The Patriots' Club

39

Godforsaken machines.

Guilfoyle sat at the head of the conference table inside the Quiet Room, surrounded by four of the firm’s top information analysts. Scattered across the table was Thomas Bolden’s credit history, his medical records, school transcripts, credit-card bills, gas, electricity, and phone bills, banking and brokerage statements, a list of magazine subscriptions, travel records including his preferred seat assignment, driving record, insurance policies, tax returns, and voting record.

All of it had been fed into Cerberus, and Cerberus had spat out a predictive model of Thomas Bolden’s daily activities. The forty-page report, bound neatly and set on the table in front of Guilfoyle, was titled “Core Personality Profile.” It told Guilfoyle where Bolden liked to eat, how much he spent each year on clothing, in what month of the year he tended to have a physical, what kind of car he was likely to drive, his “must-watch” TV, and not incidentally, how he would vote. But it could not tell him where Thomas Bolden would be in an hour.

“We can ascertain, sir, that Bolden has a point-four probability of eating at one of three restaurants downtown,” one of the men was saying. “Also, that he has a point-one probability of going shopping after work and that he has a point-ninety-seven probability of visiting the Boys Club in Harlem tonight. I caution that the results maintain a bias of plus or minus two standard deviations. Regardless, I’d suggest stationing men at all three restaurants, as well as the Boys Club.”

“The man is on the run,” said Guilfoyle. “He is not behaving according to his regular daily patterns. He went shopping, but it was at ten A.M. in a store he’d never visited before. I can promise you that he will not be visiting the Boys Club tonight. If for no other reason than he knows that we’ll have a dozen men surrounding it.”

“If I might interject, sir,” said Hoover, a flaxen-haired giant with skin as fluorescent as the damnable lighting. “The acute psychological profile Cerberus provided shows that Bolden is aggressive, proactive, and that he tends to cope well with physical stress…”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Guilfoyle said, his calm fraying by the minute. “The man is a cipher, as far as I’m concerned. He’s supposed to be an investment banker, yet he acts like a seasoned operative. Where does Cerberus tell me anything about that?”

“It’s his childhood, sir,” said Hoover. “Clearly, we don’t have a complete picture. If only we could input some relevant data pertaining to…”

Guilfoyle raised a hand, indicating that Hoover should contain himself. Hoover had spent too long with the machines. His answers always began with “If only…” If only we could improve this. If only we could get more of that. Like the mother of a mischievous child, he had become an apologist for the system’s shortcomings.

A picture window ran along one side of the Quiet Room, giving a clear view of the communications center. Guilfoyle slipped on a pair of glasses and directed his attention to the wall. Projected onto the screen was what was called a link map. A bright blue ball with the initials “TB” glowed at its center. Phone numbers belonging to his home, office, cell phone, and BlackBerry ran beneath it. Emanating from the ball, like rays from the sun, was a cluster of lines each leading to its own ball, some small, some large. Those balls, too, had initials, and below them tightly scripted phone numbers. Many of the balls were interconnected, lines running between them. The whole thing looked like a giant Tinkertoy.

Each ball represented a person with whom Bolden maintained contact. The larger balls represented those whom, according to his phone records, he spoke with most frequently. They included his girlfriend, Jennifer Dance (at last report, undergoing hospital treatment), several coworkers at Harrington Weiss, the Harlem Boys Club, and a dozen colleagues at other banks and private equity firms. The smaller balls included less frequently contacted coworkers, other colleagues, and a half dozen restaurants. In all there were approximately fifty balls in orbit around Bolden’s sun.

Guilfoyle had programmed Cerberus to monitor all the phone lines indicated on the link map on a real-time basis. Automatically, Cerberus would compare the parties speaking with a voiceprint of Thomas Bolden taken that morning. Guilfoyle didn’t have enough manpower to stake out all of Bolden’s acquaintances. With the link map, it didn’t matter. Should Bolden phone any of these numbers, Guilfoyle could listen in. More important, he could get a fix on Bolden’s location.

The problem was that Bolden was a sharp operator. He had learned firsthand that his phone had been bugged and that using a cell phone meant risking capture. The link map was therefore a waste of time.

Guilfoyle rubbed his eyes. Over a hundred monitors running floor to ceiling occupied another corner of the room. The monitors drew a live feed from exterior surveillance cameras around Midtown and lower Manhattan. The pictures switched rapidly from location to location. Software analyzed the faces of all pedestrians captured by the cameras and compared them to a composite of three photographs of Thomas Bolden. Simultaneously, it analyzed the gaits of the subjects, and using a sophisticated algorithm, compared them to a model established from the video of Bolden striding down the corridor at Harrington Weiss earlier that morning. It wasn’t the walk it was analyzing as the exact distance between his ankle and knee, knee and hip, and ankle and hip. The three ratios were added together to yield a composite number that was as unique for every man, woman, and child as their fingerprints.

That was the good news.

The bad news was that snow, rain, or any kind of moisture in the atmosphere degraded the picture enough to render the software program ineffective.

For all the money the Organization had poured into Cerberus, for all the millions of man-hours the brightest brains in the nation-in the world, dammit-had spent developing the software to run it, Cerberus was still a machine. It could gather. It could hunt. But it could not intuit. It could not guess.

Guilfoyle removed his glasses and set them delicately on the table. The discipline that had governed his entire life fell round him like a cloak, smothering his irritation, dampening his anger. Still, it was only by the utmost self-control that he did not shout. Only Hoover noticed the tick pulling at the corner of his mouth.

Machines.

Wolf Ramirez sat quietly in a dark corner of his hotel room, drawing the blade of his K-Bar knife across the sharpening stone. A clusterfuck was what it was, he thought, as he reversed direction and drew the blade toward him. Too many people running in too many directions trying to get the simplest thing done. Well, what did they expect? You didn’t send a pack of hounds to do a wolf’s work.

Wolf’s eyes lifted to the cell phone he had set on the table in front of him.

After a moment, he concentrated on the knife again. To hone the blade as sharp as he liked, he needed to work on it for a solid hour. Only then would it be truly razor sharp. Sharp enough to slip into the skin as easily as a needle and cleanly separate the dermis from the sheath of fat below it. Only then could he lift the six layers of tissue off a man as neatly as if he were filleting a trout. Straight, unfrayed lines. That’s what he liked. Precision.

Wolf didn’t like to leave a man messy. When he was finished with the bad guys, he wanted their souvenir of their time with him to be a work of art, geometric in its precision. The pain would soon pass. But the scars would be with them forever. Wolf was proud of his skills.

He stared at the phone.

This time it rang.

He smiled. Sooner or later Guilfoyle always came back to him.

“Yeah?” he said.

“Can you find him?”

“Maybe. But you have to level with me.”

“What do you need?”

“Just one thing. Tell me what you don’t want him to discover.”