Chapter 3: Gluttony

It was a lazy Sunday morning. I was putting the breakfast dishes into the contraption that washes them. Vanessa was at our round kitchen table going over a Euforia spreadsheet.

Walk was sitting at the table pretending to read the front page of the Times. I know him so well; could tell by his jawline, his too-casual attitude. that he was about to drop one of his cornball jokes on us.

He said, “Huh.”

Vanessa looked up and smiled, “What, honey?”

He pointed to an article in the paper, “Did you hear about the guy who invented the knock-knock jokes?”

Vanessa played along, “No, what?”

“He was just awarded the Nobell Prize.”

The first warning sign came last summer. Daddy has a checkup and labs done every July and January. Last July the doc highlighted his creatinine level — it had jumped from 1.0 to 1.6. It was one of those lines on the lab report that nobody paid attention to. Until we had to.

Doctor Conrad merely told him, “Drink plenty of water.”

Of course my mother went ballistic; started reading everything she could find on Chronic Kidney Disease.

Then, this January, Doctor Conrad was out of town and his partner’s nurse called Daddy, “I don’t want to freak you out, Mr. Jennings, but your creatinine spiked up to 2.6. That’s Stage 4 CKD.”

She had him stop taking Lisinopril, a blood pressure medicine. No one yet knew the cause of the problem, but he had lost over 70% of his kidney function in six months. No, that’s not accurate. My mother said, “Men start losing one percent of their kidney function each year beginning in their 30s or 40s.”

In any case, Daddy was down to around 29%.

My mother went into full battle mode. Accompanied Daddy to his chest and stomach ultrasound test — fortunately, no occlusions. Followed by a visit to the hematologist in St. Luke’s oncology ward.

She said, “He only has one CKD symptom — foamy urine. No weight loss, no swollen ankles, no shortness of breath.”

“What about trouble sleeping?” I’d done a little research of my own.

“No, he’s fine there. No itchy skin, just that fucking foamy urine.”

The next step — a kidney biopsy. Which entailed another ultrasound, this one from the back. Well, Daddy’s cortex turned out to be too thin — only 4 or 5 millimeters; the risk of puncturing something and causing internal bleeding outweighed any potential benefits from the biopsy.

So.

After breakfast in a Binghamton diner, Flynn Gallagher said, “I have a reciprocity membership with the local gun club. Want to fire a few practice rounds?”

“You know how to show a girl a good time.”

“C’mon, let’s see what you got. I know you used to be a cop.”

Binion’s Armory was just outside of town in what looked like a former military building of some sort. Three-stories tall, red brick, shaped in a huge arch. As Flynn signed in, I noticed the club offered a little bit of everything — archery, skeet, and an outdoor rifle range.

I signed out a S & W .38 with a four-inch barrel, just like the one at home. Of course, it wasn’t the same gun so I’d be at a slight disadvantage. I knew that Flynn would be facing the same challenge with the G17 he’d selected. Not that we were in a competition; it was just a friendly little interlude until it was time to meet with Bianca Uribe.

I was determined to beat the fucker. He had no way of knowing that Daddy and I practiced at the KCPD range on Main almost every week. And that Ash had sent me to Quantico, to the famed Hogan’s Alley for specialized training from an FBI instructor.

Flynn nodded at the paper targets, “Cops practice at nine yards. You do that and I’ll shoot at fifteen. Loser buys lunch.”

Cocksucker wanted to beat the girl. Wanted to show off.

We put on our acoustic earmuffs and Flynn went first. He got into a pretty good two-handed stance, but I could tell that his right arm was just a little off. Sure enough, he only put two rounds into the three-inch bullseye. The recoil was forcing the barrel of the Glock up, not pushing his shoulder back like a piston.

Still, all seventeen rounds were grouped pretty tightly. Not bad. Fucker.

I gathered myself, slowed my breathing, and focused on the target. My handgun pulled just slightly to the right and I immediately adjusted for it, taking care not to overcompensate. My cluster was far tighter than Flynn’s — every shot in or close to the bullseye.

He stared at me, “Huh.”

He looked from my target, back to me, “Huh. Guess I’m buying lunch then.”

“Oh no, this was just the warmup. We both need to shoot the same distance — fifteen yards.”

Fresh targets, earphones, Flynn went first again. Was it my imagination or did he have a little less pep in his step?

Forty minutes later, he hadn’t won one round. I had thought about letting him, but it would have been too obvious by the time that small courtesy occurred to me.

Finally, he said, “Okay, what do you know that I don’t?”

I tapped the inside tip of his trigger finger, “This is the part — the last bone, right where your fingerprint is — that should pull the trigger. Your finger is just a fraction too forward — that tugs your Glock to the side. Just a hair.”

