UP POPS SOME kind of multimedia file, maybe it’s a Word document or a PowerPoint, I can’t keep track of all the formats. It’s got a heading:
Google Mayes County, OK, Data Center, server #194657298.
Encryption code: A278444fSandoval93210
Then there is an image of a map of the United States. Each state is denoted simply by its shorthand initials, CA for California, OH for Ohio, and so forth. It looks meaningless, surely, on its face, nothing someone would kill for.
I run my cursor over the map, and, when I reach the first state, which is Maine, something happens: a little dialogue box pops up. Inside it reads: US SEN.: Andreeson (D) v. Sonol (R). Below that line, another heading in smaller font: HOUSE SEATS, and then a handful of more sets of names, like Johnson (D) V. Kyle (R), and Fern (D) V. Everson (R).
I’m looking at an electoral map of some kind.
I hear a noise outside the car and see a woman across the street with a barking dog on her leash. She’s glancing my direction, and it takes me a second to realize why. I’m stuffed into this car like a Boa constrictor in a snail shell, and with a laptop perched on my steering wheel. She looks away and keeps walking. In San Francisco, it probably dawns on her, there’s no length someone won’t go to check their laptop, no matter how uncomfortable the physical position required.
I return to the electoral map. I notice that each name in each of the elections is underlined, a hyperlink. I click on the first name, Andreeson, vaguely recalling that he’s the Democrat in a tight senate race in Maine.
A new window pops open on the right half of the screen. It takes a second for the format to come into focus. I’m looking at a document with four columns across the top. Left to right, the columns read: DATE, IP ADDRESS, SEARCH TERM DETAILS, HYPOCRISY POTENTIAL.
I increase this window so that it takes up the entire screen.
I look at the first few lines in the document:
DATE IP ADDRESS SEARCH TERM HYPOCRISY POTENTIAL
2/27/11 174.16.258.1 How to bake chicken Unlikely
2/27/11 174.16.258.1 Tiffany’s bracelet Low
2/27/11 172.16.254.1 Bifocals Low/Modest
3/01/11 172.16.254.1 Portland, ME weather Unlikely
3/02/11 172.16.254.1 Portland, ME weather Unlikely
The list goes on and on, pages upon pages. Hundreds of entries like this that cause my eyes to glaze over. I’m trying to make sense of it, looking for some handrail, when several entries catch my eye.
DATE IP ADDRESS SEARCH TERM HYPOCRISY POTENTIAL
6/31/11 174.16.258.1 Avoid Alt Min Tax POSSIBLE/CHECK
6/31/11 174.16.258.1 Alt Min Tax Loophole POSSIBLE/CHECK
I’m drawn to these entries both because of the “hypocrisy potential”—the only ones I’ve seen so far that read “possible”—and because “POSSIBLE” is in all caps. This, evidently, is important.
I’ve covered business long enough to strongly suspect what the “Alt Min Tax” stands for: Alternative Minimum Tax. It’s a pain-in-the-rear tax that can really nail people in the upper-middle bracket.
I think what I’m looking at is that someone has done an Internet search about how to avoid paying this tax. Not just someone, but Dan Andreeson, the Democrat running for senate in Maine, or maybe someone using his computer.
I close this file. I go back to the map. I run my cursor over other states and wind up on South Dakota. Again, I get a dialogue box, with the senate race at the top and a handful of house races beneath.
In the senate race, the Democrat is Fisher, the Republican is Swan. I click on Swan. Up pops another huge laundry list. It starts.
DATE IP ADDRESS SEARCH TERM HYPOCRISY POTENTIAL
4/19/11 162.94.116.2 Cheap air fares Unlikely
4/27/11 162.94.116.2 Nike, size 10 Unlikely
4/27/11 162.94.116.2 RealClear Politics Unlikely
5/06/11 162.94.116.2 Insomnia Low/Modest
5/06/11 162.94.116.2 Signs child is gay LIKELY
I read on, through hundreds and hundreds of entries, then see:
DATE IP ADDRESS SEARCH TERM HYPOCRISY POTENTIAL
7/04/11 162.94.116.2 How long pot stays in system HIGH
7/04/11 162.94.116.2 Getting THC out of system HIGH
7/04/11 162.94.116.2 How to get THC out of body HIGHEST
7/05/11 162.94.116.2 Duping urine test HIGHEST
I pause to let myself put a fine point on what I’m seeing. It’s a list of Internet searches. “IP address”—Internet protocol, if memory serves—refers to a specific Internet connection associated with the search. In more lay terms, it is the address of a computer, a number that, in effect, signifies a specific computer. In this case, evidently, the computer belonging to a Republican candidate for the senate, or a computer in his or her household.
The search term must refer to a specific Internet search on a specific date, something that someone sought on Google or Yahoo or, what’s the name of Microsoft’s version, Bing?
