sailing-government officials from noteworthy gumshoe organizations of several nations.
All such visits were made to enlist Sam’s help in obtaining information. These were by no means all of the meetings with these men or these agencies. Many occurred at a beach house owned by Sam, with Paul presiding in his place.
Only the officials Sam knew personally, and trusted, were invited to his office to meet him face-to-face, and when invited they brought no uninvited guests. Everything in life, even true love, comes with a price, and Sam had taken on certain obligations when he accepted certain data downloads from the government.
The government was no more eager to talk about their work with Sam than was Sam himself. Sam helped the government, and usually he helped a great deal, but he never charged a fee that they didn’t claim was unconscionable unless it struck him that he should accept favors and information in trade.
Since the advent of U.S. domestic terrorism, the government had been extremely forgiving of Sam’s legal excesses, especially when they were producing valuable leads on terrorist activity. The government never seemed to notice that some of their questions could only be answered by means of rather obvious invasions of privacy, such as the time he hacked into a national rental car agency computer and the suspect’s personal computer to successfully thwart a bomber who had filled an entire car trunk with C-4 plastic explosive. By the time the FBI had enough evidence for a search warrant, Sam had violated the suspect’s legal rights several times over. Hence Sam had to provide the government not only the necessary evidence, but also a legitimate way to discover it.
Anonymous tips may be used in the presence of corroborative evidence to support a search warrant, and Sam was responsible for many such tips-including leaving a suspect chained to a police station guardrail with a sign around his neck. The sign said: I DEFRAUD MY CLIENTS. At the man’s feet were financial records in a box that proved the fraud. The state court judge ruled that the sign constituted a legitimate tip and created probable cause to search the box.
The centerpiece of the offices and the heart of all that Sam did was Big Brain. Big Brain’s claims to fame were the immensity of its database, the speed with which it could be fed, and its ability to simultaneously operate for its own purposes hundreds of computers over the Internet. The secrets of its success, however, were found in the search tools and computer code that sorted and sifted the data and ultimately decided which of the billions of bits of information were relevant to a particular inquiry.
Even when Sam was off sailing, the data never stopped rolling into Big Brain, and the dozen or so technicians who worked for Grogg never left their stations. At the moment they were crunching and gobbling information about Grace Technologies and thousands of people associated with it and comparing that with information already in the database. Grogg worked to set out parameters in the software that would outline search modes of interest. This activity would increase tenfold with the arrival of his investigators.
Sam worked in a big room filled with cubicles and acoustical dividers occupied by all his in-house investigators. They seldom left the office. The actual gumshoe work was contracted out to licensed and unlicensed private detectives around the nation and the globe.
Sam sat behind his desk, a position he hadn’t taken for months, hunched in front of a computer screen and talking off and on to Paul. Paul sat in a special soundproof room, from which he had been listening to Anna Wade’s ex-husband, Joshua Nash, speak. Evidently he and Anna were having wine and talking.
Paul was listening to live feed from a huge parabolic mike aimed at Josh’s window, along with the transmissions from Anna’s cell phone, when she chose to use it, and congratulating himself on the results. Sam and Paul felt guilty about the bug in the apartment’s sprinkler system and were trying not to use it. But the parabolic mike was iffy, and faded in critical parts of telephone conversations that were being used as tests, so they had to resort to the internal mike, thereby breaking the law in a more meaningful fashion.
The audio feed also fed Big Brain. Among other things, the computer was making voiceprints for future comparison and pairing the voiceprints with facial-recognition software, handwriting-recognition software, and signature-recognition software, routine procedure for every person identified in Big Brain’s memory banks.
“They’re getting onto the subject of Lane,” Paul alerted Sam.
“She’s working around to her brother. I can feel it.”
Sam minimized his screen on DuShane Chellis and joined Paul in the booth. He heard a male voice, the voice of Joshua Nash.
“How are things with Lane?” Josh asked.
“You wouldn’t ask if you thought they were good.” Anna’s response was fainter but clear.
“I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you and Lane ever-”
“Josh, it was a symptom. Can’t we leave it at that?”
“Isn’t there some way you can find to forgive me?”
“For the adultery or for lying to my face about it?”
There was a barely audible sigh. “We didn’t actually-”
“Please, let’s be real. It’s been years. And we aren’t going to discuss the gynecologic details of something more than three years old. For God’s sake, I’ve had Lane for almost two years and you’ve had I don’t know how many girlfriends.”
A long silence followed. Sam and Paul watched the speaker.
“We gotta turn this off if they start… you know,” Paul said.
“I know,” Sam said. “I know.”
Anna wanted to abandon the topic, but Josh kept on.
“Word’s out that Lane is cranky. He wants a companion-wife kind of woman. You’re a megastar.”
Josh followed his remarks with a knowing but sad smile. She knew he desperately wanted sex. Before Lane, but after she and Josh had separated, three years ago almost to the day, she had given him that much, knowing that she shouldn’t, knowing it would feed his unbelievable optimism. It had been a moment of insanity that she wouldn’t repeat.
Instead she thought about Sam stirring his tofu spaghetti. She thought about the sound of his swimming behind her and recalled her utter certainty that he would follow. Then there was the shouting and name-calling, the competition, and suddenly she wondered why they had been fighting. Something stirred inside her, and whatever it was made her want to fight with Sam some more.
“Josh, I’m sorry, you really are a dear person to me, but I’d rather not talk about that.” She watched him, feeling his uncertainty. “Please.”
“Okay.” He forced the disappointment from his face. “Well, we’ve got a great dinner ahead of us. And I want a few dances.”
“As many as you like, Josh. As many as you like.” He carried her wine to the table and acted as though it were a dinner date with a New York cousin. He had his dignity and he wouldn’t bring it up again-this time.
She waited until the main course to bring up her brother and Sam. Being patient was killing her. Josh Nash had an armor-piercing mind. Nobody was beyond his reach when it came to information. He lived on information. If anyone could see through Sam’s veil, it would be Josh. Just as important, he knew Grace and he knew Chellis. Deep down she still didn’t know what they were capable of, and perhaps Josh did.
It took her twenty minutes to tell the story. Josh listened intently and waited until she finished before firing questions at her.
He asked about Sam’s speech, his yacht, the books on board, and whether she had seen any personal records. The questions were exhaustive and he took notes. She told him what she knew: Sam had a Ph. D., likely in computer science. His father, now deceased, had been in the military special forces, his mother was Native American and had been to college. With the last disclosure she began feeling lizardlike.
“How are you supposed to get hold of him?”
“I have an e-mail address.”
“What is it?”
“Firechief at bluehades dot com.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“That’s it.”
“Okay, I’ll trace that to a server some place.”
“I want to know about him but I don’t want to get caught looking. Above all else, you can’t get caught.”
“Are you sweet on this guy?”
