Take the Fourth (23 page)
Authors: Jeffrey Walton
“H
ey Wide Right, you busy?”
“God I hate that name, I’m in a meeting with the President,” as Scott bit his lip in front of Jonathan.
“Just you?”
“Yes, why?”
“Good. I found some more information you are both going to want to hear.”
“I’ll place you on speaker… . go ahead.”
“Well I’ve been doing some more digging on the shootings, turns out there is an interesting plot twist.”
“Interesting how,” Jonathan questioned?
“Turns out it might have been spurred on by Islamic extremists, there is a one Ehsan Nejem, that has had several meetings with the boys dating to almost three years before the event up to a few weeks ago. He’s been on the terrorist watch list since its inception and has been linked to several bombings but never brought in for questioning. He left the country two weeks ago, right now he’s in Northern India probably on his way into Pakistan.”
“So this Ehsan comes to our country to brainwash our people against us then leaves?”
“It has been done before.”
The President looked at Scott and asked, “How should we spin this?”
“I don’t think we should, hold on, here’s why, ever since nine eleven we as a country know we are not safe, yet there are people out there that are not willing to sacrifice their civil liberties in order to maintain the plight against these extremists and that number is growing by leaps and bounds thus tying our hands. Trying to blame the terrorists again just after we lynched the mob who was responsible will only harden these individuals while they pontificate their conspiracies that the government wants to control its citizens through legislation with the likes of the Patriot Act. We all know that this voice is starting to carry a lot of weight. There is only so far Americans will bend when it comes to protection from outside forces. Yet here is an opportunity to expand their fear and control. Americans against Americans. If we cannot protect ourselves from ourselves what little recourse do they have then to trust their government in order to maintain their freedom? Besides it’s not like we can bring this to light, what proof would we show them? It’s not like we are going to give a demo of the system, show them their markers, and a map. It really plays to our hand does it not?”
“Scott, if I didn’t know any better, that sounded a bit rehearsed.”
“What are you implying Mr. DNI guy? Are you saying I had a hand in this, killing innocent people prior to Christmas? What kind of fucking monster do you make me out to be?”
“I’m not saying…”
Cutting him off in mid sentence, “Good, and to tell you the truth it was a bit rehearsed, I was just waiting for the right moment and I knew eventually another school shooting or some crack in the ice would help solidify our ideals and without trying to sound callous here, this act of violence was really good timing with our proposed bill in its final draft. If the violence within our very walls is going to continue, and it will, we can’t stop that, the public will be forced to compromise their liberties on their own and hence our bill will be ripe for the passing.”
“Good point,” the President added.
“So are we just going to keep this under wraps,” the voice on the speaker phone questioned?
Jonathan spoke, “No, of course not. I’ll place it in front of the cabinet and maybe run it by the committee of HL and assure them that justice will be served and it will be swift but it’s not like we are going to broadcast this on the evening news… we have to apply our old rule of thumb, what the American public doesn’t know won’t hurt them.”
“Perfect,” Scott added, “Just like Oklahoma.”
“Yes to a degree, besides we don’t need to call any more attention to our hidden agenda.”
He sat at his monitors and watched with much anticipation. He had the vision of some Tom Clancy novel where the black ops took out an entire insurgence camp and left without a sound. It wasn’t the case. After being provided with the exact coordinates of one Ehsan Nejem to within the last five minutes, they were keyed into the firing sequence of a long range cruise missile that was parked in the Arabian Sea. Within four minutes the camp was eradicated and Ehsan’s marker no longer transmitted. Cased closed for the mission sanctioned by the President’s cabinet.
. . .
H
is first order of business with the software was to cross reference the locations of any individuals who called in with tips with the locations of the missing children or the man with the limp. There were one hundred sixty-one people who called in with tips from this morning’s news coverage. The result of his first query was a map viewable in either a satellite view or a standard map view, he chose standard, and pinpointed the callers with a blue flag/pin while the victims were in red. There was no seemingly viable connection to the missing at the moment. The callers were scattered across the map and even into other states, even as far a California thanks to the national coverage by CNN. There are always a few nut bags who call in just to tie up phone lines or to chat with someone. Just like the map Lynch and Garfield worked on, he was able to draw radiuses from each of the red flag’s point of origin—it was almost instantaneous—“this was too easy,” he said to himself. He was able to increase or decrease the radius at a touch of the button and focus on other various statistics such as gender, age, and race. He was able to overlap his results based on different search parameters. He was able to do much more than he could have ever done back at his own station; all thanks to the help of the federal government. He became so engrossed in the new software he never realized the time and was taken by surprise when Garfield walked back into the conference room a little after four in the afternoon looking slightly puckish and wrinkled as hell.
“Did you eat,” Garfield quipped?
“Yeah, the guys had lunch brought in, what’s left is over there.”
