Black List

CHAPTER 15

Returning to his office, Craig Middleton closed his door and sat down at his desk. Waiting for him on his screen was the file with Harvath’s coordinates and a smattering of other pieces of peripheral information. Making sense of data, massaging it and making it speak to him, was Middleton’s gift. He wasn’t simply good at it, he was practically a savant. There were only a handful of people in the world who understood the capture, synthesis, and manipulation of data as well as he did. In the world of data and information, he was more than a king, he was something akin to a god.

Middleton had been with ATS for as long as anyone could remember. IBM had spotted his brilliance in high school and gave him a blank check for his college and postgraduate studies. When his schooling was complete, he went to work in IBM’s classified Fathom division, working on top-secret, cutting-edge projects for the United States government.

With Fathom, it was said that IBM had amassed the greatest assemblage of brainpower since the Manhattan Project. As might be expected with such an incredible collection of intellect, there were more than a few personality quirks within the division. Eccentricity and brilliance were often two sides of the same coin.

Craig Middleton though, possessed a genius that even his exceptional peers found unsettling. There wasn’t a single project any of them were working on that Middleton couldn’t immediately identify a way to improve. He wasn’t shy, either, about telling his colleagues what they had overlooked or how even the smallest details of what they were working on could be made better. While his suggestions were always correct, his delivery was arrogant, and he grated on everyone who worked with him, even his superiors.

While never missing a chance to defame him for his rude and boorish behavior, no one could deny his brilliance, which was off the charts, and even his most vehement detractors at Fathom used names like Einstein and da Vinci when describing him. They also used names like Hitler and Mao.

Middleton’s scorched-earth personality eventually succeeded in burning every bridge with his coworkers, and IBM was forced to seal him off from Fathom or, more accurately, seal Fathom off from him. Placed in an entirely new building on campus, Middleton was given an unlimited budget and his choice of what he wanted to work on, alone. His choice shook IBM to its core.

In the 1930s, International Business Machines began working with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis to help organize and utilize population data on a scale never before seen. It was a taboo period in the company’s history, and one that IBM desperately wanted to forget. Middleton, though, was fascinated by it, in particular how the Nazis used data to surveil and control people.

Through a proprietary system of punch cards and punch card sorting machines, IBM assisted the Nazis in every stage of their persecution and eventual genocide of the Jewish people. It began with sorting census data to identify Jews in order to keep them out of particular fields of endeavor and eventually led to identifying where every Jew lived and how many family members they had so that they could be evicted from their homes and forced into the ghettos.

An American in Washington, D.C., named Herman Hollerith had developed the punch card system. At the height of the Third Reich, IBM was leasing, servicing, and upgrading two thousand sorting machines across Germany and thousands more across Nazi-occupied Europe, and manufacturing 1.5 billion custom punch cards each year in Germany alone.

There were “Hollerith Departments” at nearly every single concentration camp to compile and sort prisoner data, which ran the gamut from when a prisoner arrived to what slave labor he or she should perform and, of course, when each died.

The IBM partnership helped make the Nazis an incredibly efficient killing machine, far more efficient than they ever would have been on their own, and there was nary a facet of their operations that IBM didn’t have a hand in. As Hitler sought to expand his Third Reich, IBM had salivated at the opportunity to gain even greater market share.

Knowing the culture at IBM and that nothing, especially data and information, was ever purged—no matter how damning or dangerous—Middleton demanded access to everything they had on the Nazi program. IBM declined his request. In fact, they went further, they told him it didn’t exist. He knew they were lying, and he demanded the information again.

When he was turned down the second time, it was explained in no uncertain terms that if he made the request again, or even spoke of the project, his employment with IBM would be terminated, end of story.

Realizing that they weren’t willingly going to grant him access to the material, he devised a plan to steal it.

After sufficient time had passed, he cobbled together a series of projects he knew IBM would be pleased to see him working on and began in earnest in his private lab, which was tucked away on the far side of the campus. What the higher-ups at IBM didn’t know was that he had chosen each of the projects as cover and was slowly gaining access to the genocide program and siphoning copies of everything away.

By the time his superiors discovered, quite by accident, what he was up to, Middleton had made abhorrent progress. Using only simple mathematics and the rudimentary computing equipment available to IBM and the Nazis at the time, he had completely reworked and improved their program for genocide.

The detail into which his obsession plunged was beyond sickening. Improved train schedules and boxcar capacity studies, the construction and location of concentration camps, the means for prisoner selection, their murder, and the disposal of their corpses… Middleton’s vision, not to mention his deplorable admiration of the process, which bordered on reverence, was repellent.

According to his calculations, IBM had dropped the ball. Hitler and the Nazis could have been at least 80 percent more “productive” in their killing of Jews and anyone else they saw as an enemy of the state.

When Middleton’s research was uncovered, not only was he fired, but for the first time in the company’s history they actually burned an employee’s papers. They didn’t stop there. Upon terminating him, they confiscated his identification, his keys, and escorted him off the campus. They then collected his folders and notepads and every single book and physical object in his office and burned those as well. Middleton’s disgruntled colleagues, who were never informed of the research, weren’t surprised to hear that he had eventually been let go. What they would never know is how accurate they were in comparing him to monsters like Hitler and Mao.

