Invasion of Privacy (16 page)

Tank Potter checked the address painted on the curb and killed the engine. Without thinking, he reached beneath the seat for his backstop. An exposed coil stabbed his finger. “Ouch!”

Old habits died hard.

Chastened, Tank walked to the door. A steady hand rang the bell. Though he had the Grants’ number, he hadn’t called in advance. The first rule of journalism: never let them see you coming.

A pallid girl dressed in leggings and a T-shirt opened the door. “Hello.”

“Hello,” said Tank. “Is your mom around?”

“Who’s asking?”

“Tank Potter. I’m a reporter. You guys get the
Statesman
?”

“What’s that?”

“A newspaper. Ever seen one?”

“My mom reads the
New York Times
. Online. We subscribe to
People
.” The girl extended her hand. “My name’s Grace. Nice to meet you.”

Tank’s hand swallowed hers. “Nice to meet you.”

“You’re big.”

“My mom wanted to make sure nobody missed me.”

“It worked. My mom’s not here right now. She’s taking my sister to summer school. Did you come to ask about my dad?”

“I did. I’m sorry about what happened.”

“We can’t understand how someone so smart could let a bad guy get close enough to shoot him.”

“Did your mom say that?”

“No. I did. She’s still upset about losing Dad’s voicemail. She’s blaming my sister, but Jessie swears she was only unlocking the phone and didn’t erase it.”

“I see.” Tank smiled as if he knew what she was talking about. “Do you know when your mom will be—” The squeal of an automobile turning tightly into the driveway cut short his words. He turned to see a late-model Nissan come to a halt at the head of the walkway.

“There’s Mommy,” said Grace.

Tank waved shyly. He didn’t want to appear menacing, but there was only so much you could do when you were his size.

A trim, attractive woman got out of the car and rushed up the walk. “Can I help you?”

“Mrs. Grant? Tank Potter. I’m with the
Statesman
.”

“It’s a newspaper,” said Grace.

Mary Grant stopped a foot away, checking over his shoulder that her daughter was fine before fixing him with a decidedly unhelpful look. “Why wasn’t there anything new in the paper today about Joe?”

“I came here to talk to you about that. First, may I offer my condolences?”

“Thank you.” She pointed a finger at him. “Potter? You didn’t write the article yesterday.”

“I was on another story.”

Mary stepped around him to address her daughter. “Grace, go inside. Give me and Mr. Potter a minute.”

“His name is Tank,” said Grace, rolling her eyes.

“Shut the door, sweetheart,” said Mary.

“Bye, Tank,” said Grace as she closed the door.

“And so,” asked Mary, “what took you so long?”

“Excuse me?”

“To figure out the FBI is lying. That’s why you’re here, right?”

Tank nodded tentatively. It was his job to assume the FBI was lying. He wondered what had convinced Mary Grant of the fact. “Is there anything you’d like to tell me?”

“Is there anything you want to tell
me
?” She stepped forward. “Are you feeling all right, Mr. Potter?”

“I’m fine.” Tank cleared his throat and stood taller. He could feel sweat beading on his forehead, his tongue dry as felt. “Can we talk inside?”

“After I see your press credential.”

Tank flashed his
Statesman
ID. Mary Grant clutched his hand to bring the pass closer. “Henry Thaddeus Potter.”

“Are you a football fan?” he asked as she compared his face to the picture on the pass. “I played at UT.”

“I went to Georgetown. We prefer basketball. Come in.”

“She’s got a visitor,” said the Mole.

Shanks kicked his feet off the control console and sat up to study the monitor. “Big fella, ain’t he?”

“What do you think?” asked the Mole. “Family? Friend?”

“Friend. Doesn’t look like any of them, that’s for sure. You get a read on his license plate?”

“Forget the license. We have his face.” The Mole duplicated the last sixty seconds of images transmitted from the hidden camera and replayed the loop on a second monitor. He and Shanks watched as the Jeep pulled to the curb and the tall, florid man climbed out of the car. For an instant the visitor stared directly at the hidden camera. “Gotcha.”

The Mole froze the image and uploaded it to PittPatt. “All right, baby,” he said. “Go to work.”