Garfield made his way over to the slim pickings, grabbed the only chocolate chip cookie left and a sweet tea. After the boys ate, the word of food spread through the office like, well like leftover food in an office and the vultures left but a few morsels and the sweet tea of course.
“Find anything?” Garfield asked.
“Well first thing, your handwriting sucks.”
“Mom says I should have been a doctor but I hate being around the sick. Yeah, ever since my grandfather…”
“The second thing.,” cutting off Garfield in mid sentence while glancing over his shoulders to see if any feds were in the room, “These guys have way too much data, it’s scary. With a touch of a button I can find your credit score, where you bought your last take-out meal, what movie you last rented from your cable company which by the way, I could have told you that Bruce Willis film wasn’t any good… nowhere near his Die Hard days.”
“Yippee-ki-yay motherfucker. Yep, great movie, I’ll keep that in mind next time, . . . . but you know, I just met you this morning, so what have you come up with besides the fact I ate at the Irish restaurant yesterday for lunch?.”
“Irish?”
“Yeah, Mickey Dee’s but you probably didn’t know that since I paid cash.”
“One flaw of the system I’m afraid,” shaking off the non-funny Mc joke, “but shit they have everything else. I’ve been using their software since you left, pretty slick I may say, better than anything I’ve ever worked on.”
“That’s why they take so much of our hard earned salaries, for toys like this.”
“This is no toy, this is some real scary ass shit. Ever since Homeland Security came to be, databases all over the states have been connected to provide a ton of information in the fight against terrorism, this is a piece of software that links them all together.”
“Yeah all in the name of terrorism right? Like Al-Qaeda is going to rent True Lies from Blockbuster trying to make a bomb or using the same credit card they used to buy weapons grade uranium, a Timex, and a few rolls of duct tape.”
“But I have to tell you, it will sure make our jobs easier. Watch this…,” and with that Josh took a bit of his time to bring Garfield up to speed on the program. Then a few of the bureau guys entered back into the room
“How’s it going?”
“Yippee-ki-yay… I mean… fine, nothing major yet but I have to tell you, I’m impressed.”
“Most people are when they first log on but it quickly becomes just another tool and there are many… . well, many inconsistencies with the data and it’s very limited… only because not that many businesses are online yet.”
“These databases, who is and who is not connected, and do you hack into outside systems?”
“No, we don’t hack we leave that to the hacks at the CIA,” a slight laugh, “basically anything that is federally regulated must comply with the Patriot Act. Things like phone, electric, cable, banks, health-care all must supply us with a standard way to connect and talk to their database through, now this is geek speak here, an API or, or application programming interface. Things like phone and banking had already created these communication API’s so we just created our interfaces based upon their existing protocols but in the case that a standard didn’t already exist then our geeky pals back at the ranch created the protocol or basically the standard way to talk to us.”
“How about places like Wal-Mart or Target?”
“Anything, a business with an electronic storage device slash database can be mandated under federal law to supply its information to the government… I say can, well because it is not required unless we ask. Now we don’t go out knocking on doors and tell everybody to get online, it’s like we don’t need to know what your average cost in dry cleaning bills are or what Pink Floyd CD you just bought but hey if a business misinterprets the law and wants their database to be connected, we are not going to look a gift-horse in the mouth, we just give them our standard API document and let them do the work, of course we provide all sorts of consultants to help them with the task… all free of charge.”
“After they are connected how does this program gather all the information?”
“That’s one of the true beauties of this software, it has all sorts of filters and enhancements built in plus it’s built upon a series of widespread industry standards, those API’s I was talking about. Given the fact the data is stored in all types of databases… it’s hard for a single person to form really good queries. One database may store something in a field called customer address, while another may break it out into billing address and shipping address or even something like A-D-D-R or M-A-D-D-R.”
“So how does one compensate for that?” Garfield asked.
“You don’t, the program does. If you search for address, it will try to find any address fields within all the databases they’re connected to. When we query their information, they return the response based on our standard API call that was created by all of our programmers and analysts back at home. So when the address fields reach us we just see it as address one, address two etcetera and it maintains a certain level of, of, ummm, . . . anonymity, meaning it’s just a black box to us, you just have to know the keyword or search phrase like address or first name and not what happens or how it happens behind the scene—it’s like a miracle to me.”
“You asked for a miracle, I give you the F . .B… I,” quoted Garfield
“Still can’t get Die Hard out of your head huh?”
“Nope.”
“They’re gonna need some more FBI guys, I guess.” said the fed as Josh and Garfield smirked at his Die Hard quote and he continued, without missing a beat, “Now one of the neat things about this program is, if you right click on a piece of information it will show you the name of the system that particular piece of information came from. You can even limit your queries based on that system. As you can see there is really a ton of information at your fingertips… . you just got to dig to find it.”
“Man I bet there are some marketing gurus out there that would cream their pants to get a hold of data like this… . the demographic files are priceless.”
