Then he switched over to his Work folder which contained bug reports and a couple of questions from the young software architect he’d been grooming to take over maintenance of the facial recognition engine so that Joe could switch to working on gait recognition.
Gait recognition was new and interesting. In gait recognition, the computer tried to determine a subject’s identity from the way he or she walked. Gait recognition enabled identification from a much farther distance than facial recognition. It was surprisingly effective.
He dealt with those emails before moving to his newest folder, RRT, an abbreviation for Recognition Request Tracking. He whistled in surprise, and Edison lifted his head.
“It’s OK, boy, go on back to sleep,” Joe said.
But it wasn’t OK. Just the opposite. In the last few hours, a million more requests had been made than the week before. That didn’t make sense. Either his software had a bug, or all the governmental agencies in the United States were experiencing a massive crime wave, or something new had come online, probably something automated. His stomach clenched.
List forgotten, he logged into the system and began tracking the requests down, compiling reports of where the requests originated and the reasons why. So far, they all came from a single source.
Edison nudged his knee, but Joe pushed him away. “Busy, Edison.”
The dog dropped his head into Joe’s lap, blocking his view of the screen.
“What do you need?” He looked at the clock on the corner of his computer. He’d been sitting here for hours. “Bedtime?”
Edison wagged his tail and looked meaningfully at the door. The dog didn’t think it was healthy to sit here this long. He was right, of course. But he didn’t have to go to the bathroom. When he did, he stood by the door and gave a bark to let Joe know it was important. Just a single bark, because Edison, or Joe, was well trained.
“It’s going to be a while, buddy,” Joe told him. “Sorry.”
Edison gave him a skeptical look and wandered out toward the kitchen. A crunching sound indicated he had found a midnight snack.
Joe scrolled through the reports he’d just generated. It was unmistakable. The National Security Agency was submitting millions of match requests.
What was their source material? He found that, too. They’d submitted surveillance footage from all across the country — people going into stores, people crossing the street, people leaving church, people eating at McDonald’s. Any of those requests would have been normal, but so many of them at once meant they had tapped into thousands of surveillance cameras and were looking for automated matches of the millions of people who appeared on the videos. Those people couldn’t all be criminals or terrorists — the vast majority of them were innocent. But they were still being tracked.
Millions of innocent people were being tracked.
And Joe had created the monster.
Chapter 15
Vivian checked her phone. She’d been pacing the corridor outside of Mrs. Tesla’s suite for hours. The woman hadn’t come out, although a room-service cart had gone in. Vivian had intercepted it outside the door, searched it, and patted down the bewildered Hispanic waiter.
The elevator dinged, and she tensed, as she had about a hundred times over the course of the evening. So far she’d watched a drunken couple practically have sex in the hall, a bored businessman with a briefcase head straight to his room, four guys in black T-shirts who smelled like pot and couldn’t stop laughing stumble to their room, and a guy lugging what she swore was a monkey in a dog carrier.
Dirk stepped out of the elevator, and she relaxed. He was here to replace her, and she had trusted him with her life for years.
A police officer by day, he sometimes moonlighted for Mr. Rossi’s security company. Mr. Rossi was Tesla’s lawyer. She’d met Tesla when Mr. Rossi had hired her to protect him. But Tesla had given her the slip and disappeared underground — reappearing with the agoraphobia that still plagued him. If she’d kept an eye on him as she should have, he’d be fine today.
“Yo,” Dirk said. The circles under his eyes looked darker than usual, and his jeans and white shirt looked as if he’d slept in them. Not his usual dapper self.
Dirk looked that way only when he had girl trouble, a condition that cropped up about every six months. Dirk had commitment issues.
“Long day?” she asked.
He shrugged and looked around the empty corridor. “Better than yours, by the looks of it.”
She filled him in on the situation, then took the elevator down. This time she didn’t feel so awed by the lobby. The people here weren’t different from anyone else, except they had more money to burn.
She turned up her collar and started walking toward Grand Central in the warm night. Even though it was late, people swarmed around her on the sidewalk, some dressed in formal evening wear, others in grungy torn jeans and covered in piercings. Lucy would look like that if their mother weren’t so strict.
She tapped out a text message to an informant she’d been cultivating at Grand Central. If she didn’t get a response, this was likely a wasted trip. Still, it felt good to be walking and actually getting somewhere instead of just wearing down the carpet.
A few blocks later, she got an answer.
Good. He was sober enough to type, and he hadn’t lost or hocked the phone.
She arranged to meet him in front of Pershing Square restaurant. She was starving, and he likely was, too.
Then she hailed a cab, remembering to ask for a receipt. This was definitely a business expense, and Tesla would have to pay for it.
She climbed out in front of the terminal and jogged across the street. The green Pershing Square sign was turned off, the chairs up on the tables inside. They were always closed this late, something she should have remembered.
A gaunt figure in an Army green jacket emerged from the shadows next to her and grabbed her elbow. She resisted the impulse to smack him because she recognized him from the smell. “Rufus?”
“The same, baby.”
She looked at his thin, leathery cheeks, faded brown eyes, and scraggly black beard. “Not your baby, Roof.”
“You might be, you find out what I have to tell.”
“What you got for me?”
He rubbed his thumb against his fingertips in the universal sign for money.
“Let’s get some food into you first.” She worried about him, even though she knew she shouldn’t.
Once, he’d told her that at night he slept on a bench in Central Park in the summer and next to a warm subway grate in the winter. He slid around the city on his own paths, always one step ahead. At least tonight he looked mostly sober.
A few minutes later they were at an all-night diner, drinking coffee and waiting for two orders of bacon and eggs.
Under the fluorescent lights, Rufus looked even more bedraggled. Grit had settled into the deep lines on his forehead and cheeks, and what was left of his hair didn’t look as if it had been washed or combed since Obama was first elected president.
He’d seen some hard living, had Rufus. But that was why she needed him. He’d been panhandling around Grand Central so long he was practically invisible, and he knew everything that went on there. For a price, he’d share.
“What you got?” She fell into his rhythm of speech.