The Patriots Club

by Christopher Reich

  Over the years, the Organization had purchased companies active in all these fields. And though it was the Organization’s modus operandi to restructure them for a quick and profitable sale, it made every effort to build in a permanent access to the companies’ databases. Only after 9/11, however, did the Organization begin to assemble these companies with any coherent strategy, and then it was at the government’s request.

  Following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the United States Department of Defense established the Information Awareness Office to create a network of integrated computer tools that the intelligence community could use to predict and prevent terrorist threats. The program was officially named Total Information Awareness, but after a public outcry about government intrusion into its citizens’ privacy and charges of Big Brother and an all-seeing, all-knowing Orwellian state, the name was changed to Terrorist Information Awareness. Its motto remained the same, however: Scientia est potentia. “Knowledge is power.”

  Terrorist Information Awareness brought together a host of technologies being developed to help law-enforcement authorities track down terrorists around the globe and effectively guess what their targets might be. Data mining, telecommunications surveillance, evidence evaluation and link discovery, facial- and gait-recognition software: These were a few of the tools harnessed. The hue and cry of civilian-privacy advocates caused the government to dismantle the program. The Organization volunteered its help to rebuild it. In secret. No one, it argued, was better suited to the task. The government accepted.

  The result was renamed Cerberus, after the vicious three-headed hound that guarded the entrance to Hades. And though the project remained ostensibly under government control, the Organization had made sure to build its own portal to access the system when necessary. While the threat to the United States came from abroad, the Organization had threats of its own to monitor, and these threats were domestic in nature. To charges that the Organization was using Cerberus to violate the average American citizen’s sphere of privacy, it replied “nonsense.” It was a case of the greater good and the informed minority.

  The threat assessment concerning Thomas Bolden cited four hostile indicators. Three hostile indicators were needed to earn a positive reading—“positive” meaning that the subject merited attention as a potential danger. Four indicators called for the establishment of an electronic-surveillance perimeter. And five mandated immediate intervention with a copy of the assessment to be sent automatically to Solutions.

  Guilfoyle reviewed the indicators one at a time. The first was drawn from a cell-phone transmission between Bolden and a business associate. The second from an e-mail he had sent to a friend at another investment bank. The third from a scan of his residential computer’s hard drive. The fourth from an intracompany memo he had forwarded to Sol Weiss discussing the firm’s investment policies.

  Highlighted in yellow were the keywords Bolden had used that had drawn Cerberus’s attention. Distrust. Conspiracy. Illegal operation. Trendrite. Antigovernmental. Monopolistic. And Crown. “Evidence extraction,” the process was called. Finding clues hidden in disparate mediums and tying them together.

  By isolating each indicator and reading it in context, Guilfoyle was able to identify where Cerberus had made its mistake. When Bolden had used the keywords near, or in conjunction with, the Organization’s corporate name, Cerberus had drawn a false inference about a pending threat. It was a software program, after all. A powerful one, to be sure. But it couldn’t be expected to reason out its programmer’s mistakes. At least, not yet.

  It was the last indicator, however, that left Guilfoyle stymied. The one taken from Bolden’s residential phone bill. On three successive nights a week earlier, Thomas Bolden had placed calls from his home to a residence in New Jersey that was later discovered to have been used by Bobby Stillman. Guilfoyle double-checked the dates. There was no doubt that Stillman had been occupying the premises at that time. And yet, Guilfoyle was certain that Bolden had not been lying. Thomas Bolden did not know Bobby Stillman. Nor did he have a clue about Crown.

  It was Guilfoyle’s gift that he was able to discern with uncanny accuracy not only a person’s intentions, benign or hostile, but also whether that person was lying or telling the truth. He had always been able to sense when a person was less than forthcoming, but it wasn’t until his second year as a police officer in Albany, New York, that he’d learned to trust that sense and to hone it into a skill.