I spoke kindly, not a hint of triumph in my voice. Nor did I mention that I could easily clean and reassemble my pistol blindfolded. Friendly competition, my Aunt Fanny.

The meeting with Bianca Uribe in Binghamton was interesting. She was one ticked-off college student. A real firecracker. Feisty.

Flynn had an easy way with her; I guess from knowing Bianca and her mother back when he was stationed up in Harlem.

“Do you need any money, Bianca? You know, day-to-day stuff?”

“No, thank you. The student loan department that manages my scholarship fronted me enough cash. You gonna find this fucker?”

A charming, lilting Spanish accent. Even though she’d been born in New York, she grew up surrounded by family and friends of Puerto Rican descent. She was slender with copper-colored skin and black hair. Only a little over five feet tall, and very pretty with enormous black eyes.

Flynn opened his case and said, “We’re working on it. Here’s your laptop back.”

“Your friend did the whatda-ya call it search?”

“Forensic search. She thinks the scam may have originated with a spam e-mail for a free belly holster.”

Bianca patted the laptop and sighed, “Mama and I shared this old Dell. She didn’t know any better and clicked on ‘Unsubscribe’ for about a thousand e-mails.”

“Which just alerted the spammer that he had a valid and active address.”

“She’s not used to computers.”

“I understand. But it also could have been a way for Mr. Spammer to take her to a malicious website that downloaded malware onto your computer. And, it could have tricked her into falling for a scam offer of some sort.”

“She didn’t do that. Mamacita just likes to text her friends and cousins, exchange photos.”

Throughout the brief meeting, Bianca kept glancing from Flynn to me, me to Flynn, wondering.

He had told me a little about Bianca, but I began to get a real sense of her when she gave us some background info.

When I got home, I typed up everything I could remember for my Uribe case file. In her words:

_Growing up in Spanish Harlem, I could never remember a day without music. We lived in a fourth-floor walkup on East 102nd Street.

The music varied from day to day — salsa, danza, Puerto Rican pop. Reggaeton, bolero, merengue, guaracha. My earliest memories included a tinny portable kitchen radio. Over the years, the delivery systems would evolve from analog to digital. But, always, the music.

I’ve always had a lively attitude. Okay, a fiery temper. No idea where I got it. My mother, Emilia, is mild-mannered, almost subservient. A lifetime of cleaning houses for white families, of working in corner bodegas, of stocking shelves for Korean greengrocers.

My father?

Emilia wasn’t sure. “It was one of three men — Mateo, Santiago, Rio.”

All names ending in ‘o’. Maybe someday I’ll go down to Puerto Rico and do some investigating. I was conceived there, but my mother came to New York to live with three cousins when she found out she was pregnant. She wanted her child to be born in America, and I’m glad she did.

My temper. I curse equally foully in Spanish and English. I’ve faced down mean girls and bully boys at school. At first, they were astonished that an angel-faced girl would go Terminator on them.

Oh, I could exercise some impulse control, but only up to the point where someone pushed me too far. I didn’t win every fight in the East Harlem Scholars Academies, but they knew they’d been in a war. By the time I reached middle school, most kids were either friendly to me, or gave me a wide berth.

Now that I’m 18 and in college, I’ll try to tone things down, keep things under control. I’m on a full scholarship and I don’t want to fuck that up.

No promises, though._

Back in Connecticut, Flynn and I were sitting in a neighborhood bar, near the Stamford train station. We each had a frozen daiquiri — mango. I had about 45 minutes before catching a ride to Grand Central. Where Clint Callahan would meet me. For my last night on the East Coast.

While I was a yappy broad, I sometimes did pay attention. And listened, especially when the intel was coming from someone I respected. Did that mean I respected Flynn Gallagher?

Hmm ... maybe. A retired cop. That Black-Irish countenance — handsome, but more than that. Intelligent eyes. Of course, the fact that he’d like to slide my knickers off was another factor to ... um, factor in. And, he laughed at my jokes — all the major food groups.

Even though he had retired, he kept up with the cop-shop grapevine through family and friends.

We were discussing crime, and the prevention thereof. And, perp-capture.

He said, “Fingerprints. You probably know how the details work.”

“Hmm.”

“We still use a glue box. You know, an airtight Plexiglass chamber where we boil superglue and other toxins to bring out fingerprints from an object. Like a gun.”

“Oh sure.”

“Of course fingerprints are nothing but sweat.”

“Of course.”

“When the water evaporates in the glue box, it leaves an organic residue — you know, amino acids, glucose, lactic acids, like that.”

I nodded knowingly.

“Then we vent the chamber to clear out the fumes. The white residue left on the object reveals smudges — each one a singular print. Naturally, that’s just the start of identifying who the skell is.”

“Naturally.”

