nother lobby.

But a lot different from SSD’s.

Amelia Sachs had never seen anything quite so messy. Maybe when she was a beat officer, responding to domestics among druggies in Hell’s Kitchen. But even then a lot of those people had had dignity; they made the effort. This place made her cringe. The not-for-profit organization Privacy Now, located in an old piano factory in the city’s Chelsea district, won the prize for slovenly.

Stacks of computer printouts, books—many of them law books and yellowing government regulations—newspapers and magazines. Then cardboard boxes, which contained more of the same. Phonebooks too. Federal Registers.

And dust. A ton of dust.

A receptionist in blue jeans and a shabby sweater pounded furiously on an old computer keyboard and spoke, sotto voce, into a hands-free telephone. Harried people in jeans and T-shirts, or corduroys and wrinkled work shirts, walked into the office from up the hall, swapped files or picked up phone-message slips and disappeared.

Cheap printed signs and posters filled the walls.

BOOKSTORES: BURN YOUR CUSTOMERS’ RECEIPTS, BEFORE THE GOVERNMENT BURNS THEIR BOOKS!!!

On one wrinkled rectangle of art board was the famous line from George Orwell’s novel, 1984, about a totalitarian society:

Big Brother Is Watching You.

And sitting prominently on the scabby wall across from Sachs:

GUERRILLA’S GUIDE TO THE PRIVACY WAR

· Never give out your Social Security Number.

· Never give out your phone number.

· Hold loyalty card swap parties before you go shopping.

· Never volunteer for surveys.

· “Opt out” every chance you can.

· Don’t fill out product registration cards.

· Don’t fill out “warranty” cards. You don’t need one for the warranty. They’re information gathering devices!

· Remember—the Nazis’ most dangerous weapon was information.

· Stay off the “grid” as much as possible.

She was digesting this when a scuffed door opened and a short, intense-looking man with pale skin strode up to her, shook her hand and then led her back into his office, which was even messier than the lobby.

Calvin Geddes, the former employee of SSD, now worked for this privacy rights organization. “I went over to the dark side,” he said, smiling. He’d abandoned the conservative SSD dress code, and was wearing a yellow button-down shirt without a tie, jeans and running shoes.

The pleasant grin faded quickly, though, as she told him the story of the murders.

“Yep,” he whispered, his eyes hard and focused now. “I knew something like this would happen. I absolutely knew it.”

Geddes explained that he had a technical background and had worked with Sterling’s first company, SSD’s predecessor, in Silicon Valley, writing code for them. He moved to New York and lived a nice life as SSD skyrocketed to success.

But then the experience had soured.

“We had problems. We didn’t encrypt data back then and were responsible for some serious identity thefts. Several people committed suicide. And a couple of times stalkers signed up as clients—but only to get information from innerCircle. Two of the women they were looking for were attacked, one almost died. Then some parents in custody battles used our data to find their exes and kidnapped the children. It was tough. I felt like the guy who helped invent the atom bomb and then regretted it. I tried to put more controls in place at the company. And that meant that I didn’t believe in the quote ‘SSD vision,’ according to my boss.”

“Sterling?”

“Ultimately, yes. But he didn’t actually fire me. Andrew never gets his hands dirty. He delegates the unpleasantries. That way he can appear to be the most wonderful, kindest boss in the world…. And as a practical matter there’s less evidence against him if other people do his butchery… Well, when I left I joined Privacy Now.”

The organization was like EPIC, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, he explained. PN challenged threats to individuals’ privacy from the government, businesses and financial institutions, computer providers, telephone companies, and commercial data brokers and miners. The organization lobbied in Washington, sued the government under the Freedom of Information Act to find out about surveillance programs, and sued individual corporations that weren’t complying with privacy and disclosure laws.

Sachs didn’t tell him about the data trap Rodney Szarnek had put together but explained in general terms how they were looking for SSD customers and employees who might be able to patch together dossiers. “The security seems very tight. But that was what Sterling and his people told us. I wanted an outside opinion.”

“Happy to help.”

“Mark Whitcomb told us about the concrete firewalls and keeping the data divided up.”

“Who’s Whitcomb?”

“He’s with their Compliance Department.”

“Never heard of it. It’s new.”

Sachs explained, “The department is like a consumer advocate within the company. To make sure all government regulations are complied with.”

Geddes seemed pleased, though he added, “That didn’t come about out of the goodness of Andrew Sterling’s heart. They probably got sued once too often and wanted to make a good show for the public and Congress. Sterling’s never going to give one inch if he doesn’t have to… But about the data pens, that’s true. Sterling treats data like the Holy Grail. And hacking in? Probably impossible. And there is no way anybody could physically break in and steal data.”

