The Broken Window (18 page)

THE DATABASE

innerCircle®is the largest private database in the world, with key information on 280 million Americans and 130 million citizens of other countries. innerCircle®resides on our proprietary Massively Parallel Computer Array Network (MPCAN®), the most powerful commercial computer system ever
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assembled.

innerCircle®presently holds more than 500 petabytes of information—that equals trillions of pages of data—and we anticipate that soon the system will grow to an exabyte of data, an amount so vast that it would take only five exabytes to store the transcript of every word spoken by every human being in history!

We have troves of personal and public information: telephone numbers, addresses, vehicle registration, licensing information, buying histories and preferences, travel profiles, government records and vital statistics, credit and income histories and much, much more. We get these data into your hands at the speed of light, in a form that’s easily accessible and instantly usable, uniquely tailored to your specific needs.

innerCircle®grows at the rate of hundreds of thousands of entries a day.

THE TOOLS

· Watchtower DBM®, the most comprehensive database management system in the world. Your partner in strategic planning, Watchtower®helps you target your goals, extracts the most meaningful data from innerCircle®and delivers a winning strategy directly to your desk, 24/7, via our lightning-fast and super-secure servers. Watchtower®meets and exceeds the standards that SQL set years ago.

· Xpectation®predictive behavior software, based on the latest artificial intelligence and modeling technology. Manufacturers, service providers, wholesalers and retailers… want to know where your market is going and what your customers will want in the future? Then this is the product for you. And, law enforcers, take note: With Xpectation®you can predict where and when crimes will occur, and most important, who is likely to commit them.

· FORT®(Finding Obscure Relationships Tool), a unique and revolutionary product which analyzes millions of seemingly unrelated facts to determine connections human beings couldn’t possibly discover on their own. Whether you’re a commercial company wishing to know more about the marketplace (or about your competitors) or a law enforcement organization faced with a difficult criminal case, FORT®will give you the edge!

· ConsumerChoice®monitoring software and equipment allows you to determine consumers’ accurate responses to advertising, marketing programs and new or proposed products. Forget subjective focus group opinions. Now, through biometric monitoring, you can gather and analyze individuals’ true feelings about your potential plans—often without their awareness that they’re being observed!

· Hub Overvue®information consolidation software. This easy-to-use product allows you to control every database within your organization—and, in appropriate circumstances, within other companies’

operations as well.

· SafeGard®, security and identity verification software and services. Whether your concerns are terrorist threats, corporate kidnapping, industrial espionage or employee or customer theft, SafeGard®assures that your facilities will remain secure, letting you concentrate on your core business.

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This division includes the world’s leading background verification, security and substance-screening companies, used by corporate and government clients throughout the world. The SafeGard®Division of SSD is also home to the industry leader in biometric hardware and software, Bio-Chek®.

· NanoCure®medical research software and services. Welcome to the world of microbiologic intelligent systems for the diagnosis and treatment of illness. Working with M.D.’s, our nanotechnologists are crafting solutions to the common health problems facing today’s populace. From monitoring genetic issues to developing injectible tags to help in detecting and curing persistent, deadly illnesses, our NanoCure®Division is working to create a healthy society.

· On-Trial®civil litigation support systems and services. From products liability to anti-trust cases, On-Trial®streamlines document handling and deposition and evidence control.

· PublicSure®law enforcement support software. This is THE system for the consolidation and management of criminal and allied public records stored in international, federal, state and local databases. Through PublicSure®search results can be downloaded to offices, patrol car computers, PDA’s or cell phones within seconds of the request, helping investigators bring cases to speedy conclusions and enhancing the preparedness and security of officers in the field.

· EduServe®, scholastic support software and services. Managing what children learn is vital in a successful society. EduServe®helps school boards and teachers in facilities from K to 12 most efficiently utilize their resources and offer services that guarantee the best education per tax dollar spent.

Rhyme laughed in disbelief. “If Five Twenty-Two can get his hands on all this information… well, he’s the man who knows everything.”

