“I don’t see how she could have known that I was going to be there.”
“The missing link,” Lucy says. “Who’s the common denominator?”
“I don’t have an answer that makes sense.”
“I’m about to show you. I’m living up to my reputation,” she adds. “It must seem I’ve not lived up to mine,” I reply, but it’s as if she doesn’t hear it.
“The rogue agent. The hacker,” Lucy repeats what I told her Jaime said to me last night.
“And when I had to listen to that, I got upset,” I continue to confess, and she continues to ignore it. “I got very angry, and I shouldn’t have.”
She is clicking through a menu on the MacBook. Two other computer notebooks on the desk display programs that are running searches, it seems, but nothing I’m seeing is intelligible, and there is a BlackBerry plugged into a charger, which I don’t understand. Lucy doesn’t use a BlackBerry anymore. She hasn’t for a while.
“What are we looking for?” I watch data speeding by on the two notebooks, words, names, numbers, symbols flowing too fast to read.
“My usual data mining.”
“Might I ask for what?”
“Do you have any idea what’s available out there if you have a way to find it?” Lucy is content to talk about computers and security cameras and data mining, about anything that doesn’t include my evening with Jaime and my need to be absolved for her death in the eyes of a niece I love like a daughter.
“I’m sure I can’t begin to imagine,” I reply. “But based on Wiki-Leaks and everything else, there don’t seem to be many secrets anymore, and almost nothing is safe.”
“Statistics,” she says. “Data that are gathered so we can look for patterns and predict. Crime patterns, for example, so the government remembers it had better give you funding to keep all those bad people off the street. Or stats that will help you market a product or maybe a service, such as a security company. Create a database of a hundred thousand or a hundred million customer records and produce histograms you can show to the next person or business you want as a client. Name, age, income, property value, location, prediction. Burglaries, break-ins, vandalism, stalking, assaults, murder, more predictions. You’re moving into an expensive house in Malibu and starting your own movie studio and I’m going to show you that it is statistically improbable anyone is going to break in to your residence or buildings or mug your staff in the parking lot or rape someone in a stairwell if you have a contract with my company and I install state-of-the-art security systems and you remember to use them.”
“The Jordans.” She must be looking for their alarm company information.
“Customer data is gold, and it’s sold constantly and at the speed of light,” Lucy says. “That’s what everybody wants. Advertisers, researchers, Homeland Security, the Special Forces that took out Bin Laden. Every detail about what you surf for on the Web, where you travel, who you call or e-mail, what prescription drugs you buy, what vaccinations you or your children get, your credit card and Social Security numbers, even your fingerprints and your iris scans because you gave your personal information to a privatized security screening service that has checkpoints at some airports and for a monthly fee you bypass the long lines everybody else stands in. If you’re going to sell your business, whoever acquires it wants your customer data, and in many cases that’s all they want. Who are you, and how do you spend your money? Come spend it with us. And from there the data gets sold again and again and again.”
“But there are firewalls, I assume.” I don’t want to know if she’s hacked her way through.
“No guarantees that secure information doesn’t end up in the public domain.” She’s not going to tell me if what she’s doing is legal. “Especially when a company’s assets are sold and their data end up in someone else’s hands.”
“As I understand it, Southern Cross Security wasn’t sold. It went bankrupt,” I point out.
“That’s incorrect. It ceased operations, went out of business, three years ago,” Lucy replies. “But its former owner, Daryl Simons, didn’t go bankrupt. He sold Southern Cross Security’s customer database to an international firm that supplies private protection and security advice, a soups-to-nuts outfit that will offer bodyguards or oversee the installation of a security system or do threat analysis if you’re being stalked, whatever you want. In turn, this international firm probably sold their customer database, and on it goes. So I’m doing things backward, like deconstructing an elaborate wedding cake. First I find the wedding cake in the bakery of cyberspace, and then I have to search for the original itemsets, datasets that were mined when patterns of interest were extracted from data repositories.”
“This would include billing information. Or details about false alarms.”
“Whatever was on Southern Cross Security’s server, and that certainly includes false alarms, trouble on the line, police response, whatever got reported, and this information got cooked up into statistical analyses. So the Jordan information is out there or in there somewhere. A teaspoon of flour I’ve got to uncook. Ultimately what I’m really looking for is the intranet link that Southern Cross Security had to its archived files. In other words, a dead site that would have the detailed billing information of individual customers. I hate that the process is slow.”
“When did you start the searches?”
“I just did. But I had to write the algorithms before I could run them. Now I’m autotrolling. That’s what you’re seeing on these two screens.”
“It might be a good idea to include Gloria Jordan,” I suggest. “We don’t know what name the account was in. Could have been an LLC, for that matter.”
“I don’t need to single her out, and I’m not worried about an LLC. Her data will be connected to his and to their children’s and to companies and tax returns — to anything in the media, to blogs, to criminal records, everything linked. Think of a decision tree. Did she say anything to you last night about worrying someone was following her, watching her, maybe showing up at her building?”
“Jaime.” I assume she means.
“Any reference at all, maybe somebody who gave her a weird feeling? Maybe someone who was too friendly?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“Why would you think to ask?” Lucy’s gaze is fixed on data streaming by.
“The security system and camera,” I reply. “And she’d started carrying a gun. A Smith and Wesson thirty- eight loaded with high-power hollowpoints.”
She is silent, watching data roll by.
“Your influence?” I say to her.
Lucy answers, “I don’t know anything about a gun. I would never recommend that for her. I never did, never got her one, never gave her lessons. A bad candidate.”
“I’m not so sure it was simply a case of the jitters because she felt out of her element in the Deep South, and I should have asked if she was feeling frightened or threatened or unstable or irrational or just plain miserable, and if so, why. But I didn’t.” It’s a relief to get it out, but I feel ashamed as I wait for her to turn on me, to blame me. “Just as I didn’t bother to make sure she was okay when I left last night. Remember what I used to tell you when you were growing up?”
Lucy doesn’t answer.
“Remember what I always said? Don’t go away mad.”
She doesn’t respond.
“Don’t let the sun go down on your wrath,” I add the rest of it.
“What I used to call your
“What an annoying person I must be.”
“You’re annoying when you think you’re somehow exempt from feeling what the rest of us do. Yes, you, quote, ‘went away mad’ last night. I know how angry you were. You went on and on about it over the phone until three o’clock in the morning, remember? And you should have been angry. It was okay to be angry. I would have been, too, if the shoe had been on the other foot and she was saying things like that about you. Or had done that to
