John Sandford - The Hanged Man’s Song

“And they never got the word that Bobby was dead. Nobody told them.”

MOVING ON.

“Look at this. They’re talking about getting rid of money,” I said. I was astonished. “Jesus Christ, they’re running models, already. They’re talking about a few years .”

“They can’t.”

“Sure they could. They’re laying it out. Everybody carries a smart card from the bank, backed by the government. It has your ID right on the card, along with a little liquid crystal display to tell you what your balance is.” I tapped the screen, a photo of a working prototype of the card. “Use it for everything, but see, they require you use it for all transactions over twenty dollars. So you have a card and pocket change, and that’s it. No more illegal purchases. You couldn’t even buy your dope with pocket change, because anytime somebody showed up with a thousand bucks in twenties, they’d have to explain where it came from.”

“It’d totally fuck me,” LuEllen said.

“Depending on what you stole,” I said. “Jewelry, stamps, high-value stuff… take them across the border, sell them in Mexico.”

“For what? What would I bring back? Sombreros?”

“That’s a point. You might have to move down there permanently.”

WE DUGinto a directory called Biometric. They were running 3-D cameras set up at FedEx Field that would examine faces and gaits, compare them to faces and gaits of known criminals and terrorists, and alert the monitoring authority in real time. They were using the faces and gaits of a selected sample of their own people, who would go to the stadium during games to see if the cameras could pick them up.

“You walk past a convenience store camera and a bell rings somewhere,” LuEllen said.

“More or less.”

The success rate was down at the 30 percent level, but was inching up; they were going for a 150-meter recognition distance. When the success rate moved past the 50 percent mark, the plan was to place the cameras in airports, shopping centers, car rental agencies, and in selected “observation points”-for that, you could read “across the street from the neighborhood mosque.”

“Eventually, you could track anyone,” I said. “All you’d have to do is be interested in what the person was doing. Take a few observational tapes, get your recognition formula together, and there you are. A guy couldn’t walk around town without the cops knowing who you were and where you were, every minute of the day.”

“Like 1984 .”

“Exactly like that. The camera in the front room.”

THEYwere testing programs that would intercept phone messages-the implication was all phone messages-and would analyze conversations for words and phrases that might indicate illegal activity.

“Like how would they do that?”

“You’d say, ‘Why don’t we get the rest of the Al Qaeda sleeper cell together and spend some time building dirty bombs and talking in Arabic about chemical, biological, and nuclear warfare with which to blow up these infidel dogs.’ The computer would then automatically record the message, figure out from the vocabulary that something was going on, and alert a live monitor.”

“Wouldn’t a terrorist talk in code?”

“I don’t know, a lot of them are kinda stupid. Even if it didn’t work on terrorists, if they got this set up, it sure would let them fuck with everybody else.”

THEgroup was also looking at real-time language translation with a heavy emphasis on Chinese and Central Asian languages, and was talking about a new generation of databases that could handle amounts of data several orders of magnitude greater than anything we yet had.

The giant databases would also be tied to the money-card program, because the databases would be used to analyze virtually everybody’s purchases-all of them-looking for “suspicious” activity.

The group was also talking about a highly developed computer model that would, in some sense, predict likely futures, so that the government could begin taking early action to avoid whatever outcome it wanted to avoid.

The idea was to intercept futures that led, say, to revolution in Saudi Arabia. The problem was, if it worked, there was no way that it would not be used to prevent the opposition party, the party out of power, from winning an election. That would happen almost at once-probably as soon as the program was running. I mean, it was just too good not to use.

THEfinal directory was called Background and showed what could be done by operational units, spies, working with good database search programs. Rent a porno movie? They’d know it. Move a chunk of your portfolio from Intel to Boeing because you’re a government worker with an inside source on new military contracts? They’d know that and link the pieces within seconds of the transaction. Kid gets C’s in school? Case of the clap in the Army? Prescription for Xanax or Viagra? Go on vacation three times in a row with the same woman, not your wife, in the next seat on the airplane?

They were already running the program on fifty-odd subjects. Some of the names rang bells, but only vaguely, until LuEllen said, “This guy’s a senator. From Wisconsin.”

“Holy shit,” I said. I scanned down the list. “I think they’re all senators. Or congressmen. Look, here’s Bob. Congressman Bob. Jesus-look at the stuff. This looks like the stuff that Carp’s putting out there. The Bobby file. What the hell are they doing with this stuff?”

We’d been slumped over the screen and LuEllen suddenly sat up and looked around. “Kidd, unplug the goddamn thing. Let’s get out of here. C’mon, let’s get going.”

Her nervousness affected me, too. I pulled the plug on the wi-fi and we drove away, slowly, as always. LuEllen said, after a while, “You know what’s so weird about all of this? One thing, anyway?”

“What?”

“That you could get into their files. They’re this bunch of rocket scientists down in the basement talking about databases the size of the moon-they’re talking about building the Death Star-and some broken-ass hacker gets into their system and it all pops out.”

“Thanks. I wasn’t completely sure my ass was broken,” I said.

“You know what I mean. They can’t even secure themselves.”

“We might be coming to a time when nobody is secure. When nothing is secret. You sit up in your chair and behave yourself, or your little secret is on CNN.”

“I’m moving to fuckin’ Argentina,” she said, disgusted.

“They’d have it in Burundi,” I said. “Once the technology is demonstrated, it’ll get used. Pakistan and North Korea have the bomb and they can’t even feed their people.”

We drove around for a while, thinking our own thoughts, occasionally looking out the back window, and then LuEllen said, “I’m glad people don’t live forever. I don’t think I want to be here when all this gets worked through the system and gets established. It’s like…”

“A nightmare,” I said.

BACKat the hotel, I started opening files that I’d simply snatched, without reading, from the DDC database. Usually when I was doing laptop stuff, LuEllen was restless and moving around, watching TV, shopping, playing golf, whatever; now she was glued to my elbow.

The working group was a secret inside the intelligence community. The Senate committee, as the intelligence oversight group, knew about it, without apparently knowing all of the details. The senators apparently got everything about the biometric research, about the money card proposals and the telephone intercept analysis, and the future map, but may not have known about the Background files.