Like many Triton executives, Donohue had joined the firm straight out of the service. A graduate of the naval academy, he’d done an eight-year hitch driving an S-3 Viking, an aging warhorse whose mission it was to track Soviet submarines. With the Russians pretty much out of the sub business, the need for his specialty was low and falling. Donohue had been offered a promotion and a billet in recruiting if he would stay. He’d tolerated the military’s long hours and low pay because he loved flying. If he had to take a desk job-and this particular billet was located in Detroit, Michigan-he wanted to earn a little coin. He’d resigned his commission and joined Triton. As a newlywed with his first child due in six months, it was time to start putting some money in the bank.
“Here she is,” said the VP, a guy named Merchie Rivers. Rivers walked and talked like a hard-charging ground-pounder who’d forgotten he’d taken off his green beret five years earlier.
Donohue watched a pair of workers wheel the pressure-wrapped podium toward them. “Looks bigger.”
“It’s the newest model. If we’re going to have a billion people watching, the boss wants to have the best up there. It’s two inches wider across the base. Weighs thirty pounds more.”
“Why the increase?” asked Donohue. As a pilot, he’d been trained to question every extra pound his aircraft took aboard.
“The thing’s got enough bulletproof armor to stop an RPG. Kevlar ain’t light.”
“Good. There’s no such thing as being too safe on this one.”
“Amen,” said Rivers.
The workers lifted the podium into the payload of a delivery van and strapped it in place.
Donohue slammed the rear doors closed. “Just make sure it has the presidential seal on it.”
“Not to worry, buddy,” said Rivers, shaking his hand as if it were a rag. “This one was custom made for President McCoy.”
39
Godforsaken machines.
Guilfoyle sat at the head of the conference table inside the Quiet Room, surrounded by four of the firm’s top information analysts. Scattered across the table was Thomas Bolden’s credit history, his medical records, school transcripts, credit-card bills, gas, electricity, and phone bills, banking and brokerage statements, a list of magazine subscriptions, travel records including his preferred seat assignment, driving record, insurance policies, tax returns, and voting record.
All of it had been fed into Cerberus, and Cerberus had spat out a predictive model of Thomas Bolden’s daily activities. The forty-page report, bound neatly and set on the table in front of Guilfoyle, was titled “Core Personality Profile.” It told Guilfoyle where Bolden liked to eat, how much he spent each year on clothing, in what month of the year he tended to have a physical, what kind of car he was likely to drive, his “must-watch” TV, and not incidentally, how he would vote. But it could not tell him where Thomas Bolden would be in an hour.
“We can ascertain, sir, that Bolden has a point-four probability of eating at one of three restaurants downtown,” one of the men was saying. “Also, that he has a point-one probability of going shopping after work and that he has a point-ninety-seven probability of visiting the Boys Club in Harlem tonight. I caution that the results maintain a bias of plus or minus two standard deviations. Regardless, I’d suggest stationing men at all three restaurants, as well as the Boys Club.”
“The man is on the run,” said Guilfoyle. “He is not behaving according to his regular daily patterns. He went shopping, but it was at ten A.M. in a store he’d never visited before. I can promise you that he will not be visiting the Boys Club tonight. If for no other reason than he knows that we’ll have a dozen men surrounding it.”
“If I might interject, sir,” said Hoover, a flaxen-haired giant with skin as fluorescent as the damnable lighting. “The acute psychological profile Cerberus provided shows that Bolden is aggressive, proactive, and that he tends to cope well with physical stress…”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Guilfoyle said, his calm fraying by the minute. “The man is a cipher, as far as I’m concerned. He’s supposed to be an investment banker, yet he acts like a seasoned operative. Where does Cerberus tell me anything about that?”
“It’s his childhood, sir,” said Hoover. “Clearly, we don’t have a complete picture. If only we could input some relevant data pertaining to…”
Guilfoyle raised a hand, indicating that Hoover should contain himself. Hoover had spent too long with the machines. His answers always began with “If only…” If only we could improve this. If only we could get more of that. Like the mother of a mischievous child, he had become an apologist for the system’s shortcomings.
A picture window ran along one side of the Quiet Room, giving a clear view of the communications center. Guilfoyle slipped on a pair of glasses and directed his attention to the wall. Projected onto the screen was what was called a link map. A bright blue ball with the initials “TB” glowed at its center. Phone numbers belonging to his home, office, cell phone, and BlackBerry ran beneath it. Emanating from the ball, like rays from the sun, was a cluster of lines each leading to its own ball, some small, some large. Those balls, too, had initials, and below them tightly scripted phone numbers. Many of the balls were interconnected, lines running between them. The whole thing looked like a giant Tinkertoy.
Each ball represented a person with whom Bolden maintained contact. The larger balls represented those whom, according to his phone records, he spoke with most frequently. They included his girlfriend, Jennifer Dance (at last report, undergoing hospital treatment), several coworkers at Harrington Weiss, the Harlem Boys Club, and a dozen colleagues at other banks and private equity firms. The smaller balls included less frequently contacted coworkers, other colleagues, and a half dozen restaurants. In all there were approximately fifty balls in orbit around Bolden’s sun.
Guilfoyle had programmed Cerberus to monitor all the phone lines indicated on the link map on a real-time basis. Automatically, Cerberus would compare the parties speaking with a voiceprint of Thomas Bolden taken that morning. Guilfoyle didn’t have enough manpower to stake out all of Bolden’s acquaintances. With the link map, it didn’t matter. Should Bolden phone any of these numbers, Guilfoyle could listen in. More important, he could get a fix on Bolden’s location.
The problem was that Bolden was a sharp operator. He had learned firsthand that his phone had been bugged and that using a cell phone meant risking capture. The link map was therefore a waste of time.
Guilfoyle rubbed his eyes. Over a hundred monitors running floor to ceiling occupied another corner of the room. The monitors drew a live feed from exterior surveillance cameras around Midtown and lower Manhattan. The pictures switched rapidly from location to location. Software analyzed the faces of all pedestrians captured by the cameras and compared them to a composite of three photographs of Thomas Bolden. Simultaneously, it analyzed the gaits of the subjects, and using a sophisticated algorithm, compared them to a model established from the video of Bolden striding down the corridor at Harrington Weiss earlier that morning. It wasn’t the walk it was analyzing as the exact distance between his ankle and knee, knee and hip, and ankle and hip. The three ratios were added together to yield a composite number that was as unique for every man, woman, and child as their fingerprints.
That was the good news.
The bad news was that snow, rain, or any kind of moisture in the atmosphere degraded the picture enough to render the software program ineffective.
For all the money the Organization had poured into Cerberus, for all the millions of man-hours the brightest brains in the nation-in the world, dammit-had spent developing the software to run it, Cerberus was still a machine. It could gather. It could hunt. But it could not intuit. It could not guess.