Fortress

45

There was a long line outside the reception room. To get in, the guests had to pass through a full security check and give up their phones to meaty, dark-suited guards in shades straight out of Men in Black.

Beth steered Tom past the line and straight through, where she broke away and went into full meeting-greeting-laughing mode as she guided people to their seats. Tom scanned the crowd: mostly male, almost uniformly middle-aged and white. A lot of the men had the square-jawed, whitewall haircut look of former military personnel. Others were clones of Stutz — grey men in grey suits. But there was another contingent somewhat less formally dressed, with beards and ponytails, who looked as if they had just ridden in on their bikes from the desert. What kind of big idea would unite these disparate factions?

Stutz clambered onto the stage. ‘For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Aaron Stutz.’

There was a ripple of laughter — as if to acknowledge how ridiculous it would be not to know who he was.

‘And I want to thank you most sincerely for joining us tonight. You’re about to experience an evening to remember. But you don’t want to listen to me. Without further ado, let me introduce you to the brains behind this project, the reason you all have come here tonight — Skip Lederer!’

To wild applause and whooping, Skip ambled in, sucking a popsicle. Beth had evidently not persuaded him to change: he was still in the Beavis and Butt-Head T-shirt, his only concession to the occasion a small radio mic. Instead of standing at the autocue, he chose to sit on the edge of the podium, his legs swinging like a toddler’s. He didn’t bother with an introduction. Instead, he took out the popsicle and examined it, then reached into his jeans pocket and held up a smart phone and an American Express card. ‘Most folks think these are what freedom is all about.’ He waved them in the air so everyone could see them.

‘Uh-uh. Not so. In fact they’re quite the opposite. These babies are the spy in your pocket, channels through which we can discover everything we need to know about an individual: what he buys, where he goes, who he meets, who he screws, what he reads, who his friends are, his enemies — and what they’re saying about him. We can find out more about a guy than he knows about himself. Great, huh? So, what’s the problem?’

He waited, ostensibly for someone to answer, but really for dramatic effect. They were hanging on his every word.

‘The problem, girls and boys, is not the collection of the intelligence, it’s what happens to that information. That’s the NSA’s problem number one. Their other problem, of course, is that they think they’re hot shit.’

He shook his head. ‘Know what? In actuality they are full of shit.’

A few of the audience whooped.

‘I mean literally. Their server capacity is maxed out. They got so much data on us they don’t know what to do with it all. Like, they’ve built the world’s biggest vacuum-cleaner to suck up all the intel, and it’s gummin’ up the works. They can’t process it. It’s too freakin’ much for them.’

He paused briefly to finish the popsicle, then gestured with the stick.

‘All that precious intel is mountains of information they don’t have the resources to begin to mine. Thar’s gold in tham thar mountains, but where’s the manpower to go panhandling for it? Sure it’s fine if you know who you’re looking for, which bad guys you’re on to. But what happens when you don’t know who the hell they are?’

He paused and surveyed the sea of rapt faces. Then he turned to the giant screen behind him and aimed a remote. ‘I’ll tell you what happens. The Boston Marathon happens… Fort Hood happens… Times Square happens. No warning. No intelligence.’

The faces of the perpetrators of each attack flashed up, followed by the burning Twin Towers.

‘Another problem. Nine/Eleven. Some of those guys were in the system. They had a few names, but no one joined up the dots.’

The screen changed to an image of a huge football crowd: faces of all types, all ages, all colours.

‘Where’s Waldo? Where’s the next guy on no one’s radar who comes out of nowhere and goes bang? Does the NSA know about him? The hell it does. Even though he’s in their system somewhere.’

Skip was rewarded with a volley of evangelical Right ons and You said its. Evidently his appearance and mode of delivery had done nothing to dampen the audience’s enthusiasm for his pitch. He shook his head mournfully and jumped up into a standing position.

‘Here’s the thing. The NSA’s retrieval technology is supposed to be state-of-the-art. Their programmes have cool names like “Prism” but they suck. Why? Because their systems can only tell you the past, what the bad guys have done. And if they haven’t done anything bad yet? Who’s watching out for them? The freaks who blew up the Boston Marathon. Who knew? How long are we in America gonna have to go around looking at the guy next to us on the street, at the bus station, on the subway, wondering what’s in his backpack, what’s under his vest? Well, let me tell you, the wait is almost over.’

The audience were now on their feet, clapping and cheering. What they were hearing made George Orwell look like an optimist, but they were loving it.

‘For those of you who are tired of wondering when the next bomb is coming, when the next lone bomber is gonna strike, Oryxis has the solution.’

He turned to the screen again and waved the remote. Over the Times Square throng appeared the words Threat Elimination.

‘Our software is designed not only to mine the information, but to process it in real time. Soon, what NSA desk jockeys take a week to do, we’ll be doing in thirty seconds. And we can do a thousand times the volume.’

He paused while the room erupted with more whoops and applause. They didn’t need convincing.

‘But here’s what else we can do.’

The screen flashed with another headline: Predictive Tracking.

‘What Oryxis can do, with intelligent use of all this data, is model what an individual is going to do before he does it. Our algorithms penetrate the data, looking for patterns in behaviour that conform to our profiles. We then isolate our POIs, our Persons of Interest. And then we go deep. We go in and get it all. We can know so much about a guy that we know what he’s going to do before he’s even thought of doing it. Welcome to the future. Suck on that, NSA! We are gonna build the digital fortress to keep this country safe.’

To thunderous applause he came and sat down beside Tom, who leaned towards him. ‘Interesting. And what happens to the POI after you’ve identified and predictively tracked him?’

Skip shrugged. ‘Hey, I just write the code.’ He nodded at Stutz. ‘I leave the outcomes to the grown-ups.’

Stutz was on his feet, clapping along, his face turning purple again, but with elation this time. ‘People, let’s hear it for Skip Lederer, the cleverest man in America — hell, the world!’

He smiled indulgently, like a headmaster waiting for his pupils to stop chattering. ‘Now, I’d like for you to meet our next speaker, a very special guest, who’s come all the way from war-torn London to talk about the work of our friends at Invicta. Tom Buckingham has, for the last fourteen years, served his country in their most elite military group, the British Army’s Special Air Service, better known as the SAS.’

All eyes were now on Tom.

‘Please join me in giving him a real down-home Texas welcome. Tom Buckingham!’

As Tom approached the podium to loud cheers, Stutz came forward and gave him a firm photo-opportunity handshake and a big grin. Only there were no cameras tonight, that was for sure. Stutz whispered in his ear, ‘Give ’em hell, son. Tell it like it is.’

Public speaking was a necessary evil, something to be trained for, like suiting up for a gas attack. He knew several in the Regiment who would rather die in a firefight than get up in front of an audience but he was ready. He shut his mind to everything but the job he had agreed to do and what he was about to say.

He needn’t have worried. They were attentive, leaning forward to listen and laughing in all the right places, as he took them through a few highlights of his life in the SAS. And when he moved on to describing the men he had met on the Invicta campus, whose lives had been turned around by Rolt and his programme, there was a reverent hush. From there, he pulled no punches in his description of the hostel bombing. If this was what it took for Rolt to get his money, then why not go for it? If there was one thing that would surely clinch it, it was this. It almost alarmed him how easily it came to him, finding the words that could mesmerize the audience. Was this how the politicians did it? The hate preachers? And all the time in another part of his brain he was asking himself what any of this had to do with Invicta. The questions were piling up. And as his eyes drifted from face to face he caught sight of a figure at the back of the room, leaning against a pillar: just the man who might have some of the answers.