“He told me that very few employees can log on and get dossiers from innerCircle. As far as you know, is that true?”

“Oh, yeah. A few of them have to have access but nobody else. I never did. And I was there from the beginning.”

“Do you have any thoughts? Maybe any employees with a troubling past? Violent?”

“It’s been a few years. And I never thought anybody was particularly dangerous. Though, I’ve got to say, despite the big happy family façade Sterling likes to put on, I never really got to know anyone there.”

“What about these individuals?” She showed him the list of suspects.

Geddes looked it over. “I worked with Gillespie. I knew Cassel. I don’t like either of them. They’re caught up in the whole data-mining curve, like Silicon Valley in the nineties. Hotshots. I don’t know the others. Sorry.” Then he studied her closely. “So you’ve been there?” he asked with a cool smile. “What’d you think of Andrew?”

Her thoughts jammed as she tried to come up with a brief summary of her impressions. Finally: “Determined, polite, inquisitive, smart but…” Her voice petered out.

“But you don’t really know him.”

“Right.”

“Because he presents the great stone face. In all the years I worked with him I never really knew him. Nobody knows him. Unfathomable. I love that word. That’s Andrew. I was always looking for clues… You notice something odd about his bookshelves?”

“You couldn’t see the spines of the books.”

“Exactly. I snuck a peek once. Guess what? They weren’t about computers or privacy or data or business. They were mostly history books, philosophy, politics: the Roman Empire, Chinese emperors, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Stalin, Idi Amin, Khrushchev. He read a lot about the Nazis. Nobody used information the way they did and Andrew doesn’t hesitate to tell you. First major use of computers to keep track of ethnic groups. That’s how they consolidated power. Sterling’s doing the same in the corporate world. Notice the company name, SSD? The rumor is he chose it intentionally. SS—for the Nazi elite army. SD—for their security and intelligence agency. You know what his competitors say it stands for? ‘Selling Souls for Dollars.’” Geddes laughed grimly.

“Oh, don’t get me wrong. Andrew doesn’t dislike Jews. Or any other group. Politics, nationality, religion and race mean nothing to him. I heard him say once, ‘Data have no borders.’ The seat of power in the twenty-first century is information, not oil or geography. And Andrew Sterling wants to be the most powerful man on earth… I’m sure he gave you the data-mining-is-God speech.”

“Saving us from diabetes, helping us afford Christmas presents and houses and solving cases for the police?”

“That’s the one. And all of it’s true. But tell me if those benefits are worth somebody knowing every detail about your life. Maybe you don’t care, provided you save a few bucks. But do you really want ConsumerChoice lasers scanning your eyes in a movie theater and recording your reactions to those commercials they run before the movie? Do you want the RFID tag in your car key to be available to the police to know that you hit a hundred miles an hour last week, when your route only took you along roads that were posted fifty? Do you want strangers knowing what kind of underwear your daughter wears? Or exactly when you’re having sex?”

“What?”

“Well, innerCircle knows you bought condoms and KY this afternoon and your husband was on the six-fifteen E train home. It knows you’ve got the evening free because your son’s at the Mets game and your daughter’s buying clothes at The Gap in the Village. It knows you put on cable-TV porn at seven-eighteen. And that you order some nice tasty postcoital take-out Chinese at quarter to ten. That information is all there.

“Oh, SSD knows if your children are maladjusted in school and when to send you direct-mail flyers about tutors and child-counseling services. If your husband is having trouble in the bedroom and when to send him discreet flyers about erectile dysfunction cures. When your family history, buying patterns and absences from work put you in a presuicidal profile—”

“But that’s good. So a counselor can help you.”

Geddes gave a cold laugh. “Wrong. Because counseling potential suicide victims isn’t profitable. SSD sends the name to local funeral homes and grief counselors—who could snag all of the family as customers, not just a single depressed person after he shoots himself. And, by the way, that was a very lucrative venture.”

Sachs was shocked.

“Did you hear about ‘tethering’?”

“No.”

“SSD has defined a network based just on you. Call it ‘Detective Sachs World.’ You’re the hub and the spokes go to your partners, spouses, parents, neighbors, coworkers, anybody it might help SSD to know about and profit from that knowledge. Everybody who has any connection is ‘tethered’ to you. And each one of them is his or her own hub, and there are dozens of people tethered to them.”

Another thought and his eyes flashed. “You know about metadata?”

“What’s that?”