  On that particular day, he and his partner were rolling in their police cruiser through Pinewood, conducting a routine neighborhood watch, when they noticed a homeless man dressed in a khaki trench coat, panty hose, and combat boots, stomping along the sidewalk. There had been a complaint about a man matching his description harassing a woman out walking her dog. Stopping beside him, they rolled down the window and asked his name. At first, the man didn’t respond. Like many homeless people, he appeared mentally ill and mumbled to himself constantly. His hair was long and unkempt. His beard was matted and scraggly. He continued walking, shooting them strange glances. There was no indication that he was armed or possessed of hostile intent. Until that date, there had never been an incident of a street person or vagrant assaulting an Albany police officer. Albany was not New York City.

  Guilfoyle, who was driving, called through the window for the man to stop. Finally, the man complied. Guilfoyle’s partner opened his door and asked, “What are you doing?” “I’ve got something to show you guys,” the vagrant said. He approached the car, still mumbling and addressing the invisible personalities who peopled his world. He was smiling. Most people would have taken him for nothing more than a harmless nutcase. But when Guilfoyle looked into this man’s eyes, he knew at once that he intended to kill the police officers. With no hesitation, Guilfoyle, aged twenty-three, drew his service revolver, forced his partner’s back against the seat, and fired twice into the homeless man’s chest. When the vagrant collapsed to the ground, his trench coat fell open to reveal a jury-rigged flamethrower. The nozzle was threaded down the arm of his coat and cupped in his palm. In his other hand, he held a Zippo lighter. A search of the vagrant’s belongings kept at the Catholic rescue mission turned up a journal in which he wrote about his desire to “send cops back to hellfire.”

  Two months later, Guilfoyle responded to a domestic-violence complaint. When they arrived at the address, however, the woman who had called was no longer there. Guilfoyle questioned her husband, who said that she had gone out for a drink. The man was calm and forthright, explaining that his wife was simply angry with him for gambling. Suspicious, Guilfoyle and his partner searched the apartment but found no trace of the woman. The apartment was clean and in good order. There was no sign of a struggle, no evidence of mayhem. Yet, Guilfoyle was certain that the man had murdered his wife. He didn’t know exactly why, just that his brief interrogation of the man had left him convinced. He knew.

  Guilfoyle returned to the husband, and standing very close to him—close enough to see only his face and nothing beyond it, close enough to smell his breath, to register every twitch of his mouth, to see that his brown eyes were flecked with green—he asked where he had hidden his wife’s body. The man’s calm dissolved like a thunderclap. Breaking into tears, he led them to a closet in his bedroom, where he had stuffed his wife’s strangled, lifeless body into a steamer trunk.

  Word of Guilfoyle’s extraordinary talent spread quickly. In short order, he was promoted to detective and brought in to handle the more difficult interrogations. Behavioral scientists arrived from the state university at Binghamton to study his skills. They had him watch endless reruns of To Tell the Truth. Guilfoyle never failed to guess the impostor. They showed him copies of the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted Criminals” circular and he was able to assign each the offense for which he was wanted. A team from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) arrived to ask for his assistance with something they called the Diogenes Project, Diogenes b
eing the ancient Greek who went from house to house shining a lantern in every man’s face, seeking a truly honest man. For months, they worked with him to catalog the taxonomy of human expression. Together, they scoured medical texts and identified every distinct muscular movement that the face could make, a total of forty-three in all. But no matter how hard they tried, they could not teach the skill to others.

  The human face was a canvas on which man painted his every thought and emotion. Some strokes were deft, lightning quick, others long and lingering. Look close enough, however, and you could see them all. A knitting of the brow, a tightening of the mouth, a narrowing of the eyes: Guilfoyle was able to process all of this instantaneously and know a man’s state of mind. It was his gift.

  And so he had known that Thomas Bolden was telling the truth.

  Yet to believe that, Guilfoyle had to also believe that Cerberus had kicked out a “false positive”—in the parlance, meaning that the system had identified the wrong man. He could not do that. There was the matter of the phone calls Bolden placed to Stillman. If Bolden had called Bobby Stillman, he had to know her.

