The Prince of Risk

47

Michael Grillo did not like to be kept waiting. The time was ten past nine. He stood beneath the awning of a deli at the corner of 61st and Third Avenue, enjoying the shade. He had a rule about this kind of thing: never smoke more than three cigarettes while waiting for a contact. Staying in one place too long put you in jeopardy of being spotted. Just as dangerous, it signaled desperation to your contact. Grillo dropped cigarette number two and ground it beneath his heel.

He gazed up the block to the corner of 62nd Street, his eyes focusing on the entry to a steel pier and glass office building. His contact worked on the tenth floor of the building, behind a door bearing the words Johnson, Higby, and Mather, Attorneys at Law. His contact was not a lawyer. The names on the door were a front. His contact was a twenty-five-year man with the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Operations, and the offices of Johnson, Higby, and Mather housed an Agency collections office engaged in the analysis of foreign intelligence.

Grillo checked his watch for the third time in ten minutes. He felt for his Shermans. Instead, he took out his phone and looked at his e-mail. Nothing new had arrived since his contact at the credit bureau had put him onto Edward Astor’s scent an hour before.

“Astor has a credit score of seven sixty-one,” the contact had reported.

“Won’t do him much good now,” said Grillo. “Just tell me what cards he carried.”

“Visa, MasterCard, American Express, the usual. Pays off his balance every month.”

“His salary is listed at five million a year. He can afford it. Just forward me the card numbers.”

After receiving the information, Grillo phoned the credit card companies, specifically the individuals who headed the companies’ antifraud departments. As with the nation’s phone carriers, he had spent considerable time and effort cultivating contacts. Unauthorized sharing of customer records was a felonious offense punishable by hefty fines and prison time. His approaches were made in person and with discretion. On occasion he’d been forced to call on a person’s patriotism, meaning that he’d misrepresented himself as an agent for a United States government law enforcement agency. If his requests were denied he had alternate means at his disposal, namely a crafty, cunning, and completely amoral band of hackers based in Shanghai. But they were a last resort, and not to be trusted.

Copies of Edward Astor’s charges began landing in Grillo’s secure servers soon afterward. By noon he would possess a comprehensive record of all charges the late CEO of the New York Stock Exchange had made over the past ninety days. Grillo was interested not in what he had purchased but in studying the location of his charges to track Astor’s movements.

Grillo’s phone rumbled in his pocket. He looked at the caller ID and answered. “That was quick.”

“You told me to impress you,” said the female executive at the nation’s largest phone carrier. “Check your mail. Just sent over his last three months of calls, including correspondents’ names and addresses.”

“I’m impressed.”

“Prove it.”

Grillo brought up the message on his screen as they spoke. It was apparent that Edward Astor had spent an enormous amount of time on the phone. Page after page was filled with numbers and the names of the individuals or corporations to whom the numbers were registered. He scrolled to the last entries, detailing calls made to and from Edward Astor’s phone on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. He recognized a few names as belonging to well-known corporate supremos. His eye fixed immediately on a call placed to Edward Astor on Friday morning at 9:18. Duration, seventeen seconds. The caller had no name and no address. To Grillo’s eye, that meant the call had probably been made from a throwaway, a cell phone purchased from any corner vendor with a prepaid number of minutes. It might even be from Palantir.

“I don’t suppose the usual will do,” he said.

“I don’t suppose it will.”

“Double, then.”

“Deal.”

Grillo hung up. He accessed his banking app and transferred $10,000 from his work fund to the woman’s numbered account at a discreet Dutch bank in the Cayman Islands. He sent a copy to a secure address he’d set up for Bobby Astor.

Grillo fished out his third Sherman. As he flicked the Zippo and brought the flame toward the cigarette, he saw his contact emerge from the building. He replaced the unlit cigarette in its box, entered the deli, and headed to the refrigerated foods section in the rear. A minute later a portly, bald African-American dressed in khakis, button-down shirt, and club tie sidled up next to him.

“America’s greatest hope,” said Grillo.

“Fuckin’ A,” said Jeb Washburn. “Bring it.”

“There is such a thing as dry cleaning.”

“I appreciate that coming from a man who’s wearing my annual salary. Those Ferragamos you got on?”

“You noticed.”

“I noticed they run six bills in the Bloomingdale’s shoe department.”

