The Broken Window (27 page)

“Oh, yeah. A few of them have to have access but nobody else.
I
never did. And I was there from the beginning.”

“Do you have any thoughts? Maybe any employees with a troubling past? Violent?”

“It’s been a few years. And I never thought anybody was particularly dangerous. Though, I’ve got to say, despite the big happy family façade Sterling likes to put on, I never really got to know anyone there.”

“What about these individuals?” She showed him the list of suspects.

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Geddes looked it over. “I worked with Gillespie. I knew Cassel. I don’t like either of them. They’re caught up in the whole data-mining curve, like Silicon Valley in the nineties. Hotshots. I don’t know the others. Sorry.” Then he studied her closely. “So you’ve been there?” he asked with a cool smile.

“What’d you think of Andrew?”

Her thoughts jammed as she tried to come up with a brief summary of her impressions. Finally:

“Determined, polite, inquisitive, smart but…” Her voice petered out.

“But you don’t really know him.”

“Right.”

“Because he presents the great stone face. In all the years I worked with him I never really knew him.

Nobody
knows him. Unfathomable. I love that word. That’s Andrew. I was always looking for clues…

You notice something odd about his bookshelves?”

“You couldn’t see the spines of the books.”

“Exactly. I snuck a peek once. Guess what? They weren’t about computers or privacy or data or business. They were mostly history books, philosophy, politics: the Roman Empire, Chinese emperors, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Stalin, Idi Amin, Khrushchev. He read a lot about the Nazis.

Nobody used information the way they did and Andrew doesn’t hesitate to tell you. First major use of computers to keep track of ethnic groups. That’s how they consolidated power. Sterling’s doing the same in the corporate world. Notice the company name, SSD? The rumor is he chose it intentionally.

SS—for the Nazi elite army. SD—for their security and intelligence agency. You know what his competitors say it stands for? ‘Selling Souls for Dollars.’” Geddes laughed grimly.

“Oh, don’t get me wrong. Andrew doesn’t dislike Jews. Or any other group. Politics, nationality, religion and race mean nothing to him. I heard him say once, ‘Data have no borders.’ The seat of power in the twenty-first century is information, not oil or geography. And Andrew Sterling wants to be the most powerful man on earth… I’m sure he gave you the data-mining-is-God speech.”

“Saving us from diabetes, helping us afford Christmas presents and houses and solving cases for the police?”

“That’s the one. And all of it’s true. But tell me if those benefits are worth somebody knowing every detail about your life. Maybe you don’t care, provided you save a few bucks. But do you really want ConsumerChoice lasers scanning your eyes in a movie theater and recording your reactions to those commercials they run before the movie? Do you want the RFID tag in your car key to be available to the police to know that you hit a hundred miles an hour last week, when your route only took you along roads that were posted fifty? Do you want strangers knowing what kind of underwear your daughter wears? Or exactly when you’re having sex?”

“What?”

“Well, innerCircle knows you bought condoms and KY this afternoon and your husband was on the six-fifteen E train home. It knows you’ve got the evening free because your son’s at the Mets game and your daughter’s buying clothes at The Gap in the Village. It knows you put on cable-TV porn at seven-eighteen. And that you order some nice tasty postcoital take-out Chinese at quarter to ten. That information is all there.

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“Oh, SSD knows if your children are maladjusted in school and when to send you direct-mail flyers about tutors and child-counseling services. If your husband is having trouble in the bedroom and when to send him discreet flyers about erectile dysfunction cures. When your family history, buying patterns and absences from work put you in a presuicidal profile—”

“But that’s good. So a counselor can help you.”

Geddes gave a cold laugh. “Wrong. Because counseling potential suicide victims isn’t profitable. SSD

sends the name to local funeral homes and grief counselors—who could snag
all
of the family as customers, not just a single depressed person
after
he shoots himself. And, by the way, that was a very lucrative venture.”

Sachs was shocked.

“Did you hear about ‘tethering’?”

“No.”

“SSD has defined a network based just on you. Call it ‘Detective Sachs World.’ You’re the hub and the spokes go to your partners, spouses, parents, neighbors, coworkers, anybody it might help SSD to know about and profit from that knowledge. Everybody who has any connection is ‘tethered’ to you.

