Invasion of Privacy: A Novel Read online

  “Ian!” It was Peter Briggs, coming out of the White Stag.

  “Come on,” Ian called. “They’re waiting on me.”

  Briggs pulled up alongside him. “That bastard May’s remarks made it into an article about the race in the Reno papers.”

  “The sports section.” Ian had seen the piece while doing a little background on Gordon May. “Right before the part about the race stewards denying his objection.”

  “He sounds serious.”

  “Like I said, he’s a sore loser. Now everyone knows it. Anything else about John Merriweather comes out of his mouth, we’ll sue him for defamation. Shut him up once and for all.”

  “That’s what I like to hear.”

  “To think,” said Ian, dismissing May’s monstrous accusations. “John Merriweather was a dear friend.”

  The men walked a ways farther, leaving the main campus and continuing along a paved road toward the R&D facility, a black glass rectangle the size of a city block surrounded by a twenty-foot-tall fence.

  “This is it, then?” said Briggs as they passed through the security checkpoint. “You get the cooling system all squared away?”

  “That’s what we’re going to find out.”

  “Better have,” said Briggs. “Utah’s ready to rock ’n’ roll. They don’t like delays in D.C.”

  Ian ignored the admonishing clip to his voice. “Let me worry about D.C.”

  “Whatever you say. You’re the boss.”

  —

  It was an object of beauty.

  Ian ran a hand over the face of the machine. An undulating wave of black titanium as alluring as a centerfold’s curves glimmered beneath the lab’s soft lighting. Form married to function. The ONE logo had been painted across the panels in electric-blue ink that seemed to lift right off them. The apotheosis of design and intellect.

  Titan. The world’s most powerful supercomputer.

  Half a dozen engineers were conducting last-minute checks of the equipment. All wore hoodies or fleece. One sported a down parka. Outside, the temperature was pushing 100°. Inside, it was a chill 58°.

  “Ah, Ian, welcome,” said Dev Patel, the chief programmer on the Titan project, hurrying toward him. “Can we get you a jumper?”

  “I’m fine,” said Ian. “Are we all hooked up?”

  “All according to your instructions.” Patel placed a hand on top of Titan. He was short and round, a native of Madras who’d come to ONE by way of IIT, Caltech, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “We’ve connected two hundred machines for today’s test. Our footprint is about four thousand square feet.”

  “Two hundred? That enough?”

  “Good lord, yes.” Patel tugged at the thatch of graying hair that fell across his forehead, looking like nothing so much as an aging schoolboy. “And then some.”

  Ian patted him on the back. John Merriweather’s coup was to marry graphics processing units (GPUs) with conventional central processing units (CPUs) to create a hybrid that was at once more energy-efficient than anything before it and capable of an order of magnitude increase in computational power. Titan used 25,000 AMD Opteron 16-core CPUs and 25,000 Nvidia Tesla GPUs. “Memory?”

  “Seven hundred ten terabytes,” said Patel, “with forty petabytes of hard drive storage.”

  Seven hundred ten terabytes was the equivalent of all the text found in a stack of books running from the earth to the moon. “And that gives us?”

  “A theoretical peak performance approaching ten exaflops—about twenty thousand trillion calculations per second—give or take.”

  “That means we’re tops, right?”

  “No one else is even close.”

  Ian spoke over his shoulder. “Get PR. I want that information out to everyone on the Net a minute after the test is completed.” He put a hand on Patel’s shoulder and guided him to a private corner. “Is she ready?”

  “I’ll keep my end of the bargain if you keep yours.”

  Ian’s end meant seeing to it that the new cooling system functioned as advertised. Patel’s end meant pushing Titan to the max, getting all twenty thousand trillion operations per second from it. It was time to push the needle into the red once more. “All right, then. Let’s light this baby up.”

  Patel’s eyes radiated excitement. He turned toward the engineers and raised his arms. “Light this baby up.”