“That’s why I left our government’s service.”

Washburn picked up a package of sliced ham and pretended to look for the sell-by date. “You better be careful, or you’re not going to be around to enjoy those fancy Eyetalian loafers, Mr. Grill-O. You’re barking up some very dangerous trees.”

“What can you tell me?”

Washburn put down the ham. “About Palantir? A little and that’s already too much. Let’s get out of here. I don’t like being penned in like this.”

Grillo and Washburn left the deli and headed down 61st. Foot traffic was light, and the steady stream of cars passing enabled them to speak without fear of being overheard.

“Like I said,” Washburn began, “I only know a little, and that’s all I want to know. Don’t suppose you want to tell me what this is about?”

Grillo shook his head.

“Fair enough,” said Washburn. “All right then, here it is. Palantir’s some kind of far-out software platform that collects information from about a trillion sources off the Internet and analyzes it for possible threat scenarios.”

“Sounds like a straightforward data-collection tool.”

“Nothing straightforward about it. It started as one of the crazy-assed projects financed by DARPA, but at some point the government lost control of it.”

DARPA. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. “Did DARPA cut the funding?”

“On the contrary. They wanted to double-down. It was better than anything they expected.”

“Better?”

“More powerful. It was too good at what it did.”

“And that is?”

“Predict future events. A real-life Eight Ball. You remember that thing you shake and wait for the answer?” Washburn stopped and pulled Grillo into a doorway. “It was Afghanistan that did it. Palantir’s mandate was to upload and integrate all our intel over there and see if it could tell us what was going to happen. We’re talking everything from combat after-action reports to local police chiefs’ threat assessments, provincial reconstruction team reports, Agency intel-everything. Palantir just vacuumed everything up.”

“And?”

“It worked,” said Washburn. “That was the problem.”

“I don’t follow.”

“It started predicting when and where attacks would take place, the probability of Afghan troops rebelling against us, transport choke points. It was too much.”

Grillo had served a ten-month tour in the AfPak theater as a company commander with the Fifth Marines. Hellmand Province. It had been a bloody summer. “We could have used something like that.”

“Don’t you see, man? Palantir wasn’t just looking at today and tomorrow. It was looking at next month, next year-and it told us we were going to lose. That did not go over well at the Pentagon. No siree, Bob. The four-stars over in Virginia were not keen on a top-secret, multimillion-dollar experimental software platform that predicted that the United States of America didn’t have an ice cube’s chance in hell of winning that conflict. They had serious blood and treasure invested.”

“But you said DARPA wanted to double-down.”

“Sure, DARPA did. They’re a bunch of mad scientists. Not a soldier in the lot. It was the men with the scrambled eggs on their covers who wanted to shut it down.”

“What happened?”

“That was the end. Goodbye, Palantir. Whoever created Palantir disappeared. Went off the grid.”

“And that’s it? No one’s heard from him since?”

“You expecting him to make contact after we dumped him?” Washburn gave him a look. “Sounds like you’ve been talking to him more recently than we have.”

Grillo pulled a grimace. It meant “No comment.”

Washburn gave him a thump on the shoulder. “I’m outta here. Any of my bosses see me talking to a rich-ass boy like yourself, they’ll think I’m pulling an Aldrich Ames.”

“In this case, I’d say it’s the opposite. You’re helping the good guys.”

“Good guys?” said Washburn. “Who are they?”

“You know who they are.”

“Maybe I do. You’re one of ’em, Grill-O. That’s the only reason I’m here.”

The two men reached the corner of Fifth Avenue and stopped before crossing, allowing the pedestrians to stream around them.

“Look, Jeb, my client would like to thank you for your services.”

“No way,” said Washburn in horror. “I do this for God and country.”

“Maybe I’ll buy you a pair of shoes. Ferragamos.”

“Buy my wife a pair. Size seven. Don’t ask me how I know.”

“You got it, Jeb.”

Washburn turned and looked Grillo in the eye. “You still smokin’ those nasty cigarettes?”

“Shermans? Yeah. Want one?”

“Hell, no. Just wondering why a smart, suave motherfucker like you wants to kill himself.” Washburn laughed. “Cigarettes ain’t bad enough, now you go asking about Palantir. Tell you something for free, Grill-O. Your days are numbered.”