The Nowhere Man

5 The Eyes of the Data-Mining Beast

The room could have been anywhere. Midway up a high-rise. At the distal end of a mansion’s wing. Underground, even.

It was big.

The size of a movie theater, but without the rows of chairs. There wasn’t a screen.

There were hundreds of them.

Lining three walls, stacked top to bottom, the most elaborate display of computing power this side of DARPA. Each monitor scrolled an endless stream of code. The screens were the eyes of the data-mining beast; the banks of servers bunkered behind the bomb-resistant fourth wall were the brain.

Guttering light from the monitors strobed across the dim room, living camouflage. It was hard to see anything aside from the screens. Everything melted together — the rugs, the consoles, the sparse furniture. Even the few visitors with clearance to enter — usually a not-fully-read-in engineer making tech adjustments — seemed to disappear, fish blending into rippling water.

Charles Van Sciver liked it in here. Liked it for the darkness, through which he could drift alone and unseen.

There were no windows. No mirrors either, not even in the adjoining bathroom. He’d covered them up. The occasional visitor was made to stand at a distance so Van Sciver could stay bathed in the protective anonymity of the flickering lights.

It was safe and contained in here. Just him and his algorithms.

It wasn’t fair to say that all the computing power was directed at locating Orphan X.

Only 75 percent.

Or 76.385, to be precise.

After all, as the head of the Program, Van Sciver did have other mission responsibilities.

But none as important as this.

For better than a decade, Evan had been the top asset in the entire Orphan Program. He didn’t merely know where the bodies were buried. He had buried most of them.

Though the naked eye couldn’t process a sliver of the information whipping across the monitors, Van Sciver liked to watch the large-scale data processing in real time. Though he knew the buzzwords—“cluster analysis,” “anomaly detection,” “predictive analytics”—he couldn’t even comprehend what was before him. But he could grasp the output reports, which he checked meticulously on the hour, searching for filaments in the ocean of cyberspace. These threads of the Nowhere Man had to be delicately backtraced. If Van Sciver allowed the slightest quiver showing that he had something on the hook, the line would snap.

Lately his team of engineers had been focused on data warehousing, piecing together bits of information from offshore bank accounts, trying to reconstruct enough of the mosaic to point them in the right direction. They had leads on Evan, of course. A few floating strands on the water. But every time they tugged slack out of the line, they came up with more slack, a money transfer zigzagging off into the depths, a shell corp vanishing behind a mailbox corporation, another trail ending at a disused P.O. box off some dusty Third World dirt road.

Van Sciver paced the perimeter of the room, his ever-paler skin drinking in the antiseptic blue glow of the screens. The lack of human contact ensured that he would never be deterred from his goal. Ultimately it would come down to discipline and abstinence, and so he had cleared out any distracting clutter from his existence. His willingness to deny all pleasure and warmth was why he would win. That was why he would beat his nemesis. Victory would be pleasure enough.

Van Sciver halted. Facing the horseshoe of the rippling walls, he basked in the power represented before him. Time was meaningless in here. The present was spent reconstructing the past and extrapolating the future, a dragon ever swallowing its tail, an infinity of numbers that summed to zero.

But one day they would add up to everything.

One day they would search out the right thread of ones and zeros that would lead to Orphan X.

It was only a matter of time.