Short for Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition, PittPatt was an advanced facial recognition software program developed at Carnegie Mellon University to help hunt terrorists in the days following 9/11. ONE had purchased PittPatt a year earlier and tweaked the technology for a different purpose. It planned on licensing the technology to merchants of every stripe, who would use it to identify their customers and, based on past purchases and publicly available personal information—age, sex, zip code, credit history—send news of sales, discount coupons, or the like directly to their smartphones. The only terrorists it was interested in finding were those with a credit score of 700 and an American Express Gold Card.

“Image captured,” said an officious female voice. “Mapping completed.”

Shanks and the Mole waited as PittPatt conducted a search of every public database on the Net for images that matched the visitor. It searched Facebook and Instagram and Google Images. It searched Tumblr, YouTube, Match.com, Picasa, and a thousand more like them.

It also searched private databases. These included the National Crime Information Center; the Department of Public Safety and its equivalent in all fifty states; the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System; and Interpol.

Images filled the screen, six to a line, the lines rapidly scrolling down the page. The first picture to appear was of a football player running down the field.

“Tank Potter,” said the Mole, reading the caption. “Never heard of him.”

“He was almost famous.”

“Let’s go deeper.” The Mole requested that PittPatt search for more detailed and personal information. The name Henry Thaddeus Potter led to property records showing him to be the owner of a home in Tarrytown and the former owner of homes on Blanchard Drive and Red River Street. Mention of a Potter family trust was found in a bankruptcy filing for a Mrs. Josephine Willis Potter which listed a sole son, Henry Thaddeus, and gave his date and place of birth.

PittPatt did all this in .0005 second.

“Still waiting on the jackpot,” said the Mole. “Got it!”

Potter’s name coupled with his place and date of birth helped the program find batches of Social Security numbers issued in Houston on or around his birthday. Time and again an algorithm paired Potter’s name with a probable Social Security number. Though the algorithm had a tiny chance of success on each try, it continued to run through all possible numbers until it found a match, in this case a credit report that listed the last four digits of his Social Security number.

The Mole read to the bottom of the list. In ten seconds he had learned more about Henry Thaddeus “Tank” Potter—impoverished heir to a once-great fortune, All-State football star, washed-up college athlete, divorced father of two children who lived with their mother in Arkansas, and journalist—than Mr. Potter’s closest friends ever would.

“Not a friend of the family after all,” said Shanks. “A reporter.”

A final picture appeared on the monitor. It was Tank Potter’s mug shot from two nights before.

The Mole smirked. “And a drunk.”

Class was over.

Jessie took her time putting away her laptop, keeping an eye on the front of the room, where the older students were talking to Linus. Normally she liked to be first out, but today she had a reason to wait.

“That was amaze-balls,” said Garrett, taking the seat next to her, swiping his blond hair out of his face. “We haven’t even talked about that stuff. How did you do it?”

“Just figured it out, I guess.”

“Maybe you can explain it to me. You want to get a hamburger or something for lunch?”

“I ate earlier,” said Jessie.

“How about a coffee? I can give you a ride home, too, if you want. I’m eighteen. It’s okay.”

“My mom’s getting me.”

“Well, um…,” Garrett stammered, and Jessie almost felt sorry for him.

“Miss Grant.” Linus Jankowski stood in front of her desk. Garrett stood, giving a wave and a “See ya” before shuffling out of the classroom.

“Hi, there,” said Jessie.

Linus sat down. “So, young lady. Mind telling me how you did it?”

“I already explained it.”

“I mean how you came to possess that kind of knowledge.”

“It just seemed kind of obvious.”

“Really? That’s not usually a word I’ve heard attached to advanced encryption algorithms, but okay. So why didn’t you speak up when I asked the first time?”

“I don’t like attention,” said Jessie. “It creeps me out.”

“Humility. What a concept.” Linus trained his eyes on Jessie. “Do you know the last person to solve that hack? It was Rudeboy at DEF CON last summer. He did it to win Capture the Flag.”

“Rudeboy solved it?”

“He wasn’t the only one, but he was the quickest. Five minutes flat. I came in third. Three minutes behind. You, Miss Grant, needed thirteen minutes and seventeen seconds.”

