Pyramid Lake (2 page)

My phone buzzed. I slid it from my pocket, glanced at the screen, and looked the senator in the eye. “You lied,” I said. “You did read my abstract.”

This time, Linebaugh’s surprise was genuine. I kept my face neutral.

McNulty cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, Senator, but he—”

Linebaugh raised a hand, silencing McNulty without a glance. His eyes bored into mine. “I have a plane to catch at four,” he said. “If you’ve got something to show me, you might want to get to it.”

My phone buzzed in my hand again. I checked the screen. “You don’t have any plane to catch at four. What time is your flight,
really
? Tonight?” I waited a beat. “Tomorrow?” I kept my eyes on my phone as another message came through. “Oh, I see: tomorrow.”

Letting my phone-arm drop to my side, I grinned at Linebaugh. “So, staying in Reno tonight?” The phone buzzed twice in my hand. “No, I didn’t think so. Vegas, then?” One buzz. “Yep, that makes sense—Vegas is more your speed.”

“Let me see your phone,” Linebaugh said.

I handed it to him.

Linebaugh scanned the messages I had received:
He’s lying about reading your abstract. He has read it. He’s also lying about his flight at four. Now he’s feigning impatience. He’s actually quite intrigued. His flight isn’t tonight. It’s tomorrow. He’s not staying in Reno. Definitely staying in Vegas.

“Very impressive,” he said. “I don’t care how good your software is; it’s only as good as the operator using it, and you’ve clearly found someone exceptional. I’d like to meet him.”

“Or her,” I said.

“Or her.” His gaze swept the lap, zeroing in on the four ceiling-mounted smoked-glass bubbles that concealed the cameras. “I’m very curious about your operator’s prior background and training. Casino security?”

“Nope. Before this, none at all,” I said.

My phone buzzed in Linebaugh’s hand. We both looked at the message.
He doesn’t believe you about my background and training.

“So, let’s see,” Linebaugh said. “No electrodes on me to measure skin flinch or galvanic response. I don’t have an EEG hooked up. You aren’t MRI-imaging my brain. You’re not even monitoring my pulse. Do the cameras have an infrared channel to measure skin temperature?”

He had clearly done his homework, as I figured he would. Linebaugh’s just-a-regular-Joe act put the voters at ease, but he had a master’s in electrical engineering from Michigan in addition to his Harvard MBA. It said something about his constituents that hardly any of them knew his educational background.

I followed his gaze to the glass bubbles in the ceiling and shook my head. “Only visible-light cameras, but very high speed.”

“Facial microexpressions alone, then. Your software captures them in real time, categorizes them, and your operator interprets them. How fast are the cameras?”

“A thousand frames per second when we started. I’ve been able to slow them down using fractal interpolation and three-D extraction algorithms. We can get away with a hundred frames per second now.”

“When will you have it below thirty?”

Linebaugh’s question was smart. Once the software could operate below thirty frames per second—standard video frame rate—no specialized cameras would be necessary. The algorithms could be applied to any video feed: interrogation footage, cell phone video capture, even broadcast television.

“Within two years,” I said. Actually, I already had the problem cracked. The only significant remaining hurdle was computing power, which the twelve million I was asking for was about to solve nicely.

“Does decreasing the frame rate also reduce the processing power needed?” Linebaugh asked.

“Increases it, actually,” I said. “But I’ve got a low-cost way to achieve that compute efficiency.”

The hardware upgrade I had planned would farm a lot of the processing load onto secondary Beowulf HPC clusters built from AMD’s Jaguar CPU and Radeon GPU processors—using thousands of copies of the same inexpensive chipset that powered a PlayStation 4 game console.

I grinned. I called the thing next door “Frankenstein” for a reason. The supercomputer’s architecture was actually kind of a haphazard mess, stitched together from a mix of different node topologies and server blade types. But it was beautiful, too, in its own way.

And besides, the compute power problem was going to solve itself eventually.

The phone in Linebaugh’s hand—my iPhone 5S—had an A7 GPU capable of pushing 100 gigaflops: equivalent to 1995’s fastest Cray T3D supercomputer. Moore’s Law was shrinking the hardware requirements even as I improved the software. MADRID might need a ninety-ton supercomputer to run it today, but it was only a matter of time until we could deploy my software into the field on a laptop. Or even a cell phone.

