by Tim Dorsey
His was one of a growing number of firms in a field that had endless buyers lining up for a geometric progression of knowledge. The nascent industry had plenty of niches in which companies could specialize. They variously offered millions of searchable newspaper and magazine articles, indexed scientific papers from leading research universities dating back to 1888, legal precedents and up-to-the-minute Shepardized case law for all fifty states and the federal districts.
Wesley’s company specialized in prying, and it easily had the longest line of clients clamoring for their product: networks wanting to know the volume of cable subscribers in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, test marketers seeking the median age of people who bought laundry detergent with credit cards, municipal planners looking for the neighborhood that voted least so they could locate the new sewage transfer station.
They were like the business world’s version of the Elias Sports Bureau. You know, those people who ESPN quote on SportsCenter when they want to know the last year in which the Red Sox gave up an extra-inning blown save on an inside-the-park homer against a switch-hitting platoon infielder born south of the Mason-Dixon with the nickname “Jukes.”
Wesley never needed to reorder business cards, because he didn’t get out much; his were still tucked neatly in a bottom drawer, embossed with the company’s previous name, Event Horizon, Inc. The moniker was an astrophysics term for the point of no return where all matter and even light itself cannot escape the gravity of a black hole. It was meant as an analogy for the moment when the interstellar nebula dust of Internet gibberish is pulled together to form actionable intelligence. The name was way too highbrow for the buyers, and people kept on driving past the building, having no idea or concern about what was going on inside. So the name was changed to Big Dipper Data Management. All the new clients liked the mental image of a soup ladle. The founder of the company had thought up both names, because he’d recently purchased a telescope.
Oh, and they had a new client. Law enforcement. Most of the police upper brass was old-school and couldn’t grasp the utility. But the new whiz kids who retrieved deleted files from the laptops of pedophiles—they all sent word up the chain: This is the future.
It started at the beginning of the methamphetamine explosion, back before honest citizens needed a U.S. passport and long-form birth certificate to buy over-the-counter sniffle remedies. At the encouragement of police, state lawmakers hired Wesley’s company and used the supporting data to show an undeniable statistical relationship between pockets of violent street crime and volumes of cold-medication sales, which led to pioneering legislation drying up the basic ingredients for drug labs.
That opened everyone’s eyes. Cold remedies? What about cold cases? Everyone remembered all the previously unsolved murders that had been cleared at the dawn of DNA. This looked like a silicon version of genetics, and another step forward in the march of technological justice.
The theory: We’ve got all these electronic files of credit-card purchases, utility bills, tollbooth hits, property taxes, airline tickets, car titles, etc., etc. Obviously too circumstantial to hold up in court, but what if we mashed all those records together, filtering for time and place. In the coldest of cases, it might at least narrow the field and generate a short list of those who deserved a closer look.
For instance: a rash of mystery rapes hit the Pensacola area in the late nineties. Then nothing for years. Police figured the assailant either moved, died, went to prison, or was shipped out with the military.
Then, in 2004, Pensacola authorities noticed a bulletin out of Jacksonville. Serial rapist. As they read, chills. Almost identical details: sliding-glass-door entry, panty-hose mask, one-sided serrated knife, even the exact verbatim instructions to each victim that they had withheld from the press: counting to one hundred, then back down again, before attempting to loosen the same kind of knots.
The Pensacola police got in touch with Jacksonville, and they decided to meet halfway. Literally. Tallahassee. They hovered over Wesley in his cubicle. First, he set the parameters for Pensacola during the six-month period of the first attacks, which pretty much created a list of everyone who had produced personal ID for anything, only about 1,850,000 people. Then he percolated that list through the last month’s info in Jacksonville—looking for those who had been in both places during the two time periods—which brought the number in the overlapping circle down to 2,379.
“Damn,” said the lead investigator. “I though we might have had something.”
“We do,” said Wesley. “That’s a workable number.”
“Workable?” said the detective. “It’s over two thousand.”
“That’s nothing the null sets can’t neutralize.”
“I have no idea what you just said.”
“The null sets are the silver-bullet statistics.” Wesley typed even faster as he spoke. “You say the attacks stopped in Pensacola in ’98 and resumed in Jacksonville in ’04? So what we do is take our list of two-thousand-some-odd suspects, flip the filter, then kick out all the names who had any hits in either city during the intervening six-year quiet time when the assailant was supposedly in jail or whatever . . .” He stopped typing for a dramatic pause, then pressed a final button.
The investigators leaned toward the screen. The number 2,379 quickly spun south. A thousand, 500, 80, 15, until it finally came to a stop: 1. And a suspect’s name. The last piece of data was a video-store rental no less. Chevy Chase vacation comedy. Detectives made some calls. Unbelievable. A seaman at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola had been shipped overseas, then six years later he was transferred back to another base in Jacksonville.