  The engineers retreated to their workstations behind a glass wall and placed noise-canceling headphones over their ears. The ambient buzz Ian had noted since entering the lab grew louder. A metallic clicking noise emanated from the machines, the cadence and volume increasing by the second, as if hundreds of steel dominoes were being shuffled and shuffled again.

  “Would you prefer to watch the demonstration in a different manner?” asked Patel.

  “Everest?” Ian struggled to keep from clapping his hands over his ears.

  “Yes,” shouted Patel.

  The men walked down a corridor to a smaller, quieter room. The room was empty except for one wall made entirely of dark translucent glass. This was Everest, the “exploratory visualization environment for science and technology,” a thirty-seven-megapixel stereoscopic wall made of eighteen individual display monitors.

  Three vanguard codes had been selected to test Titan’s maximum operating capabilities. S3D modeled the molecular physics of combustion in an effort to lessen the carbon footprint of fossil fuels. WL-LSMS simulated the interaction between electrons and atoms in magnetic materials. And CAM-SE simulated specific climate change scenarios and was designed to cycle through five years of weather in one day of computing time.

  “We’re running CAM-SE,” said Patel. “We might as well find out whether or not the earth is going to be here fifty years from now.”

  “Might as well.” Frankly, Ian was more interested in whether Titan would be in working order fifty minutes from now or a flaming pile of silicon. He crossed his arms and faced the wall of black glass. Six closely spaced horizontal lines ran the length of the wall: red, yellow, orange, green, blue, and purple.

  The room lights dimmed.

  Phase One Initiated flashed in the upper left-hand corner. Titan had begun its work.

  Below it a reading displayed the supercomputer’s internal temperature: 75° Fahrenheit.

  The lines on the glass wall began wiggling, interweaving, dancing with one another as if bothered by a weak current. The temperature display jumped to 80°, then 85°. The lines’ movements grew more frenzied, each assuming a life of its own, oscillating into sine and cosine waves. The lines were a visual manifestation of Titan’s calculations as the machine worked its way into the complex code, analyzing billions of possible climate models. There were no longer just six lines but twenty, then thirty, and then too many to count, a rainbow of gyrating colors.

  Meanwhile the temperature continued to rise.

  A buzzer sounded.

  Phase Two appeared.

  Titan was working faster.

  On command, the lines escaped their two-dimensional confines and leapt into the room. Ian and Patel were surrounded by a sea of multicolored, undulating wave functions, awash in an ocean of neon light.

  120°

  150°

  The machine was heating too rapidly.

  Ian said nothing. To speak was to scream. He glanced sidelong at Patel. The programmer no longer looked like an enthusiastic schoolboy. In the darkened room, his round, pleasant face illuminated by the wildly gyrating lights, he looked like a doomed prisoner awaiting a dreadful sentence.

  170°

  180°

  Ian hummed to himself, blinking inadvertently each time the number rose. If Titan’s internal temperature surpassed 200° for a period of thirty seconds, the supercomputer would shut itself down. There would be no meeting at Fort Meade. The giant array in Utah would be removed and shipped back for repair. Months would be needed to rework the cooling design.

  Despite his anxiety, Ian felt outside himself, part of some bigger s
cheme: intelligence, the universe, he didn’t know what to call it. Maybe progress. The first computers had used punch cards to tabulate election results. Then came transistors and silicon wafers and microchips. The latest was nanochips, chips as thin as a human hair, so small they needed to be viewed with an electron microscope. Today a smartphone retailing for $99 held the computing power necessary to launch Apollo 11 and land two men on the surface of the moon.

  Titan possessed one billion times that power.

  Deus in machina.

  God in the machine.

  Everest glowed blue.

  The buzzer sounded again. The terrific noise grew.

  Phase Three appeared.

  Titan had reached its maximum speed. In a single second it performed as many calculations as the first mainframe had been able to perform in an entire week.

  200°

  “Shut it down,” shouted Patel. “We’re going to burn.”

  “Wait,” said Ian.