And then it would change the world.

The senator handed my phone back. “You say your operator doesn’t have formal training,” he said. “Still, there are those few rare individuals who can interpret microexpressions with a high degree of accuracy. I’m wondering how much of what you’ve shown me is actually your software, and how much of it is your operator’s own unusual talent.”

He winked at the nearest camera bubble. “I may have to hire her away for my campaign.”

“My operator doesn’t like to travel,” I said. “But like you said, let’s get on with the demo. Shall we play twenty questions, Senator?”

“I see.” Linebaugh’s eyes flickered, and I finally saw the face I’d been waiting for: the senator’s game face—his
debate
face.

“A politician as a real-world test,” he said. “Clever, Trevor. After two decades in the political arena and in the public eye, having my every gesture, every pause, every eye movement analyzed by pundits and political opponents, I should be quite good at masking my reactions, shouldn’t I?”

His aide squared her shoulders. “Senator, this seems inexpedient.”

Linebaugh’s eyes were fixed on mine. “No. Frankly, I’m intrigued.” He let a small twitch lift one side of his lips. It was subtle, but deliberate; I knew he wanted me to see the classic microexpression for contempt.

“We do this on one condition,” he said. “I get to meet your operator afterward.”

“Done deal,” I said. “Would you like a glass of water before we get started?”

Linebaugh’s face gave me nothing I could see, but the phone in my hand buzzed three times.

I grinned. Three buzzes meant anger. My little crack about a glass of water—like the ones you see on C-SPAN, in front of the accused during Senate investigative hearings—had hit home.

“Ask your questions,” he said.

I was ready.

Linebaugh wasn’t the only one who had done his homework.

“T
ell me, what made you decide to run for the Senate?” I asked.

Linebaugh smiled. “Back when I was in junior high—”

“Actually, I don’t give a shit about that,” I said. “Let’s talk about 2007 instead. Let’s talk about Iraq—specifically, about eighteen billion in United States Federal Reserve cash bundled onto pallets and flown over there on C-130 cargo planes. Eighteen billion dollars which then went missing.”

McNulty sucked in a breath, loud in the near-absolute silence.

Linebaugh’s face didn’t change.

“That was not our country’s finest hour,” he said evenly. “A minor point—it was the Iraqis’ own money, not U.S. money—but still, we should have had better oversight and accounting of it. A regrettable wartime mistake, and we turned it into a circus with the Senate hearings, but why bring it up now, Trevor? It pales in comparison to the
seven-hundred-
billion-dollar taxpayer bailout of our own banks and financial institutions during the subprime crisis—which, I’m sorry to say, was carried out with even less oversight and control.”

“Let’s stay on topic,” I said. “In 2007, you were on the Senate Armed Services Committee. You authorized that disbursement from the Iraq Development Fund.”

“The committee I served on authorized it,” Linebaugh said. “We asked the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to turn the money over to the provisional Iraqi government. It was an emergency measure necessitated by the rapid pace of reconstruction. The Fed packed the money up for transport—over four hundred tons of mint-new US currency. Can you imagine what that looked like? It took the Air Force twenty C-130 flights to ferry it over—”

“Two thousand seven was a busy time in Iraq,” I said. “Lots of other stuff happening that year, too. The Blackwater scandal, for instance, which put the PMCs under the microscope. It was the start of Senate inquiries… investigations into misconduct.”

Linebaugh nodded. “A difficult time for the U.S. internationally. Without Blackwater and the other private military companies that the Pentagon contracted, we lacked the manpower to maintain security in Iraq. A few unfortunate incidents got blown out of proportion, and suddenly these private contractors were a focus for public outrage. But I haven’t heard a question yet, Trevor.”

“Fair enough. So here it is. Tell me, Senator, when Blackwater and the other PMCs had their contracts put on hold during the investigation, was it
your
idea to pay them with untraceable cash instead, using the Iraqis’ own money instead of U.S. funds?”

Stunned silence filled the room. I heard Blake’s whispered “Oh, shit” as plainly as if he were miked.

Linebaugh laughed. “That’s a remarkable accusation. I would be offended if it weren’t so misguided. How old are you, Trevor?”

“Twenty-eight,” I said.