“In today’s world, information is wealth, worth its weight in gold.”
“Not to mention power,” piped Josh, and with that the men got back to mining for data… mining for gold and feeling the power.
Just a wee bit after five the first phone rang from the nightly news coverage of Ripley Newenberg’s disappearance. Things were a little calm until then. If the guys in the room thought for an instant that they were done talking to a bunch of whackos, they were wrong. The nightly news coverage brought them out of the woodwork, in troves, which made their work even harder and in a way easier. A good cop, a good detective, can discern the truth through voice and story, they pay attention to inflections and facts, they can tell. So this is the easy part. The hard part comes from the sheer volume of calls and the sheer volume of information and this was unlike the mountain of calls from this morning and afternoon sessions combined. But they were ready and no one, Garfield included, needed to take notes longhand this time around. All the information was logged directly into the FBI’s database and Josh was rerunning his reports against the new data as it was being uploaded. The team was on… except for the original detective for this case, he was still at home.
Lynch woke up groggy as to be expected, a little disoriented, and not sure of the time. The sun was just starting to bid its farewell although not quite dusk, it was just enough for Lynch to question if his digital alarm clock was reading a.m. or p.m. His body wasn’t used to this, sure when he was a peon in the department he had all sorts of strange bed hours but since he had made detective almost twelve years ago swing shifts were a thing of the past—just one of the perks to his department status. Deciding he better get a move on since it was indeed p.m. he raised himself out of bed and made his way towards the bathroom. He stopped at his chest of drawers and emptied out the contents of his pockets. The last thing was the picture of Ripley from his shirt pocket. He didn’t remember placing it there. For a full minute or two he studied the picture, she was adorable, and then he remembered she was missing. His hardened heart felt a twinge of pain. He didn’t know why but this case was different from the others, he just couldn’t place a finger on it but if he looked deep within he would have found his answer. It was the reason he wasn’t married. He so wanted to be a father and when he got his college girlfriend pregnant he didn’t think it was the end of the world, until she lost the baby and wanted nothing more to do with him—she never loved him but she was the love of his life. Though he never knew the sex of the child he had lost he always assumed it was a girl… . daddy’s little girl. He placed the picture of Mr. Newenberg’s little girl next to his change and keys, walked into the bathroom, and did his business. His shower was hot, maybe too hot for this summer evening. He seemed even more tired upon his exit, dried off, and splashed some cold water on his face, shaved, brushed his teeth, then made his way back into the bedroom. He dressed in the same exact pants he had just slept in but did manage to find a new ironed and starched shirt hanging in the closet. He grabbed his keys and the picture and was going to place her picture in his shirt pocket but this shirt didn’t have a pocket, most of his shirts did, not this one. Lynch ventured downstairs thought briefly about a cup of coffee but his stomach was still saying no. He made a quick turkey sandwich with mayo on wheat and walked out the door with sandwich, keys, and picture in hand. Twenty minutes later he was parked in his usual parking spot though he had very little recollection of his drive into work. He just went through the motions, not really thinking of each and every turn or car or sign. He exited his Chevy and made his way to the entrance of the station. His feet felt heavy. His shoulders ached as though he was carrying a dead weight all day. He had too much on his mind, most being the clock. He felt as though the case was lost already and was sinking into that pit of despair he often visited but that all changed when he walked back into the conference room just before eight. There was a buzz in the air and everyone was hard at work. He half expected to see an empty room and then heard Josh say, “We have a few good leads,” looking in the direction of Lynch.
“One of those leads was the 74 Camaro again. Some guy called it in. It was spotted right next to his shore home on Tybee Island. Looks like the kid left town but not the state. The local police have been dispatched but there were bigger fish to fry in the pan.”
“How so?”
“Well since you were catching up on some z’s, and rightfully so, your idea to place the press release out this morning has generated a ton of phone calls. I think we have every man who walks with a limp in Georgia tagged into this system. No names as of yet but again on yours and Garfield’s hunch we narrowed down the search diameter to within your original circle which contained all the missing girls.”
“I’m sorry, you said no names yet, right?”
“Yes, most people just called in saying there is this man who fits your description that comes in here and buys so and so or was last seen at so and so.”
“So now we have to go through all the calls, gather any clues that paint a suspicious portrait of our subject and link them to a specific location and hope we get a break. That’s not going to be easy and it’s going to take time, time we don’t have.”
“It might be easier than you think. Using this software and data the feds have given us access to, we can search medical records for anyone who might have a leg injury, then try to gather buying habits through debit or credit cards on those individuals. In fact we have already started this process. The FBI has gathered a few profiles together to pinpoint certain items such as rope, handcuffs, lubricant, magazines, specific clothes, or anything else a child molester might buy, including toys, candy, or something like bags of lime to help with decomposition.”