“We photograph the prints with a high-resolution digital scanner and feed the pictures into a computer with dedicated software. Software that identifies and charts the characteristic points. Like a double-loop core, a clean tentarch, maybe a couple of isles.”

“Yep.”

“As you know, the FBI’s National Crime Information System doesn’t compare photos of fingerprints. It computes a numerical list of characteristic points. At that juncture, the NCIS is simply looking at numbers. Which makes it fast and easy to find matches.”

Figuring I should be contributing a little more to the conversation, I said, “The technology keeps getting better and better.”

Flynn looked at me for a long moment.

“Well, the fingerprint ID-process is pretty rudimentary compared with what DARPA and some law enforcement agencies are doing these days.”

Time to stop faking it, “DARPA?”

“The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It’s the Pentagon’s famous R & D hub.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“The last several years have been a race to develop and enhance what the military calls Automated Fusion.”

“Automated Fusion?”

Flynn smiled that killer smile, “Some call it the God View. Look at all of the eyes that track us — license plate readers, smartphones, drones, security cams.”

“No such thing as privacy anymore.”

“Yeah, but all of those eyes are working independently of each other. The Holy Grail is multi-intelligence fusion — braiding together all of the strands of previously-discrete surveillance data.”

“How would that even work?”

“Well, law enforcement — we found ourselves in a position that security analysts called surveillance overload — data-rich, but information-poor. We had a lot of individual pieces of info, but not much of a big picture.”

“So...?”

“Okay. Here’s one example. There’s a software program called Citigraf — a map that shows, say, a Chicago neighborhood.”

“Got it.”

“Citigraf also shows live streams from CCTV cameras, gunshot reports, a house fire — and it ties into 911 calls at the same time.”

“Wow.”

“An improvement, but still not quite the overall picture in real-time.”

“Okay.”

“So the Pentagon saw the need to create a software platform that was capable of integrating all available data — say of a Syrian war zone — into a single interface.” Flynn smiled again — a dangerous smile, one I was certain had disarmed many a disingenuous maiden.

He said, “Know what they did?”

“What?”

“Went to the video game industry — companies like DreamWorks Interactive — and contracted with some of the best coders in the world.”

“Like Medal of Honor — my son plays that. I think.”

“Exactly like that. At the same time, the surveillance technology itself keeps getting better and better. There’s a laser that can ID you from over 200 yards simply by measuring your heartbeat.”

“You’re kidding!”

“Nope. There’s also an easy hack that makes your smartphone spy on anything in the neighborhood that has a Bluetooth connection. Like Fitbit, or even a smart appliance.”

“Fuck.”

“Software that alerts the cops if you suddenly break into a run near a CCTV camera.”

“That could be useful — someone fleeing the scene of a crime.”

“You’re right. Now in New York we have a software program called Patternizr. It feeds in more than ten years of department data — it includes pattern-recognition algorithms that search property and personal violations for anything related to a recent crime.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, the method of the break-in, time of day, neighborhood, the type of force used, like that. That means that a team rolling on, say, a domestic beef, will know the players, their 911 history, recent arrests, hospital records, a pretty thorough picture before they even arrive on the scene.”

“Huh.”

“But that’s just another tool in the kit. The real magic — for both the military and law enforcement — is fusing all the elements into one platform that’s damn near omniscient.”

“So it’s a software challenge.”

Flynn was really getting into it. Me too. “Yes. But part of that challenge is integrating hard data like GPS coordinates with soft data like terrorist watch lists and informants’ reports.”

“Oh.”

“Back to my old department. They now have smartphone software — it’s called the Domain Awareness System. It’s a fusion application that’s available to all 36,000 officers.”

“Wow.”

“But that’s just one snapshot. Imagine a giant correlation engine. Remember, that before they started working on automated fusion, all of our digital data points were scattered over multiple platforms.”

I nodded.

“And now those individual pieces of info are becoming a single, uninterrupted biography. We’re starting to see the whole picture.”

“The God View.”

“Hey, you do listen.”

“That’s not all I do.”

Now, why the fuck did I say that?

In any case, I wanted this to be more of a two-way conversation, so I said, “There’s another way, a broader way, to look at intelligence gathering. In the civilian world.”

“Oh, what’s that?”

“Pixels, cookies, and fingerprints — in other words, surveillance capitalism.”

Flynn looked at me with interest. Perhaps he was seeing more than a blonde girl with nice tits. “Surveillance capitalism?”

“Yeah, as applied to digital advertising. Targeted digital advertising.”

“Like the other day I searched for XYZ hiking boots.”

“Exactly. That site probably deposited a cookie in your browser. But it goes far beyond that. It scoops up so much information about you that it’s called digital exhaust.”

“Oh?”

“The machine-learning systems are actually getting to the point where they can predict your behavior.”

“Like Google and Facebook.”