  Guilfoyle fingered the drawing of the musket. In his mind’s eye, he was looking at Bolden. The two were back in the room on the seventieth floor of Hamilton Tower. He traced every line of the man’s face, recalled every twitch of his lips, the direction of his eyes. He decided that he very much wanted to speak with him again. He had a disconcerting feeling that for once, he may have been wrong, and that Thomas Bolden had bested him. He did not enjoy being made to look like an idiot.

  “Hoover,” he called.

  “Yes, Mr. Guilfoyle?”

  “How’s it coming?”

  “Slowly, sir. We have a lot of conversations to go through.”

  “Hurry it up. We’ve got to get our men in place before he arrives.”

  Grasping the paper with his left hand, he folded it dexterously into quarters and slipped it into his jacket pocket. As a boy, he’d practiced long hours to be a magician. He became adept at sleight of hand, and, when working alone, was able to master the most difficult illusions. Yet, everyone agreed that he was a terrible magician. One fault doomed him from the beginning. He couldn’t smile. People preferred to watch his hands instead of his face.

  17

  The crew pushed past Bolden into his office, all four of them. One of the uniformed security men closed the door and took up a position with his back against it.

  “Tommy, please take a seat in that chair,” said Michael T. “Mickey” Schiff, the firm’s chief executive.

  “I think I’d like to stand, Mickey. What’s the deal?”

  “I said take a seat. Your wishes are no longer a matter of concern to this firm.”

  “Please, Tom,” said Sol Weiss. “Take a seat. The sooner we’re done here, the better.”

  “Sure, Sol.” Bolden allowed the chairman to guide him to one of the armchairs normally reserved for guests. “What’s this about?”

  “This is about you, mister,” said Schiff every bit as aggressively as before. “About your disgraceful predilections. About bringing dishonor upon the reputation of a venerable institution and shaming the man who gave you a chance to make a place for yourself.”

  The CEO of Harrington Weiss was a slight man, wiry, and proud of his fitness, his skin tanned the color of polished oak. Schiff was the firm’s Mr. Inside, the ice-blooded technocrat who had overseen HW’s successful forays into derivatives and the private equity market. As was his custom, he was dressed in a tailored navy chalk stripe with plenty of cuff showing. His hair was colored a brassy auburn. Bolden noticed that his gray roots were showing. Must have been a busy week.

  “Stop it right there,” he said. “I’ve never done a thing to hurt HW.” He appealed to Sol Weiss. “What’s he talking about?”

  A crowd was gathering outside the office. Secretaries, assistants, and a smattering of executives formed a semicircle of aggrieved onlookers. At its center, her chin held high, stood Althea.

  “Thomas, we have a situation here,” said Weiss in his tacks-and-gravel baritone. “Diana Chambers contacted us this morning to inform us about the misunderstanding that took place between you two last night.”

  “What misunderstanding was that?” asked Bolden.

  “The gist of her complaint is that you assaulted her in the men’s room of the hotel last night after she refused to perform oral sex on you. I’m sorry to be so blunt.”

  Schiff cut in impatiently. “Is it your practice, Tom, to slap around women who won’t have sex with you? Are you one of those freaks that needs to feel like he’s in control to be a man?”

  “Diana Chambers said what?” Bolden asked, dumbfounded. Like him, Diana Chambers worked as a director at HW. She was a pretty, prim blonde, proud of being a Yalie, short and athletic with blazingly white teeth and brown eyes that bugged out when she smiled. They were friendly, but not friends. “It’s not true. None of it. Not a word. I talked to Diana for maybe two minutes last night. I certainly didn’t go into the men’s room with her. I didn’t ask her to have sex with me and I didn’t hit her. Where is she? I can’t believe she said this. I’d like to talk to her myself.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not possible,” said Sol Weiss. “She’s at the hospital.”

  “At the hospital?”

