John Sandford - The Hanged Man’s Song

Bob was short and too heavy in a masculine, pink, southern way. He had a florid, short-nosed face and a belly, white haystack hair, and a perpetual smile. He was sweating with the summer heat when he slid into the booth across from me; he was wearing a blue-striped seersucker suit, which you’re only allowed to wear if you come from the South, and a pinkie ring with a deep blue oval stone, and he looked pretty good in all of it. He was about fifty, I thought, and his pale blue eyes were worried. Bob was kind to old people, children, and dogs, but had a reputation for striking like a rattlesnake if you pissed him off.

“What’s shakin’?” he asked. Before I could answer, he pointed a pistol finger at a waiter, and then tipped his thumb into his mouth. The waiter nodded and disappeared. “Universal signal for a Beefeater’s martini, up, with two olives and ice-cold.”

I dug into my pocket and found a printout of the documents that had been compiled against Bob. I passed it to him. He read it once, then again, more carefully, then put the paper on the table, folded it four times, into a small square, and stuck it into his pocket. “Could cause me some trouble,” he said thoughtfully. He looked me over. “Where’s it coming from?”

“Frank Krause. Your friendly neighborhood senator.”

He took a moment to think about that, and then a single wrinkle appeared in his forehead. “Frank Krause? I saw something on TV about Frank Marsh, they said something about Krause.”

“That’s what I’m talking about,” I said.

“How are you mixed up in it?”

“There’s a guy I know only on the Internet. He’s apparently involved in some kind of hassle with Krause. Anyway, he says that Krause has got a rat’s-nest inter-agency intelligence operation going, and one of the things that they’re testing is called Deep Data Correlation. The basic concept was supposed to be that they could look at an ocean of data and figure out from that who might be bad guys. Terrorists.”

“Is that bad?” The waiter came back with a martini, waited, with me, until Bob nodded. The waiter went away and I continued.

“Not if that was what was happening. But there are some fundamental problems with that kind of data-mining,” I said. I explained the numbers problem. “So essentially, what they were trying to do is impossible. But -if you come at it from the other end, starting with a name, then going after associated data, you can develop some pretty powerful tools.”

“Wait a minute,” Bob said. “You’re saying that instead of looking at the data, and finding suspects, they find a suspect, and then mine the data to support the suspicion.”

“Yeah. Except, of course, that you’ve got to identify a target first. With terrorists, identifying the target is the whole problem. That’s the hard part. If they’d been a private company, say, hired to find techniques that would identify terrorists, they’d have concluded that data-mining was a waste of time. But they’re not in a private company. They’re with the government. So they apparently said to themselves, ‘Well, data-mining won’t work, but we’ve got this great research tool, let’s just check it out on a few targets.’ ”

“They chose me?” He looked floridly earnest, but not all that surprised.

“Bob,” I said, “I gotta trust you, I think, but honest to God, we’ve occasionally given each other reason to think that neither one of us might not be…”

I shrugged, and he finished the sentence for me. “… as close to God as our mothers might wish.”

“Exactly,” I said. “So I’m gonna show you something. But if you tie me to it, or mention it to anyone that you heard it from me, I’m gonna shove it up your ass sideways.”

He smiled. “That’s the kinda deal I understand.” His smile vanished like a turned-off light, and he looked at me over the rim of his martini glass as he finished the drink, his eyes cold as ice. “They won’t hear about you from me; you got my word.”

I took my laptop off the seat beside me, turned it on, waited until it was up, then called up the file. I turned it toward him and said, “You can page through it with the Page Down key.”

He started paging through, stopping occasionally to mutter, “Just saw this one on TV… Krause is doing this?… Jesus, I didn’t know this guy was queer, I was just peeing in the next stall to him… Landford Hewes took a half-million out of Mejico Rico? Holy shit, he’s supposed to be Mr. Clean… Oh man: Davy Fergusson, he’s a friend of mine and so is Tina, and this says he beats the shit out of her. Look at the mouse on that woman, and the hometown cops bailed him out without a word.”

He was slack-jawed, fascinated.

“You gotta think about this,” I said. “This use of their data-mining tool is inevitable. It’s the perfect weapon to use against elected politicians. I mean, I might not care if they find out that I’ve been renting porno videos or getting blow jobs from seventeen-year-old boy hookers in the local park, but a politician would. Imagine what would happen if this capability got into the hands of lobbyists. We’d be at the mercy of any special interest willing to use it.”

“Umm…” he said. He took thirty minutes to work through the file. “If you’re making mental notes, don’t bother,” I said. “I got the whole thing on a CD for you. I’m giving them to you.”

He looked up. “What for? There’s a lotta horsepower here.”

“Not for me,” I said. “I’m a painter. Just being around this shit scares me to death. But this DDC stuff scares me, too. I thought if you had the information, you could talk to some of the people there…” I nodded at the laptop.

Again, he finished my sentence for me: “… and shove it up Krause’s ass sideways?”

“Something like that. I don’t care so much about Krause as this group he’s got working for them. It’s not right. It won’t catch terrorists; all it can be used for is blackmail.”

“It ain’t right,” he agreed. “You got that CD?”

I took it out of my pocket and passed it to him. “We are now two of the most powerful people in this whole fuckin’ capital of the world,” he said, looking at his reflection in the CD. “You and me, and we’re sitting here in a hotel booth drinking a martini and a beer and I’m looking at my face in a record.”

I couldn’t think of a quip, so I said, stupidly, “Makes you think, huh?”

AFTER ANOTHER AFTERNOONand night in Washington, and a span of boring computer digging, I carefully checked out of the hotel-that is, I got my bags and took a cab to National, went inside, then back outside, and took another cab to a department store adjoining the parking structure where I’d left my car. I walked through the store to the car, and two minutes later was on my way to St. Paul, looking over my shoulder all the time.

Washington to St. Paul by car is two killer days, or three easy ones. I decided to take three. I’d get enough ideas while driving the car that I’d want to get out and crank on the computer for a while. Motels are good for that: nothing but silence, give or take the odd housekeeper. I had my cell phone plugged into the car’s inverter, hoping that LuEllen would finally feel safe enough to call. As the hills and mountains of Pennsylvania rolled by, the phone remained silent.

At three o’clock, I stopped at a convenience store, bought a half-dozen Diet Cokes, then pulled into a Ramada Inn just off I-76 south of Youngstown, Ohio. I got a no-smoking room on the second floor and plugged in for more boring computer diddling.

I was getting nowhere; I got so desperate that I dug out the tarot cards, did a series of spreads, and figured out nothing at all. The cards were disorganized, random, trivial.