The Patriots' Club

16

Five stories beneath the frozen Virginia landscape, Guilfoyle sat listening to the recording of Thomas Bolden’s phone call to Jennifer Dance that had been made at six o’clock that morning.

“Don’t go,” the woman said. “I’ll take a day, too. Come over to my place.”

“Can’t do it,” replied Bolden.

“I need you. Come over. Now.”

“Jen, it’s a big deal. People are coming in from D.C. There’s no way I can miss it.”

“Okay, lunch then. I’ve got something to tell you, too.”

“Hint?”

“Never. But I’m warning you. I may hijack you afterward.”

“If things go well with Jefferson, I may let you. Lunch. Twelve sharp.”

“Regular place?”

“Regular place. And you? Your arm? Only ten stitches?”

“How did you know?”

The recording ended.

Guilfoyle was seated at his stainless-steel desk on the upper level of the Organization’s command and control room. The room was the size of a college lecture hall and bathed in dim blue light. Technicians manned broad computer consoles on three descending levels. All were men. All held PhDs from top universities in computer science, electrical engineering, or other related fields. All had worked for Bell Labs, Lucent, Microsoft, or a firm of equivalent stature before joining the Organization. The pay was equivalent. It was the toys that lured them, the prospect of doing pioneering work on the most advanced, and certainly the most secret, software array in history.

A dull rumble shook the floor as the air-conditioning kicked in. It might be thirty degrees up top, but the massive array of parallel-linked supercomputers combined with a lack of natural ventilation meant that temperatures were much higher down here.

“Do you want to hear it again?” a tech named Hoover asked from his console.

“Thank you, Mr. Hoover, but I think that’s enough.” Guilfoyle drummed his fingers on the desk, his eyes glued to the crude drawing that had been found in Bolden’s apartment. He sighed, and reluctantly admitted that Mr. Pendleton had been right. Maybe a machine did know better than him. Three large screens occupied the wall in front of him. One showed a projection of a Manhattan city map. A sprinkling of blue pinlights spaced at even intervals from one another formed the outline of a bell covering the lower half of the map. Every few moments, the pinlights advanced along well-marked streets, like some type of newfangled electronic game. An array of three letters glowed beneath each pinlight. RBX. ENJ. WRR. Each pinlight represented one of his men, his location broadcast by an RFID chip (Radio Frequency Identification) implanted in the soft flesh of the upper arm. Besides the recipient’s name, the RFID chip stored his blood type and full medical history.

In their midst, a sole red pinlight flickered faintly.

It was the red pinlight flashing at the corner of Thirty-second Street and Fifth Avenue that interested him. The light jumped erratically from block to block, then disappeared for a moment, only to reappear a few seconds later a half block away. The profusion of skyscrapers combined with the sheer volume of cellular traffic in Manhattan made it difficult to track the weak GPS signals emitted from a cell phone, or in Thomas Bolden’s case, his BlackBerry personal assistant.

The regular place.

“Mr. Hoover. Bring up a record of Bolden’s credit-card transactions for the past twelve months, please.”

“All of them? He’s got a Visa, a MasterCard, and two American Express cards, one personal, one corporate.”

“Leave out the corporate Amex. We’re not looking for a business expense.” In his short time with Bolden, Guilfoyle had pegged him as a straight-up individual. Not the type to put a lunch with his girlfriend on the company’s tab.

“What are we looking for?” asked Hoover.

“Isolate all dining establishments in New York City south of Forty-eighth Street. Drill down to the time of charge. Bracket eleven A.M. to two P.M.”

Though the command and control room was cooled to sixty-eight degrees, he felt hot and unsettled. He removed a handkerchief from his pocket and drew it across his forehead. A few moments later, a record of all the lunches Bolden had charged in downtown Manhattan flashed onto the screen. There were twelve transactions in all-fewer than Guilfoyle had expected-and they were spread across ten establishments.

Ten years earlier, the Organization had purchased the nation’s largest processor of consumer loans: credit cards, mortgages, auto loans. Though it had sold the company in the meantime, it had not forgotten to install a “back door” inside the firm’s software to allow unfettered, real-time access to all their customer records.

“Let’s go to Bolden’s ATM records. I’d appreciate it if you’d map them.”

A minute passed. The blue and red pinlights disappeared, replaced by a sprinkling of green pinlights dotting lower Manhattan. Guilfoyle was quick to notice a cluster near Union Square.

“Bring up all restaurants on Union Square.”

Six lights appeared around the perimeter of Union Square Park.

“Did Bolden use his credit card to pay for lunch at any of these?” Guilfoyle asked.

“Negative.”

“Let’s keep looking. Run through all stored phone communications since we began surveillance, ditto for e-mail, run the web addresses he’s been frequenting.”