  It was all or nothing. Time to push the needle into the red.

  Ten seconds passed. Fifteen.

  “Ian…please. Shut it down.”

  “Another second.”

  “You must!”

  And then something wonderful happened.

  190°

  The temperature decreased.

  180°

  And decreased again.

  Patel grabbed Ian’s arm. Ian stood still, not protesting. The panel turned from blue to red. Patel began to laugh. “It works,” he said, though his words were impossible to hear above the clatter.

  Ian nodded, saying nothing. His anxiety vanished. His calm returned. And his confidence, perhaps even greater than before.

  “Of course it works,” he wanted to say. He had designed it.

  13

  In his short time in Austin, Joe had adopted Threadgill’s on North Lamar as his home away from home. The restaurant was a local landmark built inside the shell of an old service station and dressed up in fancy paint and neon lights. Mary regretted suggesting meeting there as soon as the words left her mouth, but Don Bennett had agreed so quickly, she hadn’t had the time to change her mind.

  She found Bennett waiting inside, dressed in a three-piece suit, stiff as ever, seated at one of the booths and playing with the jukebox that decorated the table. “What are we listening to?” she asked as she slid onto the leather banquette.

  “Elvis.” Bennett dropped a quarter in the slot and thumbed a button. Elvis Presley began singing “Hound Dog.” “Wanna eat?”

  “You have time?” said Mary, surprised. “I thought you’d need to get out to the crime scene.”

  “That’s shut down.”

  “So you figured out what happened?”

  “I already told you.”

  “You didn’t seem so sure last night.”

  Bennett stared at her but said nothing. He appeared to have cut himself shaving.

  “The informant shot Joe, and Joe shot him before he died,” she said. “You’re sticking to that story?”

  “Those are the facts.”

  Mary let it go for the moment. The waiter came and handed them menus. Mary put hers down. Threadgill’s stock-in-trade was down-home cooking: fried chicken, catfish, collard greens. She and Joe always ordered the same thing: chicken fried steak. She grabbed a biscuit out of the basket and spread a dollop of honey butter across it. It no longer mattered if she fit into the LBD.

  Bennett set down his menu. “How can I help?” he asked.

  “I’d like you to take a look at my phone,” said Mary. “If you’re still interested, that is.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” answered Bennett.

  “For you or for me? I’m asking a favor.”

  “I can’t extend the Bureau’s services to a civilian.”

  “I didn’t leave the message. My husband did—minutes before he was killed in the line of duty. I’d think you’d be damned interested.”

  “I’m sorry, Mary, but the Bureau cannot assist you.”

  “Cannot or will not?”

  Bennett leaned closer. “Mary, your husband died twenty hours ago. The Bureau extends its condolences. I’m happy to talk to you about his final pay package, insurance, and all benefits due to you and your family. But that’s all. Now go home. Be with your daughters. Grieve.”

  “You’re not telling me what happened,” Mary said.

  “The incident is closed.”

  Mary took the front page of the morning paper from her purse and unfolded it on the table, turning it so that it faced Bennett. “I looked at this for a long time. Right away I knew something was wrong, but it took me a while to figure out just what. You see, Don, you said the informant got in the car and neither of them got out. But look, there he is on the ground. Fine—I’ll let that go. Maybe a question of semantics, you picking the wrong words. But tell me this: when exactly did the informant shoot Joe? Was it when he was already outside the car? Did his first shot miss and take out the windshield, or did he fire again after Joe shot him? See all that blood on the sheet by his head? I’d say the informant’s first shot had to hit Joe, because he sure as shit didn’t shoot him after Joe shot him in the head. I’m asking because yesterday at the hospital, the surgeon, Dr. Alexander, said that Joe was shot point-blank and that the bullet severed his spinal cord. The informant isn’t anywhere near to point-blank, and Joe couldn’t have pulled the trigger once he was shot. Joe would have called that ‘a problem of chronology.’ So tell me again, Don, what happened out there?”

