“It’s a community with rules and principles that we all follow. Myself included.”
“I’m not going to waste your time. But everybody here was threatened by the breach and they have worked out something, subject to your approval.”
“Well, I wouldn’t hold out a lot of hope. This isn’t a halfway house. But I’ll listen.”
“You know I’m right.”
“Just please don’t make a treaty with Anna Wade and declare war on my psyche.”
They opened the door.
“Can I talk to you now?” Jill came in.
“Talk,” Sam said.
“You can’t run your kind of business and have people doing their own thing. I know there is never a good reason to breach security.”
“But?”
“No but. You should fire me.”
“Then why did you do it?”
“At the time I thought you’d understand, because of the danger to Grady. Then when I mulled it over, and after Paul started literally shaking me, I realized maybe you wouldn’t. Originally, I thought, maybe you’d get mad but somehow ... overlook it.”
“But why did you think I’d understand?”
“Because our research shows that Samir Aziz is probably dangerous and that Chellis is perhaps deadly, but so clever that we can’t prove it Chellis will kill Grady because she’s the key to getting Jason free of Grace’s control. Aziz will abduct her for the same reason. There isn’t a safer place than here. Finally, I have a feeling about this girl. We can trust her. She should work here. That’s why I did it.”
“There is a safer place than here. Even if you were right, that doesn’t justify—”
“You’re not listening. I told you it doesn’t. That’s why you have to fire me.”
“Unless we come to some ...”
“Understanding.”
“Like what? I have a strung-out stripper kid in the bowels of my office.”
“Sam, don’t call her that.”
“You’re right. She really has nothing to do with the rank piece-of-crap trick you pulled on all of us.”
Sam took out a single Marlboro, his last.
“You don’t smoke. Do you?”
“Hell, no. I quit long ago.”
“Besides, that’s against company policy.”
He tossed it in the wastebasket. For as long as he could remember he had never seen her look this worried.
“We all talked about it. Your mother asked me a lot of questions. And we came up with something.”
“Okay,” Sam said. “What is it?”
“Of all my material possessions nothing means more to me than my car. We’ll all take a blowtorch and cut it into two-inch squares and we’ll put the squares in a giant box by the door to rust.”
“And everyone agreed to this?”
“No, that’s not all. For Paul that wasn’t enough.”
“Okay, what else?”
“I made a deal with Paul to drive some piece-of-crap car for a year. He will pick it out and it will come complete with rust spots. That is, if you agree to all this.”
“This is bizarre. It’s kindergarten. Tell me honestly: Would you do the same thing if you had to do it over?”
“No. I would ask you and if I couldn’t convince you, I would leave it alone.”
Sam thought for a moment. Two years ago she would have been out of the building by now. Getting soft in this business was scary.
He made sure to take his time and look her square in the eye. She took that to be his answer.
She turned and opened the door and walked through the office, aiming for the exit. They could all see the sorrow on her face and Sam saw the anger in their eyes.
“Jill,” he shouted as she waited for the heavy door to open. “If everybody agrees, then it’s okay by me.”
“I can stay?”
“Yeah. I just wanted you and everyone else to see exactly what it’s going to be like if anybody does it again. Anybody.”
Sam shut the door, wondering if he had done the right thing.
There was a knock. He opened the door and found Grady bursting at the seams to speak.
“Can I talk now?”
Sam nodded.
“I think I can do the job. I know you can trust me,” Grady said, looking at Sam. “You don’t even have to pay me.”
“You don’t know what you’re asking. We will be on your ass for two years. You’ll have to be in school and getting grades.”
“Fine.”
“If you drink even once you’re fired. There is no compromise on this job.”
“Fine.”
“You would have to counsel with Spring by telephone twice a week for the first three months when she’s available. And you will have to go to a substance abuse group chosen by Spring.”
“Fine.”
“You would have to live with Jill and exercise five days a week with her. I would tell her to torture you.”
“Fine.”
“You would have to take a polygraph should Jill ever ask for one. But most probably, if I think you are dishonest in any respect, you’re fired. I wouldn’t trust you for a long time.”
