Black List (18 page)
People’s thoughts, and the invasion of them, was another disturbing development that Nicholas had heard whispered about only to find confirmation of in Caroline’s notes. In addition to algorithm developers trying to use data to anticipate customer behavior, the NSA and Google were using the millions upon millions of Tweets, Facebook entries, E-Z
Pass toll records, Amazon purchases, cell phone data, GPS information, search engine queries, and other digital bread crumbs generated each day to build the most sophisticated artificial intelligence system the world had ever seen. Code-named AQUAINT—Advanced Question Answering for Intelligence—the system was not only being taught to think like a human being, but it was also being groomed to predict the way people think and act.
The technology was terrifying, but there was more. Caroline had included an article about a company secretly owned by ATS, which had recently completed phase one testing under a DHS financial grant and was now working on phase two. Called the Future Attribute Screening Technology program, or simply FAST, it was a device that could be secretly deployed at stadiums, airports, malls, and other public locations, and was designed to “identify terrorist activity before it took place.”
Without permission, the device scanned the physiology of each person who unknowingly passed by its sensor array, recording, storing, and analyzing their respiration, pheromone secretion, “electrodermal” activity, and cardiovascular signature, in an attempt to recognize “malintent” and alert authorities. A secondary “tagging” system worked to establish the subject’s identity via the FBI’s new NGI, or Next Generation Identification, database. It was like iPhoto tagging on steroids.
NGI was an all-encompassing, billion-dollar upgrade of the Bureau’s fingerprint database, which contained records for more than a hundred million people and had been known as the “largest biometric database in the world.” Instead of just fingerprints and mug shots, NGI contained searchable photos with face-recognition technology, iris scans, fingerprints, palm prints, DNA, voice-print recordings, measures of gait, and detailed analysis of scars and tattoos. It was beyond “next generation” and the perfect pairing for the FAST technology. Tagging by the FAST devices, though, didn’t end simply with running unsuspecting passersby through NGI.
With no concern paid to unreasonable searches, FAST
also scanned your person to ascertain whether you were carrying any mobile devices. If you were, the FAST machine would establish a “handshake” with your devices and copy whatever readily available data they contained. FAST also looked for any RFID tags you might be carrying and copied the information from those as well.
All of it was then fed into a larger database maintained by DHS and NSA, and a file was created for each person who walked by.
It didn’t matter if you were intent on carrying out a criminal activity today. You “might” be at some point in the future and therefore the information collected now could serve as a baseline against which all of your behavior going forward could be prepared.
Planting a flag firmly in the realm of thought crime, the U.S. government had created a scene straight out of the film
Minority Report
or George Orwell’s novel
1984.
Not only would these technologies know exactly where you were at any given moment and what you were doing, they’d be monitoring what you were thinking and calculating what you were about to do next. The same government in charge of running the U.S. Postal Service would be in charge of these technologies. The claim that they would be used only to ensure the safety of U.S. citizens seemed to Nicholas to be far outweighed by the massive potential for their abuse.
And every encroaching piece of technology, every movement to strip away people’s liberty in the name of security, in one way or another could be traced back to Adaptive Technology Solutions.
Nicholas continued moving from file to file, clicking on the links and learning all of the activities that ATS was involved in. It wasn’t until he found a file detailing the organization’s history that he realized he had hit the mother lode, the big picture, the one they had been willing to kill Caroline for.
At the end of World War II, in the waning days of the military’s Office of Strategic Services, the groundwork for the Central Intelligence Agency was being laid. Concerned about the idea of a civilian intelligence agency overseen by politicians, a highly secretive group of OSS members broke off and started their own organization.
They christened it Sentinel and, operating below the radar, pursued one simple mission—safeguarding the United States in the postwar era, no matter what the cost. In the beginning, they were quite successful, but with that success came unwanted notoriety across Washington.
Some saw them as dangerous vigilantes, unanswerable to anyone but themselves, who needed to be stomped out. Others saw them as a useful weapon against the Communists in the deepening Cold War. As investigations were launched by anti-Sentinelists, pro-Sentinelists provided the covert organization with cover and extremely lucrative government contracts.
They were in many respects above the law. In essence, they often broke the law so that certain government agencies didn’t have to. The desired outcome was achieved, security was assured, and their sponsors were able to maintain more than a modicum of plausible deniability.
As happens in many organizations, though, Sentinel experienced “mission creep.” Younger employees, recruited to help assume the burden of an ever-increasing operations tempo, didn’t always share the views of the organization’s founders.
By the 1960s, Sentinel was already moving beyond human intelligence gathering. They saw the future of intelligence in Signals Intelligence, or SIGINT, and began the transition to cutting-edge computers and satellites. By the 1970s, Sentinel had rebranded themselves as Adaptive Technology Solutions. So plugged in were they to the corridors of power, particularly at the NSA, that many believed ATS to actually be a sort of quasigovernmental entity. The organization did little to dispel this notion and in fact promoted and traded on it heavily.
Reading Caroline’s notes, Nicholas learned that ATS gradually became less and less about America and more and more about itself. Everything was about fattening its bottom line. The company was ruthless in cutting out its competitors and grinding down suppliers. They used their ability to harvest data in order to blackmail anyone in the public or private sector who got in their way. This discovery was astounding, but it was nothing compared to what Nicholas found in the next file.
