Michelangelo_s Notebook

40

Barrie Kornitzer’s office at Columbia University was located in an obscure late 1880s building tucked in behind the Low Memorial Library. The office was lavish by Columbia standards, with built-in oak bookcases, Persian carpets and several early American paintings-including an early version of Ralph Earl’s Looking East from Denny Hill, a still life by Charles V. Bond and an Edward Hicks farmscape. The desk in the main office was a William IV Rosewood flat top double pedestal partner’s desk with an inlaid black leather writing surface. There was a rumor that the desk had once belonged to the fifth president of the university, Benjamin Moore. It was also rumored that the desk had been loaned to Kornitzer because the University was scared of him. Kornitzer was perhaps the foremost authority on computer hacking in the world, owned the patents and other licensing for the best encryption programs on the planet and was a confidential advisor to several presidents of the United States and Bill Gates. He had also gone to high school with Michael Valentine and was a longtime friend.

After graduating from high school the two young men had parted ways. Kornitzer spent several years hitchhiking around the United States and Europe, taught English to the Iranian air force, herded sheep in Scotland and then went to Seattle where he worked for some time in a comic book store. He then went to Stanford, selling his comic book collection, which included Superman Number One, to pay his tuition. During most of his time he lived in a parked car in one of the school’s parking structures. He graduated with a degree in classics, turned down a number of prestigious job offers including a teaching position at Oxford, then went back to school. He got his law degree several years later, then passed the California Bar exams, although he never practiced. In the mid-seventies he joined Bill Gates’s Lakeside Programming Group back in Seattle, helping Microsoft in its early days. Eventually he went off on his own again to pursue personal interests, which included breaking into every major computer database in the world.

On his way to a federal jail for life in the mid-nineties he was rescued by his old friend Michael and eventually wound up at Columbia in a nominally legal job. Like a number of early hackers he turned legitimate by “consulting” with the very organizations he had once preyed upon, including AT amp;T, the FBI, the CIA, Chase Bank, Bank of America and his favorite-Wal-Mart. According to Kornitzer, Wal-Mart was fundamentally the most dangerous company in the world, dedicated to its founder, Sam Walton’s, idea of taking over the world through retail sales.

In 1983, innovative as ever, Wal-Mart spent tremendous amounts of capital on a private satellite system that could track delivery trucks, speed credit card transactions and transmit audio and video signals as well as sales data. By 1990 it was the biggest purchaser of manufactured goods in America, and by 2002 it was expanding into China before China could expand into America. Kornitzer said that Steven Spielberg’s Pinky and the Brain was taken from the Sam Walton prototype. A lot of people thought Barrie Kornitzer was completely out of his mind. On the other hand a lot of people thought quite the opposite: Barrie was utterly sane and a socioeconomic-technological visionary.

Kornitzer was rich, bald, edging from pudginess toward real fat and wore brown corduroy suits and paisley ties. The only computer in his office was a lowly Dell but it was linked to a Bull Nova-Scale 9000 computer being used in the Computer Systems Lab at Columbia, a few blocks away on the other side of Low Memorial Library. The Bull, according to Kornitzer, was one of the most powerful in the world. Barrie Kornitzer was unmarried and, as far as Michael Valentine knew, had never had sex with anyone on the planet-male, female, animal, vegetable or mineral. Valentine knew for a fact that his friend had eaten nothing but canned baked beans for the last decade, refusing to eat anything that had even the slightest possibility of sentient life. He might be sane, but he was extremely weird.

“So what exactly is your problem?” Kornitzer asked, seated behind his desk, one hand gently sliding back and forth over his keyboard, the other smoothing his left eyebrow.

“A lot of disjointed facts.”

“Nothing linking them?”

“Several things, nothing very specific.”

“Such as?” He began making notes on a yellow pad. Finn noticed that even as he wrote with one hand, the other continued to caress the keyboard. It was as though the hands were ruled by separate entities, as though someone had split the man’s brain with a sword. She remembered a book she’d seen in her mother’s office back in Columbus: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by a man named Julian Jaynes. She’d loved the windy title but she’d never read the book. Maybe that’s what Kornitzer had-a bicameral mind. He had a face like a Neanderthal but he was oddly attractive nevertheless.

“Art.”

“Any kind in particular?”

“Stolen. Plundered. Second World War.”

“Anything else?”

“Names. People. Murdered people.”

“That’s interesting. Give me the names.”

Valentine listed them. Finn added the few that he’d left out. Kornitzer stared down at his pad. He began to doodle in the margins, his other hand still working on the keyboard.