“Okay.”
“You do as Jill says at all times without question.”
“I know.”
“You never tell anyone about the company or your work without my permission. Break that rule and you’re fired.”
“Uh-huh.”
“What is uh-huh?”
“Yes. I agree.”
“You’ll see a lawyer and sign a contract. With the help of Spring and Jill you are going to create guidelines that will give a lot more structure to your life.” He hesitated. “It has to be a structure the rest of us can believe in.”
“I know.”
“You still want to work for my company?”
“Yes.”
“Pay starts at ten dollars an hour. Nice even number.”
“You won’t be sorry.”
“Time will tell.” He looked up to see Jill standing behind Spring.
“And, Jill, you are committed to this?”
“Absolutely,” Jill said.
“You know Jill is doing this for you?”
Grady nodded and held out her hand to shake Sam’s.
“I’ll shake your hand in a month. Right now performance talks. We both made a decision today. I’m counting on you to make it a right decision.”
When Sam left the conference room he noticed that Anna was talking to Spring.
Great.
An hour later, Sam introduced Anna to Grogg and Big Brain. She learned that Sam had roughly fifty people worldwide gathering information around the clock, in addition to the fourteen staffers in Sam’s office. Detectives were checking credit cards, phone traffic, looking for disgruntled former associates, people with ties to law enforcement, and into all manner of databases. Each iota of information was funneled into Big Brain, which stored images, driver license numbers, car VINs, Social Security numbers, telephone numbers, cell phone information. If it could be rendered digital, Big Brain stored it.
In the beginning, before the computer began to draw correlations and aggregate people who knew each other, it all seemed somewhat useless. Gradually, however, patterns emerged. Even more significantly, for years Sam had kept records that could not lawfully have been retained by many law enforcement agencies even after the war on terrorism. A few people in law enforcement did not like the limitations and had private webs kept at home on large PCs, and Sam had downloaded several of these. Much more significantly in off-the-record trades with the U.S. and other governments, he had downloaded various government databases. It was a dumping ground that hungry government spooks could come back to—a place they could find things that had to be wiped from government computers.
Terrorism had helped create the flexibility that Sam needed, but it had started long before the 9/11 attacks. Since bad guys tend to run in packs and deal with (or screw) each other, Sam already had information on both DuShane Chellis and Samir Aziz, along with hundreds of thousands of others. It was now becoming apparent that Samir and Chellis seemed to know some of the same unsavory people. Scotland Yard suspected that DuShane Chellis used a hired killer who had been employed by other criminal types.
“I’m so impressed,” Anna said when the short tour was over.
“Everything here is backed up on the East Coast every day so if something happened, not a great deal would be lost. If both Paul and I die, a board of my employees along with five other guys, law enforcement and former law enforcement, get it all. Ultimately it would be used by the government for antiterrorism and organized international crime. Of course they may have to delete a lot of it Legality for government data is a big issue.”
“I’ll bet the government would love it right now.”
“Actually they get pretty much what they need. But in bits and pieces. They don’t have the software to handle much at a time, and they aren’t even close. The database without the software to search it is not nearly as productive as it could be. My data warehouse programs are proprietary. The problem with sharing everything with the government is that my clients are not always odor free. But there isn’t really a bad person among them, inasmuch as it’s for me to discern such things.”
“Can’t they subpoena stuff?”
“Paul is a licensed attorney and our general counsel. I also am a licensed attorney. I went to correspondence school and passed the bar a long time ago, when I was young and could sit on my ass for hours. You also sign a contract with Paul and me acting independently as your attorneys. There is a clause that, at least purportedly, makes information that you give us subject to the attorney-client privilege. Much of the rest of the data is covered by the attorney work-product privilege. I have the best lawyers in the country protecting my stuff and the government, of course, has learned that the hard way. Not because I beat them in court but because we never get there. They know they would have to fight and go to court to get the stuff. That takes time and they have to ask what happens if they lose. And if they win they have to ask whether it will be there and whether they will be able to retrieve it and more importantly whether the public would stand for the government having this stuff.