“Data about data. Every document that’s created by or stored on a computer—letters, files, reports, legal briefs, spreadsheets, Websites, emails, grocery lists—is loaded with hidden data. Who created it, where it’s been sent, all the changes that have been made to it and who made them and when—all recorded there, second by second. You write a memo to your boss and for a joke you start out with ‘Dear Stupid Prick,’ then delete it and write it correctly. Well, the ‘stupid prick’ part is still in there.”

“Seriously?”

“Oh, yes. The disk size of a typical word-processing report is much larger than the text in the document itself. What’s the rest? Metadata. The Watchtower database-management program has special bots—software robots—that do nothing but find and store metadata from every document it collects. We called it the Shadow Department, because metadata’s like a shadow of the main data—and it’s usually much more revealing.”

Shadow, sixteens, pens, closets… This was a whole new world to Amelia Sachs.

Geddes enjoyed having a receptive audience. He leaned forward. “You know that SSD has an education division?”

She thought back to the chart in the brochure that Mel Cooper had downloaded. “Yes. EduServe.”

“But Sterling didn’t tell you about it, did he?”

“No.”

“Because he doesn’t like to let on that its main function is to collect everything it possibly can about children. Starting with kindergarten. What they buy, what they watch, what computer sites they go to, what their grades are, medical records from school… And that’s very, very valuable information for retailers. But you ask me, what’s scarier about EduServe is that school boards can come to SSD and run predictive software on their students and then gear educational programs to them—in terms of what’s best for the community—or society, if you want to be Orwellian about it. Given Billy’s background, we think he should go into skilled labor. Suzy should be a doctor but only in public health… Control the children and you control the future. Another element of Adolf Hitler’s philosophy, by the way.” He laughed. “Okay, no more lecturing… But you see why I couldn’t stomach it anymore?”

But then Geddes frowned. “Just thinking about your situation—we had an incident once at SSD. Years ago. Before the company came to New York. There was a death. Probably just a coincidence. But…”

“No, tell me.”

“In the early days we farmed out a lot of the actual data-collection part of the business to scroungers.”

“To what?”

“Companies or individuals who procure data. A strange breed. They’re sort of like old-time wildcatters—prospectors, you could say. See, data have this weird allure. You can get addicted to the hunt. You can never find enough. However much they collect, they want more. And these guys are always looking for new ways to collect it. They’re competitive, ruthless. That’s how Sean Cassel started in the business. He was a data scrounger.

“Anyway, one scrounger was amazing. He worked for a small company. I think it was called Rocky Mountain Data in Colorado… What was his name?” Geddes squinted. “Maybe Gordon somebody. Or that might’ve been his last name. Anyway, we heard that he wasn’t too happy about SSD taking over his company. The word is he scrounged everything he could find about the company and Sterling himself—turned the tables on them. We thought maybe he was trying to dig up dirt and blackmail Sterling into stopping the acquisition. You know Andy Sterling—Andrew Junior—works for the company?”

She nodded.

“We’d heard rumors that Sterling had abandoned him years ago and the kid tracked him down. But then we also heard that maybe it was another son he abandoned. Maybe by his first wife, or a girlfriend. Something he wanted to keep secret. We thought maybe Gordon was looking for that kind of dirt.

“Anyway, while Sterling and some other people were out there negotiating the purchase of Rocky Mountain, this Gordon guy dies—an accident of some kind, I think. That’s all I heard. I wasn’t there. I was back in the Valley, writing code.”

“And the acquisition went through?”

“Yep. What Andrew wants, Andrew shall have… Now, let me throw out one thought about your killer. Andrew Sterling himself.”

“He has an alibi.”

“Does he? Well, don’t forget he is the king of information. If you control data, you can change data. Did you check out that alibi real carefully?”

“We are right now.”

“Well, even if it’s confirmed, he has men who work for him and would do whatever he wants. I mean anything. Remember, other people do his dirty work.”

“But he’s a multimillionaire. What’s his interest in stealing coins or a painting, then murdering the victim?”

“His interest?” Geddes’s voice rose, as if he were a professor talking to a student who just wasn’t getting the lesson. “His interest is in being the most powerful person in the world. He wants his little collection to include everybody on earth. And he’s particularly interested in law enforcement and government clients. The more crimes that are successfully solved using innerCircle, the more police departments, here and abroad, are going to sign on. Hitler’s first task when he came to power was to consolidate all the police departments in Germany. What was our big problem in Iraq? We disbanded the army and the police—we should have used them. Andrew doesn’t make mistakes like that.”

Geddes laughed. “Think I’m a crank, don’t you? But I live with this stuff all day long. Remember, it’s not paranoia if somebody’s really out there watching everything you do every minute of the day. And that’s SSD in a nutshell.”