For years ATS had been using its technological superiority to conduct massive insider trading. Since the early 1980s, the company had spied on anyone and everyone in the financial world. They listened in on phone calls, intercepted faxes, and evolved right along with the technology hacking internal computer networks and e-mail accounts. They created mountains of “black dollars” for themselves, which they washed through
various programs they were running under secret contract, far from the prying eyes of financial regulators.
Those black dollars were invested into hard assets around the world, as well as in the stock market, through sham, offshore corporations. They also funneled the money into reams of promising R&D projects, which eventually would be turned around and sold to the Pentagon or the CIA.
In short, ATS had created its own license to print money and had assured itself a place beyond examination or reproach.
Nicholas felt certain he had finally struck upon why Caroline Romero had feared for her life. Then he opened a file labeled
Blue Sand.
Within the first two paragraphs, he realized that everything else ATS had done in its past was nothing compared to what it was preparing to unleash.
He needed to warn people, but he realized that there was only one person who could really do something about it.
B
ASQUE
P
YRENEES
S
PAIN
T
HURSDAY
P
adre Peio had work to do at the abbey and invited Harvath to join him. It was three hours farther into the mountains by horseback.
Harvath had been there before. It was everything a place of religious refuge should be, beautiful, peaceful, and remote. The problem was, it was a little too remote. The priests had some contact with the outside world, but it was very limited. When Nicholas had stayed there, he had brought most of his own equipment with him. It had been destroyed in a fire, and Peio was back to almost two tin cans and a string. Harvath couldn’t go with him. He needed to stay where he already had a solid connection to Skype. He needed to wait for the Old Man to relay further instructions.
And wait he did. All day, he checked his account on the hour and the half hour, hoping to see a message from Carlton. No message ever came.
Unable to avoid Harvath, as he was parked in the middle of his home, the ETA commander stuck his head inside the room and introduced himself. His name was Tello. He was an enormous man with large, rough hands and stained teeth. He wore a thick handlebar mustache along with
several days’ growth of whiskers on his cheeks that suggested he’d been too busy to shave. Harvath had no idea what the man had been up to and he didn’t want to know. Supposedly, ETA had renounced all violence. But judging by the looks of Tello and the heavily armed men on his ranch, this crew hadn’t gotten the memo. The less Harvath knew about his host and his colleagues the better.
Colleagues.
Harvath repeated the word to himself. Could the hit on the organization have been conducted not by some enemy hostile to the United States but actually by some sort of force within?
The idea was insane, yet here he was thinking it. And as crazy as it sounded, he knew better than to dismiss it out of hand. He had been trained to consider all possible options and that included trusting his gut.
Nevertheless, the possibility that any fellow Americans could be behind something like this was almost too far out of left field to be believed.
Harvath looked at his watch. It was after midnight—no wonder his mind was so jumbled. He needed to grab a couple hours of sleep. His thoughts were going in too many strange directions.
After checking Skype one last time and seeing no response, he logged off and shut the computer down.
A heavy fog had settled over the ranch, and Harvath fished a Surefire flashlight from one of the pockets in Riley’s backpack in order to light his way to the stables. The damp cold ate right through his coat. He had been trained to withstand extreme cold, but that didn’t mean he liked it. In fact, the data point that so many SEALs moved to warm-weather climes once they got out made him wonder if the Navy actually bred a deep-seated hatred for cold into its high-end operators, or if the resistance to cold had a relatively short half-life, beyond which SEALs could no longer tolerate it.
It was an interesting riddle but not one he had to solve tonight. He nodded to one of Tello’s heavily armed patrols, men with insulated barn jackets and the traditional black Basque berets the ETA men all wore, before climbing the stairs to the small apartment above the stables.
Inside, he turned on a small space heater in the bedroom and then poured himself a glass of water. Leaning against the bathroom sink, he looked over at Riley’s pack sitting on a chair in the bedroom. He’d gone
through all her personal items multiple times, but none of them told him why she had been in Paris nor why he’d been sent to meet her at the safe house in the first place.
Why the hell had any of it happened? And more importantly, why to her? Why did such bad things so often befall the women he cared about? He knew that life wasn’t fair, but damn it, it was almost as if some force somewhere was purposefully undermining him.
There were very few women at all with whom he could even discuss what he did, or who would understand and support him when he went and did it. He had met a handful in his time, and they had been great, but in some form or another, his work had always interceded and the relationships had been turned upside-down. He had hoped things with Riley could be different since she was on the inside.
They had first met earlier that year. The Old Man had sent her in to take a prisoner off his hands during an operation in Switzerland. She was in her mid-thirties and off-the-charts attractive. Tall, with reddish-brown hair, blue eyes, and a wide, full mouth. When they shook hands, he had felt a bolt of lightning pass between them.
She had been a competitive skier before retiring and going to medical school. While she enjoyed practicing medicine, there was a rush she craved and wasn’t finding in her work. She began doing research online, calling friends across the country, and even talking to a few friends of friends in Washington, D.C. She didn’t know exactly what she was looking for but figured she’d recognize it when she saw it.
She was in the process of applying for an overseas position with the CIA’s Office of Medical Services, when two U.S. Army representatives appeared on her doorstep. They were in the process of creating a program that was right up her alley and invited her to try out. Riley not only tried out, she blew the rest of the recruits out of the water and became one of the earliest members of the Athena Project.