Hoover grimaced. “That may take a while.”

“Make sure it doesn’t. He’s due to have lunch with Miss Dance in three hours, and we’re going to be there.”

When word of Sol Weiss’s death, and more important, of Bolden’s escape, had reached him, Guilfoyle had been reviewing Bolden’s file with an eye to discovering how Cerberus had kicked him out as a Class 4 offender. Cerberus was the Organization’s watchdog, a parallel-linked supercomputer programmed to search for clues indicating activity that might be detrimental to the cause. It drew from phone records, flight logs, insurance databases, credit histories, consumer profiles, bank logs, title companies, and many other repositories of sensitive information-all of it, officially, in the private domain.

Over the years, the Organization had purchased companies active in all these fields. And though it was the Organization’s modus operandi to restructure them for a quick and profitable sale, it made every effort to build in a permanent access to the companies’ databases. Only after 9/11, however, did the Organization begin to assemble these companies with any coherent strategy, and then it was at the government’s request.

Following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the United States Department of Defense established the Information Awareness Office to create a network of integrated computer tools that the intelligence community could use to predict and prevent terrorist threats. The program was officially named Total Information Awareness, but after a public outcry about government intrusion into its citizens’ privacy and charges of Big Brother and an all-seeing, all-knowing Orwellian state, the name was changed to Terrorist Information Awareness. Its motto remained the same, however: Scientia est potentia. “Knowledge is power.”

Terrorist Information Awareness brought together a host of technologies being developed to help law-enforcement authorities track down terrorists around the globe and effectively guess what their targets might be. Data mining, telecommunications surveillance, evidence evaluation and link discovery, facial- and gait-recognition software: These were a few of the tools harnessed. The hue and cry of civilian-privacy advocates caused the government to dismantle the program. The Organization volunteered its help to rebuild it. In secret. No one, it argued, was better suited to the task. The government accepted.

The result was renamed Cerberus, after the vicious three-headed hound that guarded the entrance to Hades. And though the project remained ostensibly under government control, the Organization had made sure to build its own portal to access the system when necessary. While the threat to the United States came from abroad, the Organization had threats of its own to monitor, and these threats were domestic in nature. To charges that the Organization was using Cerberus to violate the average American citizen’s sphere of privacy, it replied “nonsense.” It was a case of the greater good and the informed minority.

The threat assessment concerning Thomas Bolden cited four hostile indicators. Three hostile indicators were needed to earn a positive reading-“positive” meaning that the subject merited attention as a potential danger. Four indicators called for the establishment of an electronic-surveillance perimeter. And five mandated immediate intervention with a copy of the assessment to be sent automatically to Solutions.

Guilfoyle reviewed the indicators one at a time. The first was drawn from a cell-phone transmission between Bolden and a business associate. The second from an e-mail he had sent to a friend at another investment bank. The third from a scan of his residential computer’s hard drive. The fourth from an intracompany memo he had forwarded to Sol Weiss discussing the firm’s investment policies.

Highlighted in yellow were the keywords Bolden had used that had drawn Cerberus’s attention. Distrust. Conspiracy. Illegal operation. Trendrite. Antigovernmental. Monopolistic. And Crown. “Evidence extraction,” the process was called. Finding clues hidden in disparate mediums and tying them together.

By isolating each indicator and reading it in context, Guilfoyle was able to identify where Cerberus had made its mistake. When Bolden had used the keywords near, or in conjunction with, the Organization’s corporate name, Cerberus had drawn a false inference about a pending threat. It was a software program, after all. A powerful one, to be sure. But it couldn’t be expected to reason out its programmer’s mistakes. At least, not yet.

It was the last indicator, however, that left Guilfoyle stymied. The one taken from Bolden’s residential phone bill. On three successive nights a week earlier, Thomas Bolden had placed calls from his home to a residence in New Jersey that was later discovered to have been used by Bobby Stillman. Guilfoyle double-checked the dates. There was no doubt that Stillman had been occupying the premises at that time. And yet, Guilfoyle was certain that Bolden had not been lying. Thomas Bolden did not know Bobby Stillman. Nor did he have a clue about Crown.

It was Guilfoyle’s gift that he was able to discern with uncanny accuracy not only a person’s intentions, benign or hostile, but also whether that person was lying or telling the truth. He had always been able to sense when a person was less than forthcoming, but it wasn’t until his second year as a police officer in Albany, New York, that he’d learned to trust that sense and to hone it into a skill.