“Son,” Linebaugh said, “you’ve got a lot to learn yet, so I won’t hold your naïveté against you. But for an MIT grad, your math is lousy. Blackwater was the biggest private contractor in Iraq, and all their contracts combined still wouldn’t add up to more than three hundred million in 2007. It’s a long way from there to eighteen billion.”

The phone in my hand buzzed twice.

I didn’t look at it. Neither did Linebaugh. I held it loosely with my palm over the screen, covering it, because I knew that every other person in the room was staring at it, trying to see what it said.

“Oh, I’m sure most of the eighteen billion did get stolen by corrupt Iraqi officials,” I said. “But not all of it. If I’m right, along the way we also saved the U.S. taxpayer a little money and ensured that lots of hardworking American contractors got paid on time. Tell me, Senator, how much of that goodwill came back in soft-dollar campaign contributions?”

Linebaugh stared at me. He opened his mouth and then shut it. Then he swept his lapels back from his waist and hooked his thumbs into his belt. I understood his dilemma. Anything he said would give my cameras more to work with, but saying nothing made him look guilty, too.

He tried to keep his face under perfect control, but it was a futile effort.

My phone buzzed again.

I let the awkward silence stretch for another second or two. Then, using a hand to shield the phone’s screen from everyone else, I took a quick peek.

I let my shoulders slump theatrically. “Well, turns out I was wrong after all,” I said. “Senator, I owe you an apology. You passed with flying colors.”

I shoved the phone into my pocket and made an “after you” gesture toward the steel double doors.

“Shall we go meet my operator?”

T
he doors swung open, releasing a gust of cool air against my cheeks and forehead. The five-story space beyond floated in semidarkness, cavernous but crowded and claustrophobic at the same time. As I waited for our eyes to adjust, the shadowy bulk of dense equipment racks pressed in from the sides and loomed half-seen overhead. Pinpoints of blue, green, and amber LEDs flickered from row after row of computer cabinets curving away into the dimness.

I walked down the antistatic ramp to the ground floor of the server room, passing beneath an aluminum catwalk that supported another curving row of CPU enclosures.

Linebaugh slid his hand along the rail of chunky tube aluminum and followed me down with his aide, the scientists, and McNulty in tow. At the bottom, he stopped and stood stock-still. His gaze moved across the sweep of eight-foot computer racks, laid out in wide arcs around us like the arms of a pinwheel. His chin tilted upward as he took in the graceful S-curves of the suspended catwalks overhead, each supporting its own row of server-blade cabinets that blinked like a constellation of soft green fireflies.

“I see you don’t like straight lines,” he said.

“Seventy percent more cooling efficiency this way.” I followed his line of sight along the organic curves I had specced—another patentable first—and tried to keep the pride out of my voice. “The airflow you feel is mainly natural convection and recirculation.”

“Very green of you,” he said, nodding. “Given the facility’s geothermal power capacity, I’m surprised you took the energy footprint into consideration.”

“Just doing my part for the environment.”

Everyone else had come to a stop behind us now, gawking at our shadowed surroundings like kids at Disneyland.

I stifled a grin. Showtime.

Raising an arm, I banged the side of my fist against the nearest cabinet.

The floor under our feet erupted with blue light as LED panels snapped on beneath the frosted glass. Floor tiles blinked to life one by one, turning on in rapid succession, stretching into the distance like airport runway lights at night. An illuminated path curved away from where we stood, winding between the racks, toward the center of the room.

Liquid stripes of glowing green and orange shot up the steel and aluminum edges of the cabinets on each side. Lines of neon pink and aquamarine strip lighting raced like Saint Elmo’s fire along the curved catwalks overhead, outlining the faces of the upper racks.

The lights came up in a spiraling pattern around us. Color and illumination spread across floors, racks, and overhead walkways to converge at the center of the room, where six dark towers stretched toward the ceiling high above. Each forty-foot tower—a tapered cylinder ringed with five stacked levels of high-density server rack—narrowed gracefully to a waist before expanding again above. They housed the supercomputer’s hottest-running CPU and networking blades, and the heat gradient they generated sucked the air upward through their cooling-tower geometry like a vertical wind tunnel. The racing lines of light met and shot up the sides of the towers, spreading in rings to encircle each tower with thick bands of bright red.