  Bennett said nothing.

  “I’m waiting,” Mary said.

  “Please, Mary.”

  “Don’t ‘please’ me.” Mary pushed her phone across the table. “Are you afraid of what you might hear?”

  Bennett blinked, his eyes holding hers, avoiding the phone. “Anything else I can help you with?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes. Who exactly called 911? If Joe was all alone out there in Dripping Springs, it seems to me that no one would have found him for hours. No backup, right? That’s what you said. But the EMTs got there twenty minutes after he was shot.”

  “The investigation is closed.”

  “Yours, maybe.”

  Bennett rose from the booth. “Are we done here?”

  “No,” said Mary. “Not by a long shot.”

  14

  Don Bennett, age forty-eight, twenty-three-year veteran of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, special agent in charge of the Austin residency, former navy corpsman, winner of the Bronze Star, veteran of the first Gulf War, rabid Cowboys fan, lover of Elvis Presley, and father of five, stood in the blazing sun, phone to his ear, asking himself what he was going to say.

  It was a few minutes past one in the afternoon, and Bennett was drunk. He’d waited for Mary Grant to pull out of the lot, then marched back into the restaurant, ordered a Jack on the rocks, and drunk it down in a single draft. Then he did it again. The alcohol did little to quiet his mind. Mary Grant’s questions were his own, if more crudely put. He possessed information she did not. He had answers to her questions. Some…not all…but enough to trouble his obedient self.

  Bennett gazed up at the sky. It was white with heat, the sun a blinding abstraction. He asked himself the question again, the question he knew his master would ask, and he had his answer. Bennett considered himself a fine judge of character. He recognized a fighter when he saw one. A scrapper. Mary Grant was the kind of person who did something just because you told her she couldn’t, the kind who’d continue even if it brought harm to herself. It was not the answer he desired, but it was the truth.

  The phone rang a third time.

  Bennett was a fighter, too, he reminded himself. A scrapper. He’d made it out of situations his brethren had not. Still, there were rules, and rules had to be followed. He believed in the chain of command and in obedience to your superiors. He’d built his life on doing as he was told. It was a successful life. A happy life. There was no reason to change now.

 
; “Yes, Don,” his master answered.

  “She’s asking questions.”

  “You couldn’t convince her otherwise?”

  “She doesn’t buy the official version. He called her before the incident. Apparently he knew something was up.”

  “What did he say?”

  “I’m not sure. He left her a message, but she deleted it. She asked for our help to retrieve it. I declined.”

  “Best we didn’t know.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you keep your mouth shut?”

  “I did.”

  “Of course you did,” said his master. “You’re a reliable man, Don. I appreciate that.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “One last question…”

  “Sir?”

  “Will she be a bother?”

  There it was. The question he’d seen coming. It would be easy to lie. But Don Bennett followed orders. He believed in the chain of command.

  “Will she continue to ask questions?” his master repeated.

  “Yes, sir. I believe she won’t stop until she finds out the truth.”

  A lengthy pause followed. Bennett could sense his master’s anxiety, and it quickly became his own. “Sir?” said Bennett.

  “That’s all, Don. Take the rest of the day off. See the family. Consider it an order.”

  Bennett hung up.

  There was truth and there was honor. He had never known them to war with each other.

  15

  It worked.

  Ian stood in the center of his office, feeling the perspiration dry on his forehead. His nerves were gratifyingly becalmed. His heart had stopped doing the quickstep. Titan’s cacophonous clatter was a distant memory.

  “It worked.”

  He turned over the words in his mouth like a piece of candy. The maximum internal temperature recorded at the peak of Titan’s frenzied, divinely ordered calculations—when each and every one of the machine’s 50,000 CPUs and GPUs had been pressed to their limit, straining to solve one of the world’s most complex equations, and in reaction generating their own “cybersweat” in the form of radiated heat—was 206° Fahrenheit, fifty degrees lower than previously measured.