It sold this information to its customers, which included nine of the country’s top ten credit-card users, nearly every major bank, insurance company, and automaker, and lately, the federal government, which used Trendrite’s personal-profiling systems to check out airline passengers. And for all this, it earned three billion dollars a year in revenues, and four hundred fifty million in profit.
The deal was Bolden’s baby. He’d come up with the idea. He’d contacted the company. He’d pitched it to Jefferson. Supervised the road show. Overseen financing. Everything was all set to go. HW’s fees were estimated to top a hundred million dollars. It would be his first big payday.
RM. Real money.
Just then, he spotted Sol Weiss’s leonine gray head loping along at the far end of the hall. He was dressed in a double-breasted blue suit, a silk hankie overflowing his breast pocket, the unlit cigar leading the way. With him was Michael Schiff, the firm’s CEO.
“Althea,” he called again. “What about those flight times?”
He peeked his head out the door and saw her sitting at her desk, crying. “What is it?” he asked, rushing to her side. “What happened? Is it Bobby? Is he okay?”
But she refused to look at him. “Oh, Thomas,” she sobbed.
Bolden laid a hand on her shoulder and was shocked when she knocked it away. He looked up. Weiss and Schiff, and two uniformed security officers, were powering down the hallway. Stone faces all around. It was impossible to mistake their intention. These guys were out for blood. He wondered what poor sucker had got his ass caught in the ringer this time.
“Tommy!” It was Sol Weiss, and he had his arm outstretched and his finger pointed directly toward him. “We need to talk. “
16
Five stories beneath the frozen Virginia landscape, Guilfoyle sat listening to the recording of Thomas Bolden’s phone call to Jennifer Dance that had been made at six o’clock that morning.
“Don’t go,” the woman said. “I’ll take a day, too. Come over to my place.”
“Can’t do it,” replied Bolden.
“I need you. Come over. Now.”
“Jen, it’s a big deal. People are coming in from D.C. There’s no way I can miss it.”
“Okay, lunch then. I’ve got something to tell you, too.”
“Hint?”
“Never. But I’m warning you. I may hijack you afterward.”
“If things go well with Jefferson, I may let you. Lunch. Twelve sharp.”
“Regular place?”
“Regular place. And you? Your arm? Only ten stitches?”
“How did you know?”
The recording ended.
Guilfoyle was seated at his stainless-steel desk on the upper level of the Organization’s command and control room. The room was the size of a college lecture hall and bathed in dim blue light. Technicians manned broad computer consoles on three descending levels. All were men. All held PhDs from top universities in computer science, electrical engineering, or other related fields. All had worked for Bell Labs, Lucent, Microsoft, or a firm of equivalent stature before joining the Organization. The pay was equivalent. It was the toys that lured them, the prospect of doing pioneering work on the most advanced, and certainly the most secret, software array in history.
A dull rumble shook the floor as the air-conditioning kicked in. It might be thirty degrees up top, but the massive array of parallel-linked supercomputers combined with a lack of natural ventilation meant that temperatures were much higher down here.
“Do you want to hear it again?” a tech named Hoover asked from his console.
“Thank you, Mr. Hoover, but I think that’s enough.” Guilfoyle drummed his fingers on the desk, his eyes glued to the crude drawing that had been found in Bolden’s apartment. He sighed, and reluctantly admitted that Mr. Pendleton had been right. Maybe a machine did know better than him. Three large screens occupied the wall in front of him. One showed a projection of a Manhattan city map. A sprinkling of blue pinlights spaced at even intervals from one another formed the outline of a bell covering the lower half of the map. Every few moments, the pinlights advanced along well-marked streets, like some type of newfangled electronic game. An array of three letters glowed beneath each pinlight. RBX. ENJ. WRR. Each pinlight represented one of his men, his location broadcast by an RFID chip (Radio Frequency Identification) implanted in the soft flesh of the upper arm. Besides the recipient’s name, the RFID chip stored his blood type and full medical history.
In their midst, a sole red pinlight flickered faintly.
It was the red pinlight flashing at the corner of Thirty-second Street and Fifth Avenue that interested him. The light jumped erratically from block to block, then disappeared for a moment, only to reappear a few seconds later a half block away. The profusion of skyscrapers combined with the sheer volume of cellular traffic in Manhattan made it difficult to track the weak GPS signals emitted from a cell phone, or in Thomas Bolden’s case, his BlackBerry personal assistant.
The regular place.
“Mr. Hoover. Bring up a record of Bolden’s credit-card transactions for the past twelve months, please.”
“All of them? He’s got a Visa, a MasterCard, and two American Express cards, one personal, one corporate.”
“Leave out the corporate Amex. We’re not looking for a business expense.” In his short time with Bolden, Guilfoyle had pegged him as a straight-up individual. Not the type to put a lunch with his girlfriend on the company’s tab.
“What are we looking for?” asked Hoover.
“Isolate all dining establishments in New York City south of Forty-eighth Street. Drill down to the time of charge. Bracket eleven A.M. to two P.M.”
Though the command and control room was cooled to sixty-eight degrees, he felt hot and unsettled. He removed a handkerchief from his pocket and drew it across his forehead. A few moments later, a record of all the lunches Bolden had charged in downtown Manhattan flashed onto the screen. There were twelve transactions in all-fewer than Guilfoyle had expected-and they were spread across ten establishments.
Ten years earlier, the Organization had purchased the nation’s largest processor of consumer loans: credit cards, mortgages, auto loans. Though it had sold the company in the meantime, it had not forgotten to install a “back door” inside the firm’s software to allow unfettered, real-time access to all their customer records.
“Let’s go to Bolden’s ATM records. I’d appreciate it if you’d map them.”
A minute passed. The blue and red pinlights disappeared, replaced by a sprinkling of green pinlights dotting lower Manhattan. Guilfoyle was quick to notice a cluster near Union Square.
“Bring up all restaurants on Union Square.”
Six lights appeared around the perimeter of Union Square Park.
“Did Bolden use his credit card to pay for lunch at any of these?” Guilfoyle asked.
“Negative.”
“Let’s keep looking. Run through all stored phone communications since we began surveillance, ditto for e-mail, run the web addresses he’s been frequenting.”
Hoover grimaced. “That may take a while.”
“Make sure it doesn’t. He’s due to have lunch with Miss Dance in three hours, and we’re going to be there.”
When word of Sol Weiss’s death, and more important, of Bolden’s escape, had reached him, Guilfoyle had been reviewing Bolden’s file with an eye to discovering how Cerberus had kicked him out as a Class 4 offender. Cerberus was the Organization’s watchdog, a parallel-linked supercomputer programmed to search for clues indicating activity that might be detrimental to the cause. It drew from phone records, flight logs, insurance databases, credit histories, consumer profiles, bank logs, title companies, and many other repositories of sensitive information-all of it, officially, in the private domain.