Mel Cooper said, “Okay, listen to this. I was looking at the companies that SSD owns. Guess one of them.”

Rhyme replied, “I’ll go with whatever the hell their initials were—DMS. The maker of that RFID tag in the book, right?”

“Yep. You got it.”

No one said anything for some moments. Rhyme noticed everyone in the room was looking at the glowing window logo of SSD on the computer screen.

“So,” Sellitto muttered, eyes on the chart. “Where do we go from here?”

“Surveillance?” suggested Pulaski.

“That makes sense,” Sellitto said. “I’ll give S and S a call, set up some teams.”

Rhyme gave a cynical glance. “Surveillance at a company with, what? A thousand employees?” He shook his head, then asked, “You know Occam’s razor, Lon?”

“Who the fuck is Occam? A barber?”

“A philosopher. The razor’s a metaphor—cutting away unnecessary explanations for a phenomenon. His theory was that when you have multiple possibilities the simplest is almost always the correct one.”

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“So what’s your simple theory, Rhyme?”

Staring at the brochure, the criminalist answered Sachs, “I think you and Pulaski should go pay a visit to SSD tomorrow morning.”

“And do what?”

He gave a shrug. “Ask if anybody who works there is the killer.”

Ah, home at last.

I close the door.

And lock out the world.

I breathe deeply and, setting my backpack on the couch, go into the spotless kitchen and drink some pure water. No stimulants for me at the moment.

That edgy thing again.

The town house is a nice one. Prewar, huge (it would have to be when you live the way I do, given my collections). Not easy to find the perfect place. It took me some time. But here I am, largely unnoticed.

It’s obscenely easy to be virtually anonymous in New York. What a marvelous city! Here, the default mode of existence is life off the grid. Here, you have to fight to be noticed. Many sixteens do that, of course. But then, the world’s always had more than its share of fools.

Still, listen, you need to keep up appearances. The front rooms of my town house are simple and tastefully decorated (thank you, Scandinavia). I don’t socialize here much but you need a façade to seem normal. You have to function in the real world. If you don’t, sixteens begin to wonder if there’s something going on, if you’re someone other than you seem.

And it’s a short step from that to someone coming round, poking into your Closet and taking everything away from you. Everything you’ve worked so hard for.

Everything.

And that’s the worst of the worst.

So you make sure your Closet is secret. You make sure your treasures are hidden behind curtained or blocked windows, while you maintain your other life in full view, the sunlit side of the moon. To stay off the grid it’s best to have a second living space. You do what I’ve done: keep this Danish modern patina of normalcy clean and ordered, even if it grates on your nerves like steel on slate to be there.

You have a normal house. Because that’s what everybody has.

And you maintain a pleasant connection with associates and friends. Because that’s what everyone does.

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And you date occasionally and entice her to spend the night and you go through the motions.

Because that too is what everyone does. No matter that she doesn’t get you as hard as when you’ve smooth talked your way into a girl’s bedroom, smiling, aren’t we soul mates, look at everything we have in common, with a tape recorder and a knife in your jacket pocket.

Now, I pull the shades in the bay windows and head to the back of the living room.

“Wow, this is like a really neat place… It looks bigger from the outside.”

“Yeah, funny how that happens.”

“Hey, you’ve got a door in your living room. What’s through there?”

“Oh, that. Just storage. A closet. Nothing to see. Want some wine?”

Well, what’s through there, Debby Sandra Susan Brenda, is where I’m headed right now. My
real
home. My Closet, I call it. It’s like a keep—that last defensible spot of a medieval castle—the sanctuary in the center. When all else failed, the king and his family would retreat to the keep.

I enter mine through that magic doorway. It actually
is
a closet, a walk-in, and inside you’ll see hanging clothes and shoe boxes. But push them aside and you’ll find a second door. It opens on to the rest of the house, which is far, far bigger than the façade’s horrifying blond Swedish minimalism.

