Fear No Evil

Chapter 59

Northeastern Massachusetts

I don’t know what I was expecting but it wasn’t the bitter cold that greeted us when we followed Paladin’s legal counsel Sheila Farr into a narrow hallway. This was more than icy air-conditioning to combat summer heat. I could see my breath and shivered and shivered again.

“What’s with the ice age?” Sampson asked.

“The supercomputers.” Farr sniffed as she pulled the collar of her puffy coat higher. “There are fifteen stories of them underneath our feet and two stories of them above us. They generate so much heat that we have to keep them at these temperatures just to do what we do best.”

“Which is what, exactly?” I asked.

Farr stopped at a door, looked at me, and smiled. “We’re asked questions. We analyze data. We give answers.” She opened the door and gestured inside. “Come in where it’s warmer, let Steve tell you how it really works.”

Ned went through first. Sampson and I had to duck our heads to get through into a large office with glass walls, floors, and ceilings, a block of glass suspended fifteen feet above and in front of a much larger workspace that teemed with activity. The bigger space was set up with clusters of desks and computers interspersed with screens hanging from ceilings.

The people down there ranged from the outwardly nerdy to the seriously buff, kind of like Steven Vance, who stood up from behind a plain wooden desk in the glass cube. The former Silicon Valley CEO was as tall as me but sported an extra twenty-five pounds of solid muscle under his black polo and jeans.

Vance wasn’t tanned, but his skin sure seemed to glow. I honestly couldn’t tell how old he was as he came around the desk grinning with bonhomie.

“Steve Vance,” he said, shaking our hands and looking us each in the eye as he did. “Ryan sends his apologies. His seventy-five-year-old mother was up on a ladder, painting her kitchen ceiling, fell and broke her femur in several places.”

“Ouch,” Sampson said.

I said, “Please tell him we send him our regards and best wishes for his mother’s recovery.”

“I’ll do that,” Vance said, gesturing us to chairs. “Water? Coffee? Tea?”

“Tea sounds good,” Mahoney said.

“I’ll call for it, Steve,” his attorney said as she took off her puffy jacket.

“How can Paladin help you?” Vance said.

“We’re working on a case,” Mahoney began.

“The cartel and the corrupt agents,” Vance said, drumming his fingers on his thighs. “I understand we’ve been helping you on that one already.”

That wasn’t the answer we’d been expecting and we all sat forward.

“Run that by us again, sir,” Ned said.

“We have several ongoing contracts with the U.S. government, including the FBI, Special Agent Mahoney. Ryan told me after your call yesterday that we had had a request from your director just last week, asking us to look for links between the dead agents.”

That was news to us.

Mahoney said, “And?”

“Just the obvious ones so far,” Vance said. “Agency interactions. A few overlapping assignments. But they were all seemingly corrupted by the cartel and then murdered by a... rogue vigilante force, I guess you’d call it.”

Sampson said, “You pick up any kind of chatter prior to the attacks?”

Vance nodded and looked to Farr, who had returned with a tray of drinks. She said, “We mined LA Basin cell phone data in the day prior to the attack on FBI Agent White’s family in Pasadena. Looked at in retrospect, you can tell the Alejandros were gathering an army to retaliate.”

“But nothing about the vigilante force?” Sampson asked.

“If they were communicating, they were doing it over some kind of localized supersecure network,” Vance said. “We’ve picked up nothing on them so far.”

Sampson said, “Can you tell us how you look?”

Paladin’s CEO said, “Again, we use the supercomputers to sift through whatever the government authorizes us to sift through: cell phone data, computer data, internet traffic patterns, GPS location data, video, audio. Sometimes we have a specific target. More often than not, we’re looking for possible targets.”

I said, “You work for the NSA as well?”

Vance laughed. “Wouldn’t that be the holy grail for us? No, for the most part the NSA does its own work of broadly monitoring the nation’s communication lines in real time. We’re more focused on the past. We’re given a load of data after the fact and we sift through it until we find what our clients are looking for.”

I said, “What else do you know about the cartel? Is this vigilante force correct? Have the Alejandros corrupted every law enforcement group operating in the southwestern United States?”

Vance said, “Well, that’s for others to decide. We provide data and certain interpretations of it. After that, it’s up to others to—”

Ding!

The sharp alert came from the CEO’s laptop on his desk.

“Sorry,” he said, frowning as he got up and crossed to it. Vance moved his mouse and studied the screen before looking up at us. “Three bodies were just dumped on the steps of the Mexican supreme court in broad daylight — a Mexican general, an unidentified American, and Marco Alejandro’s cousin Enrique. They’ve got confessions pinned to their shirts and were covered in a banner that said ‘Death to traitors. Death to the Alejandro cartel.’”