Neither of them spoke for several minutes as Decker maneuvered the car back onto the main road heading south. He drove at breakneck speed for the next ten or fifteen miles until Lulu couldn’t take it any longer.
“Can’t you slow down for Christ’s sake? You’re going to get us both killed. Or is driving like a maniac part of your PTSD.”
“Who said I had PTSD?”
“It’s obvious,” she replied.
Decker glanced over at her once again. She looked terrified. He eased up on the pedal and the car slowed down to seventy.
“Thank you,” she said.
Decker laughed. He felt suddenly giddy. Must be all the adrenaline, he thought. “I guess it was your self-starter that—”
“Yep.
“IP-enabled?”
“Of course. But how they were able to put the car into drive… that I’m still trying to figure out. Poor Braun,” Lulu added. “I guess I owe you my life again. First Dino. Now this. It’s becoming a habit.”
“Forget it.”
“Forget it! You saved my life, Special Agent Decker. Don’t you know that old Chinese proverb: Save a life and you’re responsible for it?”
“Is that another one of your grandmother’s sayings? I don’t want to be responsible for your life,” he snapped back. Then, he softened. “I can barely be responsible for my own daughter’s life. Obviously.”
“It’s not your fault,” Lulu said. “Your daughter, I mean.”
“Isn’t it?” Decker laughed grimly. “I’m both her father and mother now. I’m all she’s got left. It’s my job to protect her. My job. But I didn’t. I brought Hammel into her life and he almost killed her.” He shook his head. “Forget it.” He turned to the left, trying to prevent Lulu from seeing the tears in his eyes. “I’m driving you back to Boston.”
“What? But… why? I thought we were…”
All of a sudden, Decker pulled the car off to the side of the road.
“You thought what?” He could feel himself growing angrier and angrier.
“That we were in this together.”
“We’re not in anything together. The longer you hang around me, the greater the chances that something bad’s going to happen to you. Just like Becca. I’m paid to take chances. You’re a college professor and part-time IC consultant.”
“I’m…” She looked out her side window. “What about you?” she continued. “What are you going to do?”
Decker shrugged. “I don’t know. But if Braun was right, if something happened to Zimmerman because of what he was doing at Building 5300, I have to find out what it was.”
“I can help you, John. You’re not a computer guy. You didn’t even know what an Exabyte was.”
“Of course I did. I just didn’t want Braun to know that I knew. I majored in math at Northwestern.”
Lulu laughed.
“If you can learn how to hotwire a car,” Decker added, “and I don’t even want to know how you learned how to do that, then I can figure this out. Actually,” he continued, “how did you learn how to—”
“Don’t ask. Let me just say that I had an interesting adolescence.”
“Fine.” Decker turned back to the steering wheel. He put the car into drive and slipped back onto the road. “I’m still taking you home. I don’t want to see anyone else getting hurt over me.”
They drove south on route 103 for another few miles, then picked up I-91. For a long time, neither of them said anything. Around noon, after crossing into Massachusetts and picking up Route 2E north of Greenfield, Lulu finally turned to Decker and said, “Why did Braun tell us that joke, the one about René Descartes?”
“You’ve been thinking about this the whole time?” Decker chuckled, shook his head. “I don’t know. Frankly, Braun seemed a few sandwiches short of a picnic.”
“He did, didn’t he? One minute lucid, articulate — the next…” She didn’t finish. “I know it, you know.”
“You know what?”
“That joke. I’ve heard it before. Back in college, I took some philosophy classes. So the flight attendant comes up to Descartes and says, Can I get you something? Some coffee, tea? Or a drink? And Descartes looks up and says, I think not. Then he vanishes.” She chuckled. “You know René Descartes, right? Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore, I am. The guy who founded analytic geometry.”
“I know him. And I get it. But so what? I mean, why did he tell us that joke? And what did he mean when he said he and Zimmerman were working on profiling?”
“Oh, now you need me again.”
“Whatever,” said Decker. He stepped on the gas. “If you don’t want to share your little theory, fine by me.”
“Scenario planning.”
“What?”
“You know. Games. Simulations. What was Zimmerman working on?”
“You mean before Riptide?”
“Yeah.”
“His cyber-doppelgänger project. Building personality profiles.”
“Exactly. And what’s Allied Data Systems all about.”
“Database marketing. Like Acxiom and Epsilon.”
“Exactly. Think about it. Remember how, after 9/11, everyone was clamoring for reasons why the hijackers weren’t identified earlier, especially since they’d done all these curious things right beforehand. Like taking flying lessons. Buying—”
“I remember.”
“ADS has more than twenty-five thousand servers processing more than fifty trillion — with a ‘t’—data transactions per year. Their databases contain information on five hundred million active consumers worldwide, with about fifteen hundred data points per consumer, and each person is linked to one of seventy or so socioeconomic clusters.”
“But that information is used in marketing stuff. Linking things like your online behaviors to purchasing preferences so that corporations — their clients — can sell you more stuff.”
“They also provided data to the IC on eleven of the nineteen hijackers right after 9/11.”
“I didn’t know that. So, you think Zimmerman was helping them integrate ADS data into their new Bluffdale facility, is that it? So that they could do scenario planning, or in an effort to find the next round of terrorists? Predictive modeling. Figuring out who was going to strike before they had a chance to do harm. But wouldn’t that be illegal? You’d have to data mine U.S. citizens, couple public and private datamarts. And then what are you going to do — arrest them before they do the crime? Besides, as you know, NSA has no purview over domestic spying. It’s forbidden.”
Lulu laughed. “You heard what Braun said about their telecom sniffers. They’re not just on our borders. They’re right in the middle of the U.S. of A.”
“But President Bush got into all kinds of trouble when he did that warrantless wiretapping. No matter how unlikely it is that a FISA judge turn down my request, I still have to secure permission before I go after someone domestically. Like with H2O2.”
“The rules were relaxed when Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act back in ’08. Section 702 is pretty damned broad. They can sweep up all the data they want now, foreign and domestic, both IC-generated and public datamarts, do their predictive modeling, and target you and me, any of us, even if we’re not in contact with any agent overseas. And we can’t do a damned thing about it. We can’t even tell anyone we’ve been charged.” Lulu laughed.
“What’s so funny about that? You’re talking about blanket search and seizure. No more probable cause.”
“I’m laughing because you look so indignant. I guess you’ve never been followed around in some bodega at night because the night guard assumes — simply from the way that you look — that you’re going to walk off with some crappy bag of chips or a soda. Welcome, my brother, to the twenty-first century surveillance state.” Lulu turned and stared out the window. Finally, after a moment, she said, “You’re going to get us pulled over if you don’t take it easy.”