, Ian, welcome,” said Dev Patel, the chief programmer on the Titan project, hurrying toward him. “Can we get you a jumper?”

“I’m fine,” said Ian. “Are we all hooked up?”

“All according to your instructions.” Patel placed a hand on top of Titan. He was short and round, a native of Madras who’d come to ONE by way of IIT, Caltech, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “We’ve connected two hundred machines for today’s test. Our footprint is about four thousand square feet.”

“Two hundred? That enough?”

“Good lord, yes.” Patel tugged at the thatch of graying hair that fell across his forehead, looking like nothing so much as an aging schoolboy. “And then some.”

Ian patted him on the back. John Merriweather’s coup was to marry graphics processing units (GPUs) with conventional central processing units (CPUs) to create a hybrid that was at once more energy-efficient than anything before it and capable of an order of magnitude increase in computational power. Titan used 25,000 AMD Opteron 16-core CPUs and 25,000 Nvidia Tesla GPUs. “Memory?”

“Seven hundred ten terabytes,” said Patel, “with forty petabytes of hard drive storage.”

Seven hundred ten terabytes was the equivalent of all the text found in a stack of books running from the earth to the moon. “And that gives us?”

“A theoretical peak performance approaching ten exaflops—about twenty thousand trillion calculations per second—give or take.”

“That means we’re tops, right?”

“No one else is even close.”

Ian spoke over his shoulder. “Get PR. I want that information out to everyone on the Net a minute after the test is completed.” He put a hand on Patel’s shoulder and guided him to a private corner. “Is she ready?”

“I’ll keep my end of the bargain if you keep yours.”

Ian’s end meant seeing to it that the new cooling system functioned as advertised. Patel’s end meant pushing Titan to the max, getting all twenty thousand trillion operations per second from it. It was time to push the needle into the red once more. “All right, then. Let’s light this baby up.”

Patel’s eyes radiated excitement. He turned toward the engineers and raised his arms. “Light this baby up.”

The engineers retreated to their workstations behind a glass wall and placed noise-canceling headphones over their ears. The ambient buzz Ian had noted since entering the lab grew louder. A metallic clicking noise emanated from the machines, the cadence and volume increasing by the second, as if hundreds of steel dominoes were being shuffled and shuffled again.

“Would you prefer to watch the demonstration in a different manner?” asked Patel.

“Everest?” Ian struggled to keep from clapping his hands over his ears.

“Yes,” shouted Patel.

The men walked down a corridor to a smaller, quieter room. The room was empty except for one wall made entirely of dark translucent glass. This was Everest, the “exploratory visualization environment for science and technology,” a thirty-seven-megapixel stereoscopic wall made of eighteen individual display monitors.

Three vanguard codes had been selected to test Titan’s maximum operating capabilities. S3D modeled the molecular physics of combustion in an effort to lessen the carbon footprint of fossil fuels. WL-LSMS simulated the interaction between electrons and atoms in magnetic materials. And CAM-SE simulated specific climate change scenarios and was designed to cycle through five years of weather in one day of computing time.

“We’re running CAM-SE,” said Patel. “We might as well find out whether or not the earth is going to be here fifty years from now.”

“Might as well.” Frankly, Ian was more interested in whether Titan would be in working order fifty minutes from now or a flaming pile of silicon. He crossed his arms and faced the wall of black glass. Six closely spaced horizontal lines ran the length of the wall: red, yellow, orange, green, blue, and purple.

The room lights dimmed.

Phase One Initiated
flashed in the upper left-hand corner. Titan had begun its work.

Below it a reading displayed the supercomputer’s internal temperature: 75° Fahrenheit.

The lines on the glass wall began wiggling, interweaving, dancing with one another as if bothered by a weak current. The temperature display jumped to 80°, then 85°. The lines’ movements grew more frenzied, each assuming a life of its own, oscillating into sine and cosine waves. The lines were a visual manifestation of Titan’s calculations as the machine worked its way into the complex code, analyzing billions of possible climate models. There were no longer just six lines but twenty, then thirty, and then too many to count, a rainbow of gyrating colors.

Meanwhile the temperature continued to rise.

A buzzer sounded.

Phase Two
appeared.

Titan was working faster.

On command, the lines escaped their two-dimensional confines and leapt into the room. Ian and Patel were surrounded by a sea of multicolored, undulating wave functions, awash in an ocean of neon light.

120°

150°

The machine was heating too rapidly.

Ian said nothing. To speak was to scream. He glanced sidelong at Patel. The programmer no longer looked like an enthusiastic schoolboy. In the darkened room, his round, pleasant face illuminated by the wildly gyrating lights, he looked like a doomed prisoner awaiting a dreadful sentence.

170°

180°

Ian hummed to himself, blinking inadvertently each time the number rose. If Titan’s internal temperature surpassed 200° for a period of thirty seconds, the supercomputer would shut itself down. There would be no meeting at Fort Meade. The giant array in Utah would be removed and shipped back for repair. Months would be needed to rework the cooling design.

Despite his anxiety, Ian felt outside himself, part of some bigger scheme: intelligence, the universe, he didn’t know what to call it. Maybe progress. The first computers had used punch cards to tabulate election results. Then came transistors and silicon wafers and microchips. The latest was nanochips, chips as thin as a human hair, so small they needed to be viewed with an electron microscope. Today a smartphone retailing for $99 held the computing power necessary to launch
Apollo 11
and land two men on the surface of the moon.

Titan possessed one billion times that power.

Deus in machina
.

God in the machine.

Everest glowed blue.

The buzzer sounded again. The terrific noise grew.

Phase Three
appeared.

Titan had reached its maximum speed. In a single second it performed as many calculations as the first mainframe had been able to perform in an entire week.

200°

“Shut it down,” shouted Patel. “We’re going to burn.”

“Wait,” said Ian.

It was all or nothing. Time to push the needle into the red.

Ten seconds passed. Fifteen.

“Ian…please. Shut it down.”

“Another second.”

“You must!”

And then something wonderful happened.

190°

The temperature decreased.

180°

And decreased again.

Patel grabbed Ian’s arm. Ian stood still, not protesting. The panel turned from blue to red. Patel began to laugh. “It works,” he said, though his words were impossible to hear above the clatter.

Ian nodded, saying nothing. His anxiety vanished. His calm returned. And his confidence, perhaps even greater than before.

“Of course it works,” he wanted to say. He had designed it.