And each one of them is his or her own hub, and there are dozens of people tethered to them.”

Another thought and his eyes flashed. “You know about metadata?”

“What’s that?”

“Data about data. Every document that’s created by or stored on a computer—letters, files, reports, legal briefs, spreadsheets, Websites, emails, grocery lists—is loaded with hidden data. Who created it, where it’s been sent, all the changes that have been made to it and who made them and when—all recorded there, second by second. You write a memo to your boss and for a joke you start out with

‘Dear Stupid Prick,’ then delete it and write it correctly. Well, the ‘stupid prick’ part is still in there.”

“Seriously?”

“Oh, yes. The disk size of a typical word-processing report is much larger than the text in the document itself. What’s the rest? Metadata. The Watchtower database-management program has special bots—software robots—that do nothing but find and store metadata from every document it collects.

We called it the Shadow Department, because metadata’s like a shadow of the main data—and it’s usually much more revealing.”

Shadow, sixteens, pens, closets… This was a whole new world to Amelia Sachs.

Geddes enjoyed having a receptive audience. He leaned forward. “You know that SSD has an education division?”

She thought back to the chart in the brochure that Mel Cooper had downloaded. “Yes. EduServe.”

“But Sterling didn’t tell you about it, did he?”

“No.”

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“Because he doesn’t like to let on that its main function is to collect everything it possibly can about children. Starting with kindergarten. What they buy, what they watch, what computer sites they go to, what their grades are, medical records from school… And that’s very, very valuable information for retailers. But you ask me, what’s scarier about EduServe is that school boards can come to SSD and run predictive software on their students and then gear educational programs to them—in terms of what’s best for the community—or society, if you want to be Orwellian about it. Given Billy’s background, we think he should go into skilled labor. Suzy should be a doctor but only in public health… Control the children and you control the future. Another element of Adolf Hitler’s philosophy, by the way.” He laughed. “Okay, no more lecturing… But you see why I couldn’t stomach it anymore?”

But then Geddes frowned. “Just thinking about your situation—we had an incident once at SSD. Years ago. Before the company came to New York. There was a death. Probably just a coincidence. But…”

“No, tell me.”

“In the early days we farmed out a lot of the actual data-collection part of the business to scroungers.”

“To what?”

“Companies or individuals who procure data. A strange breed. They’re sort of like old-time wildcatters—prospectors, you could say. See, data have this weird allure. You can get addicted to the hunt. You can never find enough. However much they collect, they want more. And these guys are always looking for new ways to collect it. They’re competitive, ruthless. That’s how Sean Cassel started in the business. He was a data scrounger.

“Anyway, one scrounger was amazing. He worked for a small company. I think it was called Rocky Mountain Data in Colorado… What was his name?” Geddes squinted. “Maybe Gordon somebody. Or that might’ve been his last name. Anyway, we heard that he wasn’t too happy about SSD taking over his company. The word is he scrounged everything he could find about the company and Sterling himself—turned the tables on them. We thought maybe he was trying to dig up dirt and blackmail Sterling into stopping the acquisition. You know Andy Sterling—Andrew Junior—works for the company?”

She nodded.

“We’d heard rumors that Sterling had abandoned him years ago and the kid tracked him down. But then we also heard that maybe it was
another
son he abandoned. Maybe by his first wife, or a girlfriend.

Something he wanted to keep secret. We thought maybe Gordon was looking for that kind of dirt.

“Anyway, while Sterling and some other people were out there negotiating the purchase of Rocky Mountain, this Gordon guy dies—an accident of some kind, I think. That’s all I heard. I wasn’t there. I was back in the Valley, writing code.”

“And the acquisition went through?”

“Yep. What Andrew wants, Andrew shall have… Now, let me throw out one thought about your killer.

Andrew Sterling himself.”

“He has an alibi.”

“Does he? Well, don’t forget he
is
the king of information. If you
control
data, you can
change
data.

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Did you check out that alibi real carefully?”

“We are right now.”