My Closet…

I enter it now and lock the doors behind me and turn on the light.

Trying to relax. But after today, after the disaster, I’m having trouble shaking the edgy.

This isn’t good this isn’t good this…

I drop into my desk chair and boot up the computer as I stare at the Prescott painting in front of me, courtesy of Alice 3895. What a touch he had! The eyes of the family members are fascinating. Prescott managed to give each one a different gaze. It’s clear they’re all related; the expressions are similar in that way. Yet they’re also different, as if each is imagining a different aspect of life as a family: happy, troubled, angry, mystified, controlling, controlled.

It’s what a family is all about.

I suppose.

I open the backpack and take out the treasures I’ve acquired today. A tin canister, a pencil set, an old cheese grater. Why would somebody throw these away? I also unload some practical items I’ll use in the next few weeks: some preapproved credit mailings that people carelessly discarded, credit card vouchers, phone bills… Fools, I was saying.

There’s another item for my collection, of course, but I’ll get to the tape recorder later. It’s not as great a find as it could be, since Myra 9834’s throaty screams while I detached the fingernail had to be muted by duct tape (I was worried about passersby). Still, everything in a collection can’t be a crown jewel;
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you need the mundane to make the special soar.

I then wander through my Closet, depositing the treasures in the appropriate places.

It looks bigger from the outside…

As of today, I have 7,403 newspapers, 3,234 magazines (
National Geographic
s being the cornerstone, of course), 4,235 matchbooks… and, for-going the numbers: coat hangers, kitchen utensils, lunch boxes, soda pop bottles, empty cereal boxes, scissors, shaving gear, shoe horns and trees, buttons, cuff links boxes, combs, wristwatches, clothes, tools useful and tools long outmoded. Phonograph records in colors, records in black. Bottles, toys, jam jars, candles and holders, candy dishes, weapons.

It goes on and on and on.

The Closet consists of, what else?
Sixteen
galleries, like a museum’s, ranging from those holding cheerful toys (though that Howdy Doody is pretty damn scary) to rooms of some things that
I
treasure but most people would find, oh, unpleasant. Hair and nail clippings and some shriveled mementoes from various transactions. Like this afternoon’s. I deposit Myra 9834’s fingernail in a prominent spot. And while this would normally give me enough pleasure to make me hard again, now the moment is dark and spoiled.

I hate Them so much…

With quivering hands I close the cigar box, taking no pleasure from my treasures at the moment.

Hate hate hate…

Back at the computer, I’m reflecting: Maybe there’s no threat. Maybe it’s just an odd set of coincidences that led Them to DeLeon 6832’s house.

But I can’t take any chances.

The problem: The risk that my treasures will be taken from me, which is consuming me now.

The solution: To do what I started in Brooklyn. To fight back. To eliminate any threats.

What most sixteens, including my pursuers, don’t understand and what puts Them at a pathetic disadvantage is this: I believe in the immutable truth that there is absolutely nothing morally wrong with taking a life. Because I know that there is eternal existence completely independent of these bags of skin and organ we cart around temporarily. I have proof: Just look at the trove of data about your life, built up from the moment you’re born. It’s all permanent, stored in a thousand places, copied, backed up, invisible and indestructible. After the body goes, as all bodies must, the data survive forever.

And if that’s not the definition of an immortal soul, I don’t know what is.

The bedroom was quiet.

Rhyme had sent Thom home to spend Sunday night with Peter Hoddins, the caregiver’s longtime
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partner. Rhyme gave the aide a lot of crap. He couldn’t help that and sometimes he felt bad about it. But he tried to compensate and when Amelia Sachs was staying with him, as tonight, he shooed Thom off.

The young man needed more of a life outside the town house here, taking care of a feisty old crip.

Rhyme heard tinkering in the bathroom. The sounds of a woman getting ready for bed. Clinks of glass and snaps of plastic lids, aerosol hisses, water running, fragrances escaping on humid bathroom air.