“How fast are the scanners?”
“Fast. They gobble up ten pages a second. And there are a couple of them.
BDF does a lot of very complex commercial stuff and they do a lot of this.”
“That’s great,” said Turbee brightly. “Scan in everything and load it into the cloud. Here’s a file address. I think I can help you out.”
“What can you do?”
“Dana, you have no idea what we can do. We are powered by IBM experimental octa-core supercomputers. We have more computing power than virtually any other place on the planet. If you scan everything in and get it to me, we can create the indexes you need, and I can cobble together a little program that sorts things by date and adds it to your database. It will even number the pages for you. We use AI-based algorithms.”
“How long will that take?”
“Once I get your file and your existing database, maybe an hour or so.”
“What did you say? You can slide the documents into the database automatically, number them, identify them by author, by date, in an hour?”
“Most of them. There will be some documents without a date and of uncertain authorship, but even those we can estimate a date depending on context and content. There’s a heuristic aspect to the program.”
“What about issues. Can it sort by issue? By legal issue?”
“Should be able to do that. You must have a list of key words and key issues already going, right?”
“Sure I do, Turbee. I have a list of key things that I search for.” “Send me that list, Dana,” Turbee said.
“Can you do things like proximity searches? Stem searches? Fuzzy searches? All of those things?”
“Absolutely I can. Initially it will be a bit slow, but the whole system learns as it goes. We are deep in neural net coding here. And if I run stuck, I can enlist one of the machine learning systems at Stanford or U of Toronto, or the National Weather Service. We can grab virtually an infinite number of flops of processing power. It’s never been a problem. It’s pretty accurate.
How long will it take you to scan everything in?”
“Probably five or six hours,” Dana said, looking at the pile.
“That gives me enough time to put a program together. We can have everything indexed and into the database by this time tomorrow, easy.”
“No way,” Dana said. “That’s just flat-out impossible.”
“Not at TTIC, it’s not.”
Dana looked at Chris and mulled things over. She was missing a big piece of the picture. Turbee might be able to supply that.
“Okay,” she said, after a pause. “You guys are trying to keep the world safe from terrorists. I’m sure that’s a full-time job. Why are you involving yourself in this case?”
“It’s a long story,” Turbee sighed.
“Maybe, but I need to hear it. I’ve never met you, and I don’t know what’s going on. All I know is that I’m defending a monster conspiracy case, by myself, against four of the sharpest prosecutors I’ve ever seen. Weird things are happening in this case. Your involvement is truly strange. Before I take another step in this direction, Turbee, you had best tell me why you contacted me and now are agreeing to solve this document nightmare that I’ve got.”
“I guess you’re right,” Turbee said. “I will give you an explanation. It’s a little involved and this will take a few minutes.”
“Go ahead,” said Dana. “I’m all ears.”
Turbee tumbled into a somewhat disjointed description of the two schools of thought as to the perpetrators of the Colorado River attack and who he thought was responsible. He referred to the official view, which was delineated in the Calvin Jones report, and the conspiracy view, a view that Turbee shared with George—a view that was the subject of thousands of websites, many of which had been surreptitiously created by him and George—a view shared by a few hundred million others.
“Okay, Hamilton, or Turbee. That’s interesting, but how does that help me?”
“We think that your client is actually innocent,” Turbee responded. “He’s not a nice person, I’ll grant you that, but he probably didn’t know it was Semtex, as opposed to heroin, going through his mine at Devil’s Anvil. We have a pretty good idea who the conspirators were, and Lestage was not one of them.”
“But you are sticking your neck out a mile. You are using government resources for things that . . . you know, Turbee, I’m a lawyer. Are you sure you’re not going to get into trouble over this?”
“I might, Dana. You have to promise me not to tell anybody about this. I won’t, either. Then no one will ever know. But there is a dark side to a lot of this, Dana. For whatever reason, powerful people in Washington do not want this conspiracy stuff to come out. We at TTIC have been told that if we get further involved in this, we will get fired or jailed, or worse. The people behind this are powerful and dangerous. Because of that you need to promise me you will not tell a soul about my involvement. Do you promise?”
“I promise,” said Dana solemnly. “I will not betray you.”
“Good. Now Dana, the documents will help because I think I can show that there are holes in the documents you have been given.”
“What do you mean, holes?”
“Yes, Dana. Holes. Like if a couple of documents refer to a certain email and that email has not been produced. I can give you a printout of missing documents. And all the documents that refer to it. That should help you in court.”
“Well, Turbee, if you could actually do that, I owe you a glass of wine or something,” Dana said. “I’ll scan this to a file and email it to you.”
“I prefer root beer.”
“Okay, Turbee. Thank you. I really owe you. You’re a lifesaver.”
“It’s nothing,” said Turbee. “Nice talking to you.”
Chris and Dana looked at one another and mouthed the same word. “Root beer?”
The three of