A dozen police vehicles were waved through the security gate and skidded up to the barracks. Military prosecutors arrived, and in less than five minutes the joint interrogation burped up a signed confession. The state of Florida wanted to take custody, and the navy said they were always happy to assist local law enforcement, but first they’d like to hold on to him for another hundred years.
FORT LAUDERDALE
Serge strolled the aisles of the home-improvement store, sucking coffee from a tube under his shirt.
“What are we looking for?” asked Coleman, slurping from his own tube of vodka.
“I’ll know when I see it. Just keep your eyes open for gigantic iron corkscrews.”
“What are those?”
“They’re hurricane tie-downs you twist into the ground and secure stuff when you don’t want to retrieve your aluminum shed from someone’s living room on the next block. That’s always an awkward visit.”
An employee in a yellow store vest came around the corner and smiled as he had been trained. Then the smile stopped. “Are you guys okay?”
“Great!” said Serge. Slurp, slurp.
“What’s with the tubes?”
“We have medical conditions,” said Coleman.
Serge nodded earnestly. “We’re in self-help.”
The employee sniffed the air. “Do I smell liquor?”
“A lot of things smell like liquor,” said Serge.
“Yeah,” said Coleman. “Like other liquor.”
Serge pulled up his shirt. “I’m clean. This is a clear plastic bladder that sports fans strap to their bellies with Velcro to sneak alcohol into arenas and stadiums. I learned it from Coleman, but I use it for coffee strictly due to my on-the-go needs.”
Coleman raised his own shirt. “This is water. You can’t test it because of my rights.” He lowered his shirt.
“We need your assistance,” said Serge. “Usually I can immediately lay my hands on anything in this place, like garage-door openers to activate bad stuff. You’re the expert: Do you think personal electronics can really bring down a 747?”
“What?”
“Of course you can’t speak on the record.” Serge slurped and rotated his head for answers. “Where are the hurricane tie-
downs?”
“You trying to secure a shed?”
“Bigger!”
“A metal garage?”
“Needs to be bigger than that!”
“What on earth are you tying down?”
“That’s classified.” Serge briefly flashed a Miami Vice souvenir badge. “Give me the big mothers. Plus a short metal plumbing pipe like you’d use to rough in a showerhead, and your strongest plastic fasteners for electrical cables. Jigsaw, baseboard, paint, thumbtacks, balsa wood.” Slurp, slurp. “And can you escort us through checkout? Had some recent problems there. Our pictures might be on some flyers.”
Moments later, several employees whispered as Serge and Coleman walked out the door with plastic bags in their hands and four enormous iron corkscrews perched over their shoulders.
MIAMI BEACH
Neon glowed in an artistic rainbow from the landmark Art Deco hotels along internationally famous Ocean Drive. Red, pink, green, blue, orange, yellow, as if the owners had held a meeting.
Farther north on Collins Avenue were the larger, old-guard flagship resorts. The Delano, the Eden Roc, Fontainebleau, Deauville. At a newer, lesser-known resort in the middle, the clientele finally calmed down around three A.M. Some asleep, some passed out, some sitting up in bed with the TV remote, determined to squeeze out more vacation value.
By four A.M., most of the lights had gone dark up and down the hotel’s thirty-story facade.
At 4:02, the first phone rang. Room 1911. A couple from Manitoba celebrating their copper anniversary, which was number seven. The wife answered from REM sleep and a dream about the national cricket team.
“Uh, mmmm, hullo? . . .”
“Ma’am, this is the front desk . . .”
Seconds later, the wife hopped onto the bed screaming in panic. “Kevin! Wake up! Wake up!”
He opened one eye on the pillow. “What is it?”
“An emergency! We have to get out of here!”
They dashed into the hallway. There was a white box on the wall and a sign: IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, BREAK GLASS.
Glass broke.
In the next room, two former classmates from Syracuse on a girlfriend trip. The phone rang.
“W-what? Hello? Huh? . . .”
“This is the front desk. Please stay calm, but we have a serious emergency. There’s been a highly poisonous chemical contamination to your floor from the air system. We need you to evacuate your room immediately . . .”
“But how did—?”
“Ma’am, there’s no time. We have too many rooms to call. The hazardous-material teams are on the way. In the meantime, we’ll need the total cooperation of our guests. Once you get to the hall, grab a fire extinguisher and spray yourselves down with the foam. That will temporarily neutralize the contaminants’ effects on your skin.”
“What will it do to my skin?”
“You don’t want to know right now, but there’s only a remote chance of amputation. And after you’re covered with foam, take the stairs—not the elevator!—and hurry to street level and exit the hotel onto the sidewalk. Once there, strip off all your clothes as fast as possible. By then, the hazmat teams should be waiting with the hoses to properly complete the decontamination procedure.”
The women dashed into the hall. Ten other people were already there, half covered with foam, the other half flapping their arms in whimpering panic. “Spray me next! Spray me next!”
Other doors flung open. More guests in the hall. A second extinguisher was broken out of its harness. The stampede began. No! Not the elevator! They burst into the stairwell, a race of sudsy people down landing after landing, until they reached the bottom and sprinted out onto the sidewalk.