“But…how did you know that I’d—”

“I was watching you. None of the other propeller-heads in class stood a chance.” Linus stood and picked up his satchel and his endless cup of coffee. “I’m gone tomorrow. See you after that.”

“Yeah, sure. See you.” Jessie watched helplessly as he walked out of the classroom. “Linus,” she called, rising from her chair and running into the hall. “I need your help with something.”

“Homework?”

“Not exactly. It’s kind of private.”

“Not now.”

“But—”

“Tonight. Crown and Anchor. Nine o’clock.”

The Crown & Anchor was a pub on San Jacinto Boulevard. “No—ten.”

“Even better. Ten.”

Jessie left the classroom and headed downstairs. Outside she sat by the fountain. She put her hand in the cold water, asking herself what she’d done. Meet Linus at a pub at ten? Was she crazy? She wasn’t allowed to leave the house on her own at night. Even if she managed to sneak out, how was she supposed to get all the way downtown…and then back again? And what about going into a pub? Could she even do that?

She took a fruit roll-up from her pack and ate it. How could someone smart enough to solve the hack that won Capture the Flag be so stupid?

“There you are.”

Jessie looked up as a flash of blond hair sat down next to her. “Hi, Garrett.”

“Lucky I ran into you.”

And then it came to her. The solution was in front of her all the time.

“Yeah, lucky coincidence.” Jessie smiled. “Did you say something about having a car?”

Ian ran up the stairs of ONE 1 and entered the cabin of his jet without looking back.

“Christ, I hate that place,” he said. “Like the Inquisition without the party favors.”

A flight attendant took his jacket and handed him a bottle of Penta water.

Peter Briggs followed him into the aircraft, pulled the door closed, and locked it. “Activate the ECMs,” he said.

The flight attendant moved to a control panel and turned on the plane’s electronic countermeasures.

Ian collapsed into a chair. “What the hell is she doing now?”

Briggs sat in the chair opposite. “She’s asking about Semaphore. Said it by name in a conversation with her husband’s former partner, Special Agent Randall A. Bell.”

“How is that possible?”

“How do I know?” Briggs’s face was redder than usual, his pale blue eyes brooking no challenge. “Maybe her husband left the case file open on his desk. Maybe she reads his e-mails. Maybe he whispered it to her while he was banging her the night before he died. Does it matter
how
? She said it. Listen for yourself.”

Briggs set his phone on the table and played the recording of Mary Grant speaking to Randy Bell.

“Sounds like it was a shot in the dark,” said Ian.

“No such thing.”

“But she called Bell back to ask which word she wasn’t supposed to repeat. If she was certain it was Semaphore, she wouldn’t have needed a confirmation.”

“Well, thanks to Randy Bell she has it. He might as well have attached a homing beacon to the word. After the call she performed searches for the word
semaphore
alone and in combination with
FBI
,
CIA
,
cybercrime
,
pirating
, you name it.” Briggs banged a fist on the
armrest, index finger extended for good measure. “Mason told us she was a pain in the ass. He said she wouldn’t quit.”

“Ed Mason thinks that everyone who doesn’t work for him is either a pain in the ass or a risk to national security.”

Deputy director of the FBI Edward G. Mason III was either his best friend or his worst enemy. Ian walked to the front of the cabin to make sure that none of the attendants were listening. “What else has our intrepid widow been up to?”

“See for yourself.”

Briggs handed Ian a printout of the surveillance data collected from the Grant home. Ian looked over a list of online activity. Someone in the house liked to watch videos of cute animals on YouTube. Kittens, puppies, and sloths.
Sloths
. Despite his ill temper, he smiled. His own sons spent hours watching cute animals on YouTube. Ian didn’t mind. It beat spending hours watching less cute videos of men and women that were as easily available. Twelve-year-old boys didn’t watch kittens playing the piano forever.

“We’ll deal with this when we get back. Till then—”

Briggs raised a hand. He had his phone to his ear and his face had gone from red to redder. “What did you say?…A who?…What?…Oh, Christ. Fuck me.”

“What is it?” asked Ian.

Briggs dropped the phone onto the table. “She’s got a visitor. A newspaper reporter. Still want to wait till we get back?”