For a moment there was silence. Then, Lulu heard a click and the words, “I’m not here.” They were Decker’s own words, the ones he’d only just whispered, except now they were amplified. The phrase was repeated again and again at various speeds, followed by the words, “Ninety-nine percent match.” A moment later, the voice said, “I know that he’s there. Put him on, please.”
Lulu handed Decker the phone.
“Who is this?” asked Decker. “And why are you trying to kill us?”
The man at the other end laughed. “I’m not trying to kill you. On the contrary, John. I’m trying to save both of your lives. And mine too, if I can. Listen to me very carefully. I don’t have much time.”
The voice sounded familiar but he couldn’t quite place it. “Who is this?”
“Call me X. Mr. X,” he replied with a laugh. “Like that Galaxy Being from The Outer Limits. You remember that episode, John.”
“What do you want from us?”
“You need to find out what happened to Matt.”
“Matt? Matt who?”
“Matthew Zimmerman. Remember, John. Every war begins with a single murder.” The phone went suddenly dead.
“War? What war?” Decker said. “Who’s Matthew Zimmerman? Hello. Hello!” But it was useless. The caller was gone. He handed the phone back to Lulu.
“What does Matthew Zimmerman have to do with all this?” she asked him.
“Who’s Matt Zimmerman? The name sounds familiar but—”
“MnemeScape? MyHealthQuest? You know. The Web entrepreneur.”
“Oh, right,” he replied. Now, Decker remembered. Zimmerman was the archetype of the reclusive Net billionaire, a kind of Howard Hughes of the Web. Decker had studied his theories on neural network predictive modeling while writing his thesis at Northwestern. “I don’t run in those circles,” he said. “And what does he mean: Find out what happened? What happened to Zimmerman?”
“He died a few months ago. In Vermont, I believe. Some kind of car accident.”
“Car accident?”
“It was all over the news.”
“Great,” Decker said.
Lulu turned toward the door. “Hope you like Maple syrup with your pancakes because that’s what we’re having for breakfast.”
“We? I thought you told me you wanted no part of this.”
“It’s a little late for that now, isn’t it? Whoever’s trying to kill you, Special Agent Decker, is now trying to kill me.”
“But we don’t even know who he is, this Mr. X. Why should we trust him? He could be leading us right into a trap.”
“He could be but what choice do we have? Do you want to turn yourself in? Go back to the NCTC?”
“No, I…” Decker looked over at her. “No, I don’t. Not when there’s a possible mole at the Center and everyone thinks that it’s me.”
“Then, unless you have a better idea, some stronger lead, I don’t think we have much of choice, do we? We’ll have to trust this Mr. X, at least for the moment. How’s Tony King?”
“What?”
“Tony King — your new name. You’re a reporter at large for The Washington Post. If you need me, I’ll be in what’s left of my workroom, chalking IDs.”
“You’re a woman of many talents, Lulu.”
“You have no idea.”
CHAPTER 27
“You know the speed limit’s sixty-five on this stretch of highway,” Decker said as they puttered along I-91, northbound towards Brattleboro.
Lulu stole a quick glance at him before turning back to the road. “Is that a comment about my gender or my race, Special Agent Decker?” She made it sound as if Special were anything but. “Sixty-five is the speed limit. Not the mean, or the median, or the best velocity to optimize fuel efficiency.”
“Sorry I said anything,” Decker replied. They had been creeping along in this manner, going barely fifty, since leaving Boston. It was maddening. He had slept for the first forty minutes or so of the journey, as soon as they had slipped into Lulu’s Ford Fusion. Except for a catnap or two, Decker had been unable to sleep at Lulu’s; the place had still reeked of smoke. So they had left the city before dawn, heading northbound on I-93, before turning westbound on 495 toward Vermont.
Dawn broke as they drove north of Quabbin Reservoir. The landscape was mottled with snow. The pine trees in the narrow passes looked brittle and thin, barely holding on to the hardscrabble soil.
“Tell me about Zimmerman,” he said, trying to backfill the void.
A semi whisssshed past.
“What you want to know?”
“What you know.”
“Not much, really. Just what I’ve read in the press. Grew up poor. No, that’s not true. Grew up rich, at least for the first few years of his life. In Wellsley, Massachusetts. Then his parents divorced and his mother and he moved to the South End. Dad was some insurance big-wig. Actuary. His mother became a school teacher after they split up. He got a scholarship to Harvard, where he did really well, but he dropped out after only two years to start MnemeScape.”
Over the next decade, she continued, Zimmerman designed and built an entire portfolio of websites, each architected to generate particular data about online users: MyHealthQuest, a vertical market healthcare search engine; MnemeScape, a social network designed to capture, curate, appreciate and share members’ digital memories — from photos to videos, audio and text; and ShopBorg, an intelligent agent designed to fetch the Net for eCommerce.
“Let’s say you want to go to Cancun,” she explained, “and you want to stay in this kind of hotel and do these kind of things but you only want to spend X dollars. The site sends a bot out to look for bargains mapped to your preferences and then brings them back to your email.”
“That’s a weird mix of investments,” Decker said.
“Not really. Not if you think about it. The purpose of each of his sites, besides being monetized by Google ads, was to help generate personality profiles of users based on the data points generated by all the sites in the portfolio.”
“I use some of those sites,” Decker said.
“So do hundreds of millions of other people, all over the world. That’s what Zimmerman was after,” said Lulu. “More than an avatar. A very sophisticated, integrated personality profile — using tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of data points — for each consumer who visited his virtual communities. An online ambassador. A cyber-doppelgänger. Your virtual you.”
Your virtual you, Decker thought. “But why?” he continued. “I mean, what was the point of having those profiles?”
“To target them for advertising, of course,” she replied. “Customized marketing messages. And, it turned out, to leverage that data for some other rather nefarious motives as well.”
“Like what?”
“Like corporate espionage. He’d begin with the data he gathered from the sites in his portfolio, combine it with other data streams from Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and such, merge and purge it with offline demo- and psycho-graphic information, and then mine it for trends.” She chuckled. “Here’s one example I remember in particular because it’s rather inspired. For some of his pharmaceutical clients, he’d track when folks were chatting and posting online about how they were worried about losing their jobs, how they were getting their résumés together — that sort of thing. By mapping such online chatter with geo location data gathered from smartphones and IMSI cell site simulators, even if he couldn’t identify the individuals doing the chatting — which was rare, regardless of their privacy settings — he’d be able to infer they were working for a particular pharmaceutical company. If there were enough folks in one location chatting like that, he’d be able to tell his pharma clients that the company was probably the target of a hostile takeover bid, or that a drug trial was floundering. That kind of information is worth a lot of money to folks in the private sector.”