“Not to mention, if Grogg goes quiet on them, or wants to screw them, they have a real problem. I have far too much that they want for them to fight with me. For them, cooperation and trading is the preferred alternative. And sometimes I have to get signed waivers from my clients to give them certain material.”
“This is impressive,” Anna said. “So how do you detect associations between people?”
“If we are doing an investigation and we see people in a car or at a meeting together. If other people are mentioned in a person’s garbage, maybe just a Christmas card, or a simple note, it all goes in. Every person that comes in contact with someone we might be even remotely interested in goes in the database—everything we can get on them. That’s one of the things the technicians do all day long. We try to search every public record on every person significant to any investigation. Maybe they show up on real estate title reports as buyer and seller or maybe partners in property or in a corporation. When we are gathering information nothing is too trivial to go in our database—even things that seem completely unrelated at the time. We love phone bills. And the computer remembers forever that Jack Jones had a postcard from Nick Smith in his garbage can. It’s a link, and we will never lose that link.”
“I’ll worry about the moral and ethical quagmire after we rescue my brother.”
“Uh-huh. My clients tend to look at it that way.”
Next Sam showed her the bunk rooms. For the women there were twenty bunks, dressing rooms, four tiled baths, and color. The room was cocoa with white trim, art and photos on the walls, dressers with wooden name placards, a wooden bookcase with some books and more photos.
“Now for the men.”
Although the color was the same and the baths were similarly tiled but with boy blue, there was no art or photographs; metal lockers stood in place of solid hardwood dressers, benches instead of chairs. It was much smaller, and the eight bunks were crammed together.
“Maybe you should ask the girls to fix up the boys’ place,” Anna said.
“Yeah. Maybe.”
“Inside you’re saying ‘Go to hell.’ ”
“It’s a place to sleep. When you’re awake enough to enjoy the scenery, you’re supposed to be outworking or on your way home.”
“I knew it.”
“And what were you talking to my mother about?”
“I’m way too sleepy and I’m going to go try one of the pretty bunks in the girls’ room.”
“This smells like revenge.”
“You can handle it.”
They walked down the hall to the larger dorm. Anna stepped inside and turned around.
Sam gave her a peck on the cheek.
“Not truly an inspirational kiss. But nice nevertheless.”
Sam turned to leave, anxious to get back to work. And somehow he didn’t like what had just happened to him. Turning, he walked back to her. As if she were expecting it, his lips met hers and their tongues explored their passion, which he found considerable.
“I shouldn’t be doing that,” he said. “But the only thing that seemed worse was not doing it.”
“Sam?”
“Yeah?” He stopped as he turned to leave.
“Now that I’ve seen where you work, I want to see where you live.”
Early in the morning Anna rose and found Sam sleepy-eyed and hunching over a cup of coffee in front of a computer screen. There was a certain oddity in this sculpted gym rat staring wide-eyed at dull narratives and mind-numbing details about lists of people that probably had nothing to do with anything that mattered. Sam was a jock in geek land, she thought. The entire main portion of the office was a myriad of computer screens, server lines, and phone lines, information coming in from France, Lebanon, and other faraway places, all supposedly relating in some manner either to her brother or to the men who seemingly had controlled him.
“Come to my place for brunch,” she said, watching him as he pointed and clicked.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m going to get a few winks in the boys’ room.”
“I’ll take a cab. And I’ll see you at eleven,” she said.
She had decided to remain in her Los Angeles home for the duration of the hunt for Jason. Like many other houses in Hollywood Hills, it was large and white and stucco with a red-tiled roof, something of a standard formula for the area. Individuality in the architecture of such mansions lay in shapes, corners, windows, what was round and what was square.
This house had two stories and about four thousand feet per story, with a third-floor lookout turret in which she occasionally read. The view from the tower was of brown hills and other white adobe red-tile-roofed homes. The turret had a bar that she seldom used because she drank only wine and the occasional Tom Collins. The house had a screening room, a library, a family room, a gathering room, and a living room. Most of the time she lived her life in the family room-kitchen area.