On that particular day, he and his partner were rolling in their police cruiser through Pinewood, conducting a routine neighborhood watch, when they noticed a homeless man dressed in a khaki trench coat, panty hose, and combat boots, stomping along the sidewalk. There had been a complaint about a man matching his description harassing a woman out walking her dog. Stopping beside him, they rolled down the window and asked his name. At first, the man didn’t respond. Like many homeless people, he appeared mentally ill and mumbled to himself constantly. His hair was long and unkempt. His beard was matted and scraggly. He continued walking, shooting them strange glances. There was no indication that he was armed or possessed of hostile intent. Until that date, there had never been an incident of a street person or vagrant assaulting an Albany police officer. Albany was not New York City.

Guilfoyle, who was driving, called through the window for the man to stop. Finally, the man complied. Guilfoyle’s partner opened his door and asked, “What are you doing?” “I’ve got something to show you guys,” the vagrant said. He approached the car, still mumbling and addressing the invisible personalities who peopled his world. He was smiling. Most people would have taken him for nothing more than a harmless nutcase. But when Guilfoyle looked into this man’s eyes, he knew at once that he intended to kill the police officers. With no hesitation, Guilfoyle, aged twenty-three, drew his service revolver, forced his partner’s back against the seat, and fired twice into the homeless man’s chest. When the vagrant collapsed to the ground, his trench coat fell open to reveal a jury-rigged flamethrower. The nozzle was threaded down the arm of his coat and cupped in his palm. In his other hand, he held a Zippo lighter. A search of the vagrant’s belongings kept at the Catholic rescue mission turned up a journal in which he wrote about his desire to “send cops back to hellfire.”

Two months later, Guilfoyle responded to a domestic-violence complaint. When they arrived at the address, however, the woman who had called was no longer there. Guilfoyle questioned her husband, who said that she had gone out for a drink. The man was calm and forthright, explaining that his wife was simply angry with him for gambling. Suspicious, Guilfoyle and his partner searched the apartment but found no trace of the woman. The apartment was clean and in good order. There was no sign of a struggle, no evidence of mayhem. Yet, Guilfoyle was certain that the man had murdered his wife. He didn’t know exactly why, just that his brief interrogation of the man had left him convinced. He knew.

Guilfoyle returned to the husband, and standing very close to him-close enough to see only his face and nothing beyond it, close enough to smell his breath, to register every twitch of his mouth, to see that his brown eyes were flecked with green-he asked where he had hidden his wife’s body. The man’s calm dissolved like a thunderclap. Breaking into tears, he led them to a closet in his bedroom, where he had stuffed his wife’s strangled, lifeless body into a steamer trunk.

Word of Guilfoyle’s extraordinary talent spread quickly. In short order, he was promoted to detective and brought in to handle the more difficult interrogations. Behavioral scientists arrived from the state university at Binghamton to study his skills. They had him watch endless reruns of To Tell the Truth. Guilfoyle never failed to guess the impostor. They showed him copies of the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted Criminals” circular and he was able to assign each the offense for which he was wanted. A team from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) arrived to ask for his assistance with something they called the Diogenes Project, Diogenes being the ancient Greek who went from house to house shining a lantern in every man’s face, seeking a truly honest man. For months, they worked with him to catalog the taxonomy of human expression. Together, they scoured medical texts and identified every distinct muscular movement that the face could make, a total of forty-three in all. But no matter how hard they tried, they could not teach the skill to others.

The human face was a canvas on which man painted his every thought and emotion. Some strokes were deft, lightning quick, others long and lingering. Look close enough, however, and you could see them all. A knitting of the brow, a tightening of the mouth, a narrowing of the eyes: Guilfoyle was able to process all of this instantaneously and know a man’s state of mind. It was his gift.

And so he had known that Thomas Bolden was telling the truth.

Yet to believe that, Guilfoyle had to also believe that Cerberus had kicked out a “false positive”-in the parlance, meaning that the system had identified the wrong man. He could not do that. There was the matter of the phone calls Bolden placed to Stillman. If Bolden had called Bobby Stillman, he had to know her.

Guilfoyle fingered the drawing of the musket. In his mind’s eye, he was looking at Bolden. The two were back in the room on the seventieth floor of Hamilton Tower. He traced every line of the man’s face, recalled every twitch of his lips, the direction of his eyes. He decided that he very much wanted to speak with him again. He had a disconcerting feeling that for once, he may have been wrong, and that Thomas Bolden had bested him. He did not enjoy being made to look like an idiot.

“Hoover,” he called.

“Yes, Mr. Guilfoyle?”

“How’s it coming?”

“Slowly, sir. We have a lot of conversations to go through.”

“Hurry it up. We’ve got to get our men in place before he arrives.”

Grasping the paper with his left hand, he folded it dexterously into quarters and slipped it into his jacket pocket. As a boy, he’d practiced long hours to be a magician. He became adept at sleight of hand, and, when working alone, was able to master the most difficult illusions. Yet, everyone agreed that he was a terrible magician. One fault doomed him from the beginning. He couldn’t smile. People preferred to watch his hands instead of his face.