Clothing flew with abandon into the night air.
Traffic on Collins Avenue was sparse at that hour, but even the most jaded motorist couldn’t help but rubberneck at the sidewalk festivities. A silver BMW coupe rear-ended a Miata.
Finally, all clothes were off. The naked guests experienced a modicum of relief. Then they looked around. Where were the hazmat teams?
No chemical response was on the way, but multiple 9-1-1 calls brought six patrol cars screaming down the fashionable avenue with all lights flashing. The first officer got out in front of two dozen frothy, nude people. He’d seen almost everything working the South Beach beat. But . . .
“What in the hell is going on?”
Simultaneously, the staff from the hotel’s front desk emerged from the lobby. “What in the hell is going on?”
What was going on:
One week earlier, somewhere in cyberspace, a chat room sat empty.
At precisely eleven P.M., members began logging in with code names. More than a hundred people from Palm Beach to Monroe County turned up the volume on their computers’ speakers.
A silent, streaming feed from a telephone line. The quiet was broken by an Internet voice. “Two minutes to go . . .”
All the members opened a separate computer browser to a live webcam they had previously located on A1A.
That’s how they selected their missions. When the group first began operating, it was just audio from the phones. But then someone threw out the idea that webcams were now everywhere. Listening to the action was great, but actually seeing the fruits of their work would put it over the top.
“Thirty seconds . . .”
Anticipation built. Then they heard various pulse tones of a phone number being punched in. It belonged to a national fast-food burger franchise across the street from a beach webcam in South Florida.
Someone answered.
“Hello, this is ____. How can we help you today?”
“I’m District Manager Frank Daniels from the regional office. We’ve received multiple alarms from your location. You have a major gas leak.”
“What?”
“There’s no time. Just listen: We need to vent the entire restaurant before there’s an explosion. See the four giant plate-glass windows on the front of the building that look out toward the road? Break them.”
“Explosion?”
“Shut up and get moving! The gas levels are rising every second!”
“What do I break them out with?”
“Use the chairs! Don’t you remember anything from the safety drills?”
The restaurant employee couldn’t remember anything from the safety drills about breaking windows with chairs, but he didn’t want the district manager to know that. The people in the chat room heard the employee yell away from the phone: “Guys! Grab the chairs . . .”
The group’s eyes went to the webcam feed on their monitors. The first chair crashed through the southernmost floor-to-ceiling pane. Then in quick succession, windows two, three and four. Customers and staff ran screaming out through the broken glass. Police arrived. Gas company trucks. Pandemonium.
All over the Gold Coast, fingers typed rapidly on keyboards.
“Excellent gig.”
“Top-notch.”
“Nice touch with the safety drill.”
“I concur. Puts him on the defensive so he’s not thinking straight and doesn’t question authority.”
And so on, through dozens of additional comment threads critiquing the mission.
Welcome to the modern Merry Pranksters. That was actually their name. They would have been anarchists and Luddites except they couldn’t imagine life without the power grid and social media.
Near midnight, the cyber-posts turned to a new subject. Next mission.
“Webcam thoughts?”
“I found one with a great panning view of a thirty-story hotel on Collins Avenue.”
“Perfect, but we’ll need to change the hotel game plan.”
Everyone knew why.
The hotel gig was otherwise excellent. It had been honed and improved through eight separate suc
cessful runs. Post-mission critiques added suggestions to make the prank calls more convincing. “Toss in a part about taking the stairs instead of the elevators. Everyone’s familiar with that, so it’s a legitimizing reference point.”
They continued refining the script until it couldn’t miss:
A hotel room phone rang on one of the upper floors.
“Hello, this is the front desk, and we have an emergency. There is a fire of unknown origin, and our sprinkler system is not responding even with manual override. We need you to evacuate immediately by the stairs. Do not take the elevators! Repeat, do not take the elevators! And on the way out, we need you to break off all the sprinkler heads in the hall with a shoe . . .”
But the hotel gig developed an obvious new problem. Since they were now using webcams, the entertainment value of the chaos in an internal hallway would be unseen. They put their heads together.
“We need to get them out of the hotel and onto the sidewalk in view of the cam.”
“But how?”
“What about chemical or biological contamination?”
“That’ll work.”
“Okay, so people are standing on a sidewalk. What’s funny about that?”
“It’ll be late. They’ll be drowsy in their pajamas.”
“I’m still not feeling it.”
“I got it. We tell them to spray one another with fire extinguishers to prevent chemical burns . . .”
That got the ideas flowing.
“. . . And once they’re on the sidewalk, we tell them to take off all their clothes.”
Perfection.
They came up with the place, time and date, and agreed to meet back online.
They began signing off. Until only a single person was left.
The Internet has what is known as lurkers. Means just about the same in real life. They sneak into various alleys of cyberspace and never post. Simply watch and listen, and you’d never know they were there.