“Huh,” said Kornitzer. He leaned back in his leather executive chair and stared at the landscape on the wall behind Finn’s head. “You’re beautiful,” he said, smiling.

“Pardon?” said Finn.

“You’re beautiful,” Kornitzer repeated. Finn looked a little flustered. She glanced over at Valentine, who was no help at all. He just smiled. Finn was on her own. “It’s not really a compliment. I’m just stating a fact. You don’t mind, do you? It helps when I’m trying to think something through.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t get to meet a lot of beautiful women. They don’t seem to be attracted to this kind of work.” He paused. “Which is strange, because historically of course, women have always made the best cryptanalysts.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Finn.

“It’s true.” Kornitzer nodded. He glanced at Valentine and smiled. He looked like a child. “I never lie, do I, Michael?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

The pudgy man blinked as though coming out of some sort of trance. He stared up at the ceiling. “Anything else you can tell me?”

“Not really,” Valentine answered. “Except that it seems as though there’s at least two lines of events, two vectors, and they don’t seem to have anything at all to do with each other. We’ve got this Carduss Club or Society or whatever on the one hand, linked to Greyfriars Academy, and the stolen art on the other hand. If you look at it purely from the factual side the only linking factor seems to be James Cornwall. From everything we can find out he seems to have died from natural causes.”

Kornitzer shrugged. “We’ll run it through MAGIC and see what happens.”

“MAGIC?” asked Finn.

“Multiple Arc-Generated Intelligence Comparison,” Kornitzer explained. “It was software originally developed by insurance companies to help their actuaries and risk analysts predict problems. It compares information, analyzes percentages of comparison-like to like, unlike to unlike, then shuffles them all together to give you a clearer picture of what’s going on. It can go through a couple of billion entries in a search engine like Google and give you an analysis in a few seconds. Going through all the engines-including the offline private and government ones-takes about five minutes.”

“I see,” said Finn, who didn’t see at all.

“I adapted it for the people over at Fort Meade to use for comparing telephone-call content, the frequency of certain phrases or words over a given period of time to track down terrorists.”

“Like an intelligence sifter,” put in Valentine.

“Something like that.” Kornitzer nodded, smiling benignly from the opposite side of the desk. He clasped his hands comfortably across his belly. Finn laughed. He looked like the caterpillar in Walt Disney’s Alice in Wonderland.

“It really doesn’t sound like magic,” she said.

Kornitzer’s smile widened. “I wish there were more people around like you,” he said thoughtfully. “Everyone thinks of computers as being cold. Black and white. They’re not, you know. Perhaps the hardware is but the software inevitably shows the hand of man within it. Sometimes there’s even whimsy to be found.” Finn wasn’t sure but she thought she could hear the faint sound of a British accent.

“Deus ex machina.” Valentine laughed.

“God as the machine.” Kornitzer smiled.

“You’re both nuts,” said Finn.

“Thank you,” said Kornitzer. “I like to be appreciated for my madness sometimes.” He looked at Valentine for a second. “Most people are too frightened to tell me I’m completely insane.” His eyes twinkled behind the thick lenses of his glasses. “They think I’ll steal all the money from their bank accounts or tell their spouses who they’re committing adultery with.”

“You’ve done both in your time,” said Valentine.

“True,” said Kornitzer, “but I’ve never been spiteful about it. All in a day’s work, as the superheroes say.” He shook his head sadly and turned to look out his window. The view was of a sea of university buildings. “Sometimes I wish I was back in the old days. Superman, Lois Lane, Batman and Robin.” He sighed. “Green Arrow was my favorite. I used to dream about making my own fancy arrows that could do all sorts of things, bringing down villains. I wish I could remember his real name.”

“Oliver Queen,” murmured Michael Valentine. “His sidekick’s name was Speedy.”

“I didn’t know you were a fan.”

“I’m not. I run a bookstore, remember?”

“I’d hardly call it that,” Kornitzer said with a laugh.

Finn interrupted. “It’s great to have you two old fogies reminiscing. Next you’ll be talking about Woodstock, but we’ve got these murders to look into, so…”

“Why don’t you both go for a walk around the campus?” said Kornitzer. “There’s a Starbucks at One fourteenth and Broadway. Buy me a cappuccino, double shot, low-fat, artificial sweetener. I should have something for you in half an hour or so. It’ll take me that long to input the material.”

“All right.” Valentine nodded and stood up. “Cappuccino, low-fat, artificial sweetener, half an hour.”

“Double shot.”

“Double shot.”

“Got to be exact in this business.” Kornitzer smiled at his friend then turned his attention to the flat screen and the keyboard.