The Broken Window (26 page)

“Not the worst of sins.” Rhyme shrugged. This was a sobering lesson about the nature of data, he reflected. They seemingly had found a suspect and even Cooper’s characterization of him suggested he might be the one—
He seems to be a loner
—yet the lead was completely wrong, due to the minuscule error of missing a single keystroke. They might have come down hard on the man—and misdirected resources—if Cooper hadn’t realized his mistake.

Sachs sat down beside Rhyme, who, seeing her eyes, asked, “What is it?”

“Funny, but now that I’m back, I feel like some kind of spell’s been broken. I think I want an outside opinion. About SSD. I lost perspective when I was there… It’s a disorienting place.”

“How so?” Sellitto asked.

“You ever been to Vegas?”

Sellitto and his ex had. Rhyme gave a brief laugh. “Las Vegas, where the only question is how
much
disadvantage you have. And why would I want to give money away?”

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Sachs continued, “Well, it was like a casino. The outside doesn’t exist. Small—or no—windows. No watercooler conversation, nobody laughing. Everybody’s completely focused on their jobs. It’s like you’re in a different world.”

“And you want somebody else’s opinion on the place,” Sellitto said.

“Right.”

Rhyme suggested, “Journalist?” Thom’s partner, Peter Hoddins, was a former reporter for
The New
York Times
and was now writing nonfiction books about politics and society. He’d probably know people from the business desk who covered the data-mining industry.

But she shook her head. “No, somebody who’s had firsthand contact with them. A former employee maybe.”

“Good. Lon, can you call somebody at Unemployment?”

“Sure.” Sellitto called the New York State unemployment department. After ten minutes or so of bouncing around from office to office he found the name of a former SSD assistant technical director.

He’d worked for the data miner for a number of years but had been fired a year and a half ago. Calvin Geddes was his name and he was in Manhattan. Sellitto got the details and handed the note to Sachs.

She called Geddes and arranged to see him in about an hour.

Rhyme had no particular opinion about her mission. In any investigation you need to cover all bases. But leads like Geddes and Pulaski’s checking on alibis were, to Rhyme, like images seen in an opaque window’s reflection—suggestions of the truth but not the truth itself. It was only the hard evidence, scant though it was, that held the real answer to who their killer was. And so he turned back to the clues.

Move…

Arthur Rhyme had given up being scared of the Lats, who were ignoring him anyway. And he knew the big fuck-you black guy wasn’t any threat.

It was the tattooed white guy who bothered him. The tweaker—what meth-heads were apparently called—scared Arthur a lot. Mick was his name. His hands twitched, he scratched his welty skin and his eerie white eyes jumped like bubbles in boiling water. He whispered to himself.

Arthur had tried to avoid the man all yesterday, and last night he’d lain awake and in between bouts of depression spent a lot of time wishing Mick away, hoping that he’d go to trial today and vanish from Arthur’s life forever.

But no such luck. He was back this morning and seemed to be staying close. He continued to glance at Arthur. “You and me,” he once muttered, sending a chill right down to Arthur’s tailbone.

Even the Lats didn’t seem to want to hassle Mick. Maybe you had to follow certain protocols in jail.

Some unwritten rules of right and wrong. People like this skinny tattooed druggie might not play by those rules, and everybody here seemed to know it.

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Ever’body know ever’thing round here. ’Cept you. You don’ know shit…

Once he laughed, looked at Arthur as if recognizing him and started to rise but then seemed to forget what he’d intended and sat down again, picking at his thumb.

“Yo, Jersey Man.” A voice in his ear. Arthur jumped.

The big black guy had come up behind him. He sat down next to Arthur. The bench creaked.

“Antwon. Antwon Johnson.”

Should he make a fist and tap it? Don’t be a fucking idiot, he told himself and just nodded. “Arthur—”

“I know.” Johnson glanced at Mick and said to Arthur, “That tweaker fucked up. Don’t do that meth shit. Fuck you up forever.” After a moment he said, “So. You a brainy guy?”

“Sort of.”

“The fuck ‘sorta’ mean?”

Don’t play games. “I have a physics degree. And one in chemistry. I went to M.I.T.”