  “That punch you saw fit to give her left her with an orbital fracture,” said Schiff.

  “This is nonsense,” said Bolden, looking into his lap, shaking his head.

  “I wish we could say that we agree with you, Tom,” said Weiss. “But we’ve got a sworn affidavit alleging your behavior. There are two detectives waiting downstairs to take you into custody.”

  Schiff removed a photograph from a buff envelope and handed it to Bolden. “This was taken last night at the battered-women’s unit at Doctors’ Hospital. Care to explain?”

  Bolden examined the photo. It showed a close-up of a woman’s face. Her left eye was swollen horribly, colored black and blue. There was no question it was Diana Chambers. The insinuation . . . no, the accusation that he had done this incensed him. A lump of anger rose in his throat, choking him. “I didn’t do this. Christ, I’d never . . .”

  “She swears you did,” said Sol Weiss. “What can I do, Tom? My hands are tied. You know Diana. She’s a good girl. I can’t imagine her lying any more than I can you doing this to her.”

  “But she is lying,” said Bolden.

  “That’ll be for a court to decide,” said Schiff. “Now, you’re going to have to leave the premises. Didn’t you hear Sol? There are two detectives downstairs waiting to take you in.”

  “Give me a break,” said Bolden. “Sol, I was at your table last night. So was Jenny. I could barely move ten feet, there were so many people stopping by. Did you see me talk to Diana Chambers?”

  “Look, Tommy, it was a big place,” said Weiss.

  “Did you see me talking to her?” Bolden demanded.

  Weiss shook his head and grunted irritably. “I like you, kid. You know that. But I don’t have any choice but to go by what Diana’s telling us. If it’s nonsense, then we’ll forget all about it. But first, we have to get to the bottom of it.”

  Bolden looked from one face to the next, then exhaled a long breath. Once he left the office, he’d never be back. HW wasn’t a white-shoe firm; it was more like silk-stocking. The taint of wrongdoing was enough. Once word got out, Bolden would always be the guy who beat up Diana Chambers. His ability to attract business would effectively be nil. The mere charge was tantamount to industrial castration.

  Sol was the one to deal with here. He was the boss. He’d come up from the streets. He’d know how Bolden was feeling. “Did you talk to her?” he asked him. “She told you this herself?”

  “No, I did not,” said Sol. “Her attorneys have contacted the firm. If it makes you feel any better, we’ve decided to place both you and Diana on paid leave until the matter’s settled.”

  “I can’t take leave right now,”
Bolden protested. “We’re about to close the Trendrite deal.”

  “Jake Flannagan can take it.”

  Bolden swallowed, the hairs on the back of his neck bristling. And his bonus? Would Flannagan take that, too? This was the biggest deal of his career they were talking about. “This is crap!” he said, bolting out of his chair, throwing his arms in the air. “Utter bullshit!”

  Schiff stepped forward to deliver the coup de grâce. “Miss Chambers’s attorneys have informed us that she will be pressing criminal charges against you, and against the firm. Besides the events of last night, she’s talking about some past violations that took place right in this office.”

  “This is a mistake,” said Bolden, his eyes searching the office as if he might find the answer hidden in his books or papers. “Diana must be covering for someone.”

  “It’s no mistake,” said Sol. Suddenly, he looked bored and annoyed, and Bolden could see that he was against him. “Look, Tommy, let’s do this nice and easy. Mickey’s talked to the special victims unit of the police department and he’s convinced them not to arrest you on the premises.”

  “Arrest me? For what? I already told you I didn’t do anything.”

  “If you’ll just gather your things and go downstairs . . .”

  “I’m not going downstairs or anywhere else,” argued Bolden. “I don’t know what’s going on . . . why Diana would make these insane accusations, but I’m not just going to stand here and take it. You’ve all known me for six years. Look at the work I’ve done at the firm. At the club. I’m not some kind of animal.” But when he looked at the two men, he met a stone wall. “You have my word that I did not touch Diana Chambers.”