After arriving home she slept again. At 10:30 she awoke and looked at the luminescent red numbers on the clock atop the TV cabinet. Startled, she sat upright trying to think about homemade granola and what she would wear and what Sam would think.
She walked to the kitchen and crawled up on a stool overlooking the granite kitchen bar. She noticed that the pattern in the granite sort of shimmied, and hoped it wasn’t some weird neurological problem.
On the counter was an article about Steven Spielberg and the history of his moviemaking career including his youthful efforts at filmmaking. The man’s passion for the craft appeared relentless. Next to the article was
Atonement,
a novel that began with Briony’s passion for her play. Because she was just a child, Briony’s passion was unmetered by doubt. Anna could connect both with Spielberg and Briony.
Anna’s mother, being a Catholic, taught her that the chief end of man was to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. For Anna that seemed a distant way to define her life and not quite close enough to the pavement. Life for Anna was founded on a first truth. It was at once a revelation and a premise. The chief end of man was to make responsible use of his freedom.
In Anna’s mind people had the best chance of squeezing the most out of their choices if they focused their attention on just a very few simple things. Sometimes only one or two.
Such focused attention on a single detail of life was what Anna called passion and it was the bedrock of her being. Great lives could be formed around many kinds of passion: a passion for God, or the expression of man’s woes and triumphs as in art or theater. It could be growing roses in the backyard or being a good steward of some treasure.
If she had a steely spine, as some said, it was only her passion for a single simple thing. She wanted to use her lips, her body, and her mind to tell great stories. There were, of course, obstacles, and steel spines were good for overcoming them.
Now it was occurring to her that one passion might not be enough. Perhaps a second could be fit into the stuff of her life and she might use her freedom to cultivate this second passion as well, but as yet it had not been made simple. That was a prerequisite. She knew that a part of finding her second passion was in turning around Jason’s life and the damage she had done. She was deeply suspicious that this second passion might also be related to getting to know the right man.
As she pondered Sam’s visit, her old impatience to help her brother returned. The phone rang.
“I’m on my way.” It was Sam on his cell phone.
“Great. You like granola?”
“Yep.”
“Have you learned anything?”
“Hal hasn’t finished looking. I did learn something interesting, though. Tell you when I get there. Not on a cell phone.”
“Well, hurry up, Sam.”
Despite her anxiety over Jason, she felt a strong sense of anticipation that Sam was coming. She found herself looking in the mirror pondering her hair, and the complete lack of any makeup. She could wear a thick robe or a thin one, silken or soft and shapeless. She daubed Joy perfume and felt completely ridiculous, then began with her hair. After a few minutes she figured it was decent. Going to the “old and comfortable” section of the closet, she grabbed a Lands End terry-cloth robe.
In her closet there were two full-length mirrors. She looked at herself and thought about Sam, his cool good looks, his easy confidence.
“Damn,” she muttered, walking back to the bathroom, brushing her hair more vigorously and applying a little rouge before the doorbell rang. When she started getting a crush on a man it didn’t matter about Oscars, or the adoration of millions, it mattered only about the one.
She trotted back to the closet, put the terry-cloth robe on a hook, and grabbed a Donna Karan robe instead. Blue with gold trim. Stylish but not steamy.
“You nut,” she said aloud as she glanced in the mirror one last time.
When she arrived at the entry she found Sam wearing a leather coat, a gray sport shirt, and black pants.
“Hi,” he said, and kissed her cheek.
There was only a brief, slightly disappointing hug. Something was on his mind. With other normally inscrutable men, a few actually, she could feel their mood when they walked past. It occurred to her that most such men had either been her lovers or were related to her.
Suddenly she had a hunch about what—other than her brother’s disappearance, dead friends, and a wounded pilot—might be bothering Sam.
“You’re worried about the kiss. That’s so touching.”
“Touching?”
“You’re afraid of hurting me.”