“Mitt?”

“It’s a school.”

“Good one?”

“Pretty good.”

“So you know science shit? Chemistry and physics and everything?”

This line of questioning wasn’t at all like that of the two Lats’, the ones who’d tried to extort him. It seemed like Johnson was really interested. “Some things. Yeah.”

Then the big guy asked, “So you know howta make bombs. One big enough to blow that motherfucking wall down.”

“I…” Heart thudding again, harder than before. “Well—”

Antwon Johnson laughed. “Fuckin’ wit’ you, man.”

“I—”

“Fuckin’. Wit. You.”

“Oh.” Arthur laughed and wondered if his heart would explode right at this moment or would wait till later. He hadn’t gotten all of his father’s genes, but had the faulty cardiac messages been included in the package?

Mick said something to himself and took an intense interest in his right elbow, scratching it raw.

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Both Johnson and Arthur watched him.

Tweaker…

Johnson then said, “Yo, yo, Jersey Man, lemme ask you somethin’.”

“Sure.”

“My momma, she religious, you know what I’m saying? And she tellin’ me one time the Bible was right.

I mean, all of it was exactly the way that shit was wrote. Okay but listen up: I’m thinking, where’s the dinosaurs in the Bible? God created man and woman and earth and rivers and donkeys and snakes an’

shit. Why don’t it say God created dinosaurs? I mean, I seen their skeletons, you know. So they was real. So whatsa fuckin’ truth, man?”

Arthur Rhyme looked at Mick. Then at the nail pounded in the wall. His palms were sweating and he was thinking that, of all the things that could happen to him in jail, he was going to get killed because he took a scientist’s moral stand against intelligent design.

Oh, what the fuck?

He said, “It would be against all the known laws of science—laws that have been acknowledged by every advanced civilization on earth—for the earth to be only six thousand years old. It would be like you sprouting wings and flying out that window there.”

The man frowned.

I’m dead.

Johnson fixed him with an intense gaze. Then he nodded. “I fuckin’ knew it. Didn’t make no sense at all, six thousand years. Fuck.”

“I can give you the name of a book to read about it. There’s this author Richard Dawkins and he—”

“Don’ wanna read no fuckin’ book. Take yo’ word fo’ it, Mr. Jersey Man.”

Arthur really felt like tapping fists now. But he refrained. He asked, “What’s your mother going to say when you tell her?”

The round black face screwed up in astonishment. “I ain’ gonna tell her. That’d be fucked up. You never win no arguments ’gainst yo’ mother.”

Or your father, Arthur said to himself.

Johnson then grew serious. He said, “Yo. Word up you din’t do what they busted you fo’.”

“Of course not.”

“But you got yo’ ass collared anyway?”

“Yep.”

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“The fuck that happen?”

“I wish I knew. I’ve been thinking about it since I got arrested. It’s
all
I think about. How he could’ve done it.”

“Who’s ‘he’?”

“The real killer.”

“Yo, like in
The Fugitive
. Or O.J.”

“The police found all kinds of evidence linking me to the crime. Somehow the real killer knew everything about me. My car, where I lived, my schedule. He even knew things I bought—and he planted them as evidence. I’m sure that’s what happened.”

Antwon Johnson considered this and then laughed. “Man. That yo’ fucking problem.”

“What’s that?”

“You went out an’ you
bought
ever’thing. Shoulda just boosted it, man. Then nobody know shit what you about.”

Another lobby.

But a lot different from SSD’s.

Amelia Sachs had never seen anything quite so messy. Maybe when she was a beat officer, responding to domestics among druggies in Hell’s Kitchen. But even then a lot of those people had had dignity; they made the effort. This place made her cringe. The not-for-profit organization Privacy Now, located in an old piano factory in the city’s Chelsea district, won the prize for slovenly.

Stacks of computer printouts, books—many of them law books and yellowing government regulations—newspapers and magazines. Then cardboard boxes, which contained more of the same.

Phonebooks too. Federal Registers.

And dust. A ton of dust.