“Well, even if it’s confirmed, he has men who work for him and would do whatever he wants. I mean anything. Remember, other people do his dirty work.”

“But he’s a multimillionaire. What’s his interest in stealing coins or a painting, then murdering the victim?”

“His interest?” Geddes’s voice rose, as if he were a professor talking to a student who just wasn’t getting the lesson. “His interest is in being the most powerful person in the world. He wants his little collection to include everybody on earth. And he’s particularly interested in law enforcement and government clients. The more crimes that are successfully solved using innerCircle, the more police departments, here and abroad, are going to sign on. Hitler’s first task when he came to power was to consolidate all the police departments in Germany. What was our big problem in Iraq? We disbanded the army and the police—we should have used them. Andrew doesn’t make mistakes like that.”

Geddes laughed. “Think I’m a crank, don’t you? But I live with this stuff all day long. Remember, it’s not paranoia if somebody’s really out there watching everything you do every minute of the day. And
that
’s SSD in a nutshell.”

Awaiting Sachs’s return, Lincoln Rhyme listened absently as Lon Sellitto explained that none of the other evidence in the earlier cases—the rape and coin theft—could be located. “That’s fucking weird.”

Rhyme agreed. But his attention veered from the detective’s sour assessment to his cousin’s SSD

dossier, sitting beside him on the turning frame. He tried to ignore it.

But the document drew him, needle to magnet. Looking at the stark sheets, black type on white paper, he told himself that, as Sachs had suggested, perhaps something helpful could be found in it. Then he admitted that he was simply curious.

STRATEGIC SYSTEMS DATACORP, INC. INNERCIRCLE
®
DOSSIERS

Arthur Robert Rhyme

SSD Subject Number 3480 — 9021 — 4966 — 2083

Lifestyle

· Dossier 1A. Consumer products preferences

· Dossier 1B. Consumer services preferences

· Dossier 1C. Travel

· Dossier 1D. Medical

· Dossier 1E. Leisure-time preferences

Financial/Educational/Professional

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· Dossier 2A. Educational history

· Dossier 2B. Employment history, w/income

· Dossier 2C. Credit history/current report and rating

· Dossier 2D. Business products and services preferences

Governmental/Legal

· Dossier 3A. Vital records

· Dossier 3B. Voter registration

· Dossier 3C. Legal history

· Dossier 3D. Criminal history

· Dossier 3E. Compliance

· Dossier 3F. Immigration and naturalization

T he information contained herein is the property of Strategic Systems Datacorp, Inc. (SSD). T he use hereof is subject to the Licensing Agreement between SSD and Customer, as defined in the Master Client Agreement. © Strategic Systems Datacorp, Inc. All rights reserved.

Instructing the turning frame to flip through the pages, he skimmed the dense document, all thirty pages of it. Some categories were full, some sparse. The voter registration was redacted, and the compliance and portions of the credit history referred to separate files, presumably because of legislation limiting access to such information.

He paused at the extensive lists of the consumer products bought by Arthur and his family (they were described by the creepy phrase “tethered individuals”). There was no doubt that anybody reading the dossier could have learned enough about his buying habits and where he shopped to implicate him in the murder of Alice Sanderson.

Rhyme learned about the country club Arthur belonged to, until he had quit several years ago, presumably because he’d lost his job. He noted the package vacations he’d bought; Rhyme was surprised he’d taken up skiing. Also, he or one of the children might have a weight problem; somebody had joined a dieting program. A health club membership for the entire family too. Rhyme saw a lay-away purchase for some jewelry around Christmastime; a chain jewelry store in a New Jersey mall. Rhyme speculated: small stones socketed in a large setting—a make-do gift, until times were better.

Seeing one reference, he gave a laugh. Like him, Arthur seemed to favor single-malt whisky—Rhyme’s new favorite brand, in fact, Glenmorangie.

His cars were a Prius and a Cherokee.

The criminalist’s smile faded at that reference, though, as he recalled another vehicle. He was picturing Arthur’s red Corvette, the car he’d received from his parents on his seventeenth birthday—the car in which Arthur had driven off to Boston to attend M.I.T.