Unwittingly, IBM had helped Middleton unlock a box that should never have been opened. The genie, if it could be described in such benign terms, was now out of the bottle. Middleton had discovered his calling.

He worked for multiple competitors of IBM before ending up at Equifax, the nation’s oldest consumer credit reporting agency. There, he was in his element, swimming in data and learning how he could use it.

He pioneered a division that gathered, analyzed, and provided consumer information to government and law enforcement agencies. It made him an extremely wealthy and powerful executive. The division would eventually be spun off as a company called ChoicePoint, a data-aggregating firm described as a “private intelligence service,” which peddled its information to government and private industries. But as good as he had it, it wasn’t enough. Even Equifax and ChoicePoint were not a large enough launching pad for him and what he wanted to do.

Soon enough, his talents came to the attention of the powers that be at ATS. They could have offered him a token salary of a dollar a year and he would have jumped at it. He could see the organization’s potential. He could also see that their approach hadn’t been an accident.

Toward the end of the vetting process, one of the board members asked him about his work on the Nazi program that had gotten him fired from IBM. However they got their information, they were incredibly well informed.

As Middleton answered their questions, he hedged his information; at least, until he realized that they were not unsympathetic to what he’d been doing. At that moment he realized how well suited they were for each other.

ATS needed a man like him to run their operations, and he was bright enough to recognize a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity when it was offered. Up to that point, he had had no idea ATS even existed, but once he grasped the breadth and scope of what they had created, he realized that it was the very platform he had dreamed of.

The education IBM had put him through was nothing compared to what he received the moment he began working with ATS. It was like having the doors of the Vatican’s secret archives thrown open wide. There wasn’t a single prominent American that ATS didn’t have a dossier on. The amount of information the organization had access to was stunning.

When he asked why they had files only on prominent Americans and not on everyone, his initiation into the deepest, darkest circle of ATS began.

In fact, ATS had every intention of building files on every single American. That was a large part of why he had been brought on board. They liked the work he had done, including the research that had gotten him fired from IBM.

They believed the concept of the nation-state was destined for collapse, and they had every intention of helping it along. They believed that data was power. The more they collected, the more powerful they would become. Eventually, their goal was to assemble files not only for every American but for every single human being on the planet.

At the moment, their focus was on the United States, and there wasn’t a single sphere of influence within it that ATS didn’t control. Who got elected, what laws were passed, what judgments came out of the courts, stock market performance, the price of commodities, who the U.S. went to war with and why, the rise and fall of outspoken voices across the political spectrum, reshaping what was taught in schools to American children… ATS had even successfully inserted themselves into theology and was influencing what was being preached in many churches. They had a honed, singular vision of the world upon which they were focused with absolute precision, and the greater their advancements in technology, the more able they were to reshape the country, and soon thereafter the world, exactly as they wanted it to be.

It was like walking through your house in pitch darkness, confident you knew where all the furniture was, only to have someone flip on the lights and show you that everything, every single thing, was not at all where you had thought. Middleton had been sleepwalking his entire adult life. Only now had his eyes been opened. The depth of the deception was so amazing, so total, so complete that it was beyond even a man like Craig Middleton’s ability to describe. Everything he wanted, everything he had ever envisioned, was within his grasp. He was home.

Though he was already out front on the power curve of leveraging data, his ATS mentors helped refine his skills and taught him many things he had never even considered possible, particularly when it came to influence operations. They demonstrated how to bring powerful figures to heel and keep them there.

One of Middleton’s earliest and most ingenious contributions to ATS was the development of a software program to help screen for individuals ripe for leveraging. Similar to the program they would sell to tax assessors, which constantly monitored satellite imagery for unpermitted home improvements, Middleton had built a similar overlay program for government, intelligence, and military data. It searched for inconsistencies, contradictions, or holes in personnel files, briefings, and reporting. When it found any, a digital flag was raised as the system then attempted to decipher and address the problem.

It was this very system that had helped Middleton identify the man he was about to call.

Picking up the handset of his STE, Middleton inserted a Crypto Card into the slot and dialed.

“Do you have any idea what time it is?” said the man who answered on the other end.

“We’ve located your lost dog,” Middleton replied. Taking one more look at the Harvath information on his screen, he then e-mailed the file. He didn’t care how secure the telephone system was. He always spoke in code unless he was in a completely secure situation and the person was sitting right in front of him. “I just sent you the file.”

“I’ll look at it in the morning.”

“It’s morning now. Look at it.”

“I’m putting you on hold,” the other man said as he got up and walked downstairs to his study. There he turned on his computer and waited for it to boot up. When it did, he opened the e-mail, read the pertinent details, then picked up the phone again. “All this information has been confirmed?”

“I wouldn’t have called if it hadn’t. Let’s get coffee.” It was their code for a face-to-face.

“It’ll have to wait,” the voice replied. “I’ve got a lot on my plate today.”

“Let me guess. Double-booked the wife and the mistress for lunch?”

“Fuck you.”

“I’ll see you in an hour,” Middleton said, hanging up.