Like a revelation, Melodie Crookshank knew what she had to do.
7
THE M-LOGOS 455 Massively Parallel Processing Object Unit System was the most powerful computer yet constructed by the human race. It sat in a perpetually air-conditioned, dust-free, static-free basement deep beneath the National Security Agency headquarters at Fort Mead, Maryland. It had not been built to predict the weather, simulate a fifteen-megaton thermonuclear explosion, or find the quadrillionth digit of pi. It has been created for a far more mundane purpose: to listen.
Countless nodes distributed across the globe collected a gargantuan stream of digital information. It intercepted more than forty percent of all traffic on the World Wide Web, more than ninety percent of all cellular telephone conversations, virtually all radio and television broadcasts, many land-line telephone conversations, and a large portion of the data flows from governmental and corporate LANs and private networks.
This digital torrent was fed in real time into the M455MPP at the rate of sixteen terabits per second.
The computer merely listened.
It listened with almost every known language on earth, every dialect, every protocol, almost every computer algorithm ever written to analyze language. But that was not all: the M455MPP was the first computer to employ a new, highly classified form of data analysis known as Stutterlogic. Stutterlogic had been developed by advanced cybernetic theorists and programmers at the Defense Intelligence Agency as a way of sailing around the great reef of Artificial Intelligence, which had ship-wrecked the hopes of so many computer programmers over the last decades. Stutterlogic was a whole new way of looking at information. Instead
of trying to simulate human intelligence, as AI had sought unsuccessfully to do, Stutterlogic operated under a wholly new kind of logic, which was neither machine intelligence nor Al-based.
Even with Stutterlogic, it could not be said that the computer 'understood' what it heard. Its role was merely to identify a 'communication of interest,' or a CI in the jargon of its operators, and forward it to a human for review.
Most of the CIs that emerged from the M455MPP were e-mails and cellular telephone conversations. The latter were parceled out among one hundred and twenty-five human listeners. Their job required an enormous knowledge base, fluency in the language or dialect in question, and an almost magical sense of intuition. Being a good 'listener' was an art, not a science.
At 11:04.34.98 EDT, four minutes into an eleven-minute cellular telephone call, module 3656070 of the M455MPP identified the conversation under way as a potential CI. The computer, having captured the conversation from the beginning, rewound it and began analyzing it, even while it was still in progress. When the CI concluded at 11:16.04.58 it had already passed through a series of algorithmic filters that had parsed it linguistically and conceptually, scrutinizing the voice inflections for dozens of psychological markers, including stress, excitement, anger, confidence, and fear. Object programs identified the caller and the receiver and then went out to examine thousands of databases to retrieve every particle of personal information about the two interlocutors that existed in networked electronic form anywhere in the world.
This particular CI 'greened' (that is, passed) this first round of tests, and it was assigned a rating of 0.003. It was then passed through a firewall to a subsystem of the M455 where it was subjected to a powerful Stutterlogic analysis. This analysis upgraded its rating to 0.56 and passed it back to the main database module with 'questions.' The database loops returned the CI to the Stutterlogic module with the 'questions' having been 'answered.' On the basis of those answers, the Stutterlogic module raised the rating of the CI to 1.20.
Any CI rating over 1.0 was forwarded to a human listener.
The time was 11:22.06.31.
RICK MUZlNSKf HAD begun his vicariously lived existence as a boy listening for hours at his parents' bedroom door, hearing with sick fascination everything they did. Muzinsky's father had been a career diplomat and Rick had lived all over the world, picking up a fluency in three languages besides English. He had grown up on the outside looking in, a boy with no friends and no place to call home. He was a vicarious human being, and with his job in Homeland Security he had
found a way to make a good living at it. The job paid extremely well. He worked a total of four hours a day in an environment that was free from dim-witted bosses, moronic coworkers, incompetent assistants, and deficient secretaries. He did not have to deal with people at the coffee machine or the Xerox machine. He could clock in his four hours in any way he wished during each twenty-four-hour period. Best of all, he worked alone-that was mandatory. He was not allowed to discuss his work with anyone. Anyone. So when someone asked him that inevitable, obnoxious question, What do you do for a living? he. could tell them anything he liked but the truth.
Some people might consider it crushingly dull, listening to one CI after another, almost all of them asinine exchanges between idiots, full of empty threats, psychotic rants, political outbursts, brainless pronouncements, and wishful thinking-the self-deluded ramblings of some of the saddest, dumbest people Muzinsky had ever heard. But he loved every word of it.
Once in a while a conversation came along that was different. Often it was hard to say why. It could be a certain seriousness, a gravitas, to the utterances. It could be a sense that something else was being said behind the words being spoken. After a few listenings, if the feeling didn't go away, he would then call up the information associated with the conversation and see who the interlocutors were. That was usually most revealing.
Muzinsky had no role in following up on the CIs that he identified as threatening. His only role was to forward those CIs to an appropriate agency for further analysis. Sometimes the computer even identified the agency the CI should go to-should Muzinsky pass it-as certain agencies seemed to be listening for certain cryptic things. But he passed only about one CI in every two or three thousand conversations he listened to. Most got forwarded to various subagen-cies of the NSA or Homeland Security. Others went to the Pentagon, State Department, FBI, CIA, ATF, INS, and a host of other acronyms, some of whose very existence was classified. Muzinsky had to match each CI with the right agency and do it fast. A CI could not be allowed to bounce around, looking for a home. That was what led to 9/11. The receiving agencies were now primed to handle incoming intelligence immediately, if necessary within minutes of its receipt. That was another lesson from 9/11.
But Muzinsky had nothing to do with that side of things. Once the CI left his cubicle, it was gone forever.
Muzinsky sat at the terminal in his locked cubicle, headphones on, and punched the READY button indicating he was free to receive the next CI. The computer sent him no preliminary data or background information about the
call, nothing that might influence his mind about what he was about to hear. It always started with the naked CI.
A hiss and it began. There was the sound of a phone ringing, an answer, a thump, the sound of breathlessness on the other end, and then the conversation began:
'Melodic? How's the research going?'
'Great, Dr. Corvus, just great.'
8
JUST BEFORE THE turn on the Forest Service road leading to Perdiz Creek, Maddox slowed and pulled off the highway. A pair of headlights had appeared behind him, and before he actually made the turn he wanted to make sure they didn't belong to Broadbent. He shut off his engine and lights and waited for the vehicle to pass.
A truck rapidly approached going a tremendous clip, slowed only slightly, then sped past. Maddox breathed a sigh of relief-it was just some old, beat-up Dodge. He started the car and made the turn, bumped over the cattle guard, and continued down the rutted dirt road, feeling a huge lifting of his spirits. He rolled down the windows to let in air. It was a cool and fragrant night, the stars shining above the dark rims of the mesas. His plan had worked: he had the notebook. Nothing could stop him now. There would be a certain amount of law enforcement excitement around the area in the coming days after Broadbent reported his wife's abduction, but he'd be safe up at Perdiz Creek working on his novel... And when they came by to question him, they'd find nothing-no body, nada. And they never would find her body. He'd already found a perfect place to lose it, a deep water-filled shaft in one of the upper mines. The roof above the shaft was shored with rotting timbers, and after he deep-sixed the corpse down the shaft he'd set off a small charge to bring down the roof-and that would be it. She'd be as gone as Jimmy Hoffa.
He checked his watch: nine-forty. He'd be back at Perdiz Creek in half an hour, and he had something to look forward to.
Tomorrow, he'd call Corvus from a pay phone to tell him the good news. He glanced at his cell phone,