A receptionist in blue jeans and a shabby sweater pounded furiously on an old computer keyboard and spoke, sotto voce, into a hands-free telephone. Harried people in jeans and T-shirts, or corduroys and wrinkled work shirts, walked into the office from up the hall, swapped files or picked up phone-message slips and disappeared.

Cheap printed signs and posters filled the walls.

BOOKSTORES: BURN YOUR CUSTOMERS’ RECEIPTS, BEFORE THE

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GOVERNMENT BURNS THEIR BOOKS!!!

On one wrinkled rectangle of art board was the famous line from George Orwell’s novel,
1984,
about a totalitarian society:

Big Brother Is Watching You.

And sitting prominently on the scabby wall across from Sachs:

GUERRILLA’S GUIDE TO THE PRIVACY WAR

·
Never give out your Social Security Number.

·
Never give out your phone number.

·
Hold loyalty card swap parties before you go shopping.

·
Never volunteer for surveys.

·
“Opt out” every chance you can.

·
Don’t fill out product registration cards.

·
Don’t fill out “warranty” cards. You don’t need one for the warranty. They’re information
gathering devices!

·
Remember—the Nazis’ most dangerous weapon was information.

·
Stay off the “grid” as much as possible.

She was digesting this when a scuffed door opened and a short, intense-looking man with pale skin strode up to her, shook her hand and then led her back into his office, which was even messier than the lobby.

Calvin Geddes, the former employee of SSD, now worked for this privacy rights organization. “I went over to the dark side,” he said, smiling. He’d abandoned the conservative SSD dress code, and was wearing a yellow button-down shirt without a tie, jeans and running shoes.

The pleasant grin faded quickly, though, as she told him the story of the murders.

“Yep,” he whispered, his eyes hard and focused now. “I
knew
something like this would happen. I absolutely knew it.”

Geddes explained that he had a technical background and had worked with Sterling’s first company, SSD’s predecessor, in Silicon Valley, writing code for them. He moved to New York and lived a nice life as SSD skyrocketed to success.

But then the experience had soured.

“We had problems. We didn’t encrypt data back then and were responsible for some serious identity thefts. Several people committed suicide. And a couple of times stalkers signed up as clients—but only to get information from innerCircle. Two of the women they were looking for were attacked, one almost died. Then some parents in custody battles used our data to find their exes and kidnapped the children. It was tough. I felt like the guy who helped invent the atom bomb and then regretted it. I tried to put more controls in place at the company. And that meant that I didn’t believe in the quote ‘SSD vision,’

according to my boss.”

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“Sterling?”

“Ultimately, yes. But he didn’t actually fire me. Andrew never gets his hands dirty. He delegates the unpleasantries. That way he can appear to be the most wonderful, kindest boss in the world…. And as a practical matter there’s less evidence against him if other people do his butchery… Well, when I left I joined Privacy Now.”

The organization was like EPIC, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, he explained. PN challenged threats to individuals’ privacy from the government, businesses and financial institutions, computer providers, telephone companies, and commercial data brokers and miners. The organization lobbied in Washington, sued the government under the Freedom of Information Act to find out about surveillance programs, and sued individual corporations that weren’t complying with privacy and disclosure laws.

Sachs didn’t tell him about the data trap Rodney Szarnek had put together but explained in general terms how they were looking for SSD customers and employees who might be able to patch together dossiers.

“The security seems very tight. But that was what Sterling and his people told us. I wanted an outside opinion.”

“Happy to help.”

“Mark Whitcomb told us about the concrete firewalls and keeping the data divided up.”

“Who’s Whitcomb?”

“He’s with their Compliance Department.”

“Never heard of it. It’s new.”

Sachs explained, “The department is like a consumer advocate within the company. To make sure all government regulations are complied with.”

Geddes seemed pleased, though he added, “That didn’t come about out of the goodness of Andrew Sterling’s heart. They probably got sued once too often and wanted to make a good show for the public and Congress. Sterling’s never going to give one inch if he doesn’t have to… But about the data pens, that’s true. Sterling treats data like the Holy Grail. And hacking in? Probably impossible. And there is no way anybody could physically break in and steal data.”

“He told me that very few employees can log on and get dossiers from innerCircle. As far as you know, is that true?”