That’s explosive stuff, and private. Fred’s somehow tapped into these private searches. I pass over that mind-boggling concept and consider the specific search terms.
The would-be Republican senator has looked for how long marijuana stays in the system, and how to get it out of the body, how to dupe a urine test. Previously—I glance up the search list—the candidate has searched on how to tell if a child is gay, and has made sporadic searchers about ordering OxyContin without a prescription from an overseas pharmacy. Hypocrisy potential: high.
I close the document and I click on the file for Steve Fisher, the Democrat in the South Dakota race. I skim through the mostly innocuous entries. Then I find a bunch of dates with entries like:
DATE IP ADDRESS SEARCH TERM HYPOCRISY POTENTIAL
4/04/11 162.96.561.1 Threesome video HIGH
And:
DATE IP ADDRESS SEARCH TERM HYPOCRISY POTENTIAL
4/12/11 162.96.561.1 Bondage w/blood HIGH
And:
DATE IP ADDRESS SEARCH TERM HYPOCRISY POTENTIAL
4/17/11 162.96.561.1 Violent sex HIGH
I look up from the file. I glance outside, seeing emptiness and quiet on the residential street but feeling self-conscious nonetheless. I feel like I’m holding something smoldering. It’s starting to make sense, particularly in light of the things I’d overheard Fred say about politics. He hated hypocrisy and insincerity. He said that the reason that politicians can’t solve real problems is that they can’t move beyond platitude. He wanted to use technology to bring truth to politics.
I think, sitting here squeezed into this car looking at this incredible document, that maybe he’s figured out a way to do so in the most extraordinary, and maybe most insidious, way in history.
What I’m looking at are the Internet search terms of all the people running for higher office in the United States. Somehow, Fred has managed to tap into their computers, and record hundreds, maybe thousands, of their individual searches, looking for behaviors and habits that might make them unelectable. No, that’s not right, I realize; it wasn’t that he was finding search terms that prove what makes them unelectable, but rather what makes them human.
Fred was going to expose the widespread commonality of people who cloak themselves as icons of moral purity.
Maybe.
There are some reasons to doubt the veracity and power of this document, both what it represents and whether it’s accurate. After all, even if he managed to pull up this level of surveillance, how could he prove that these aspirants of higher office were the people sitting at their computers doing the Internet searches? Could it have been their spouses, family friends, business associates? And, even if it was them sitting at the computer, couldn’t they claim otherwise?
But there is one major-league bit of evidence suggesting that this document is the real deal: someone is willing to kill for it. More than one someone.
I return to the map and do quick searches across the country, at house and senate races in California, Montana, Colorado, Georgia and Texas. Even a cursory glance shows me that, with rare exception, the documents have search terms that either are incendiary on their face or, in the hands of the right opponent or sensational media outlet, could bring shame.
I look at the clock. It’s 10:45. I’ve got to get the laptop back to Nat. I make a copy of the file and I save it to his laptop. I’m not super tech-savvy but I manage to bury the document in some file library where Nat’s unlikely to look, unless he was expressly searching there. And, without knowing what he was looking at, he’d be hard-pressed to understand it.
I’m about to close down the machine, when I realize there’s something I cannot resist. I return to the map. I run the cursor over Washington, DC. Up pops a dialogue box with the two presidential candidates.
I click on the incumbent. As the search-term list materializes, I realize that I can’t believe that Fred would have been able to record the president’s searches. First of all, the president probably doesn’t do his own searches. And, secondly, even if the president does search the Internet, there’s got to be a massive firewall in the White House that would prevent such snooping.
The file opens. I nearly chuckle. Fred’s a genius. The search terms listed are from four years earlier, from before he was elected president. And there are a couple of striking ones, not eye-popping, but eye-catching. Searches about marital discord, mild pornographic searches, a few medical conditions I’m certain he wouldn’t want the world to know he was concerned about and that would make the year of a late-night talk-show comedian. Male yeast infection? Erectile dysfunction related to stress?
I turn to the challenger. I make it past the first page when I come to a scattering of entries that almost make me blush. One refers to a sex act that some might perceive as unorthodox or even perverse. And there are a bunch of searches about how to avoid paying taxes by parking assets overseas. I can’t believe this guy. What a hypocrite.
And I’m not sure I even want to know this about him, or for that matter, about anyone else. It’s like this document is letting me look into his soul, his digital soul.
I’m about to close the challenger’s file and shut the machine when something catches my eye. Atop the challenger’s file is an icon that looks like his face. Beneath it is a file name with the extension “.mov”. Now that I think about it, I realize I’ve seen similar links inside the files of the other candidates, but with their own faces as icons.
.mov—isn’t that a movie file?
I click on it, feeling a sense of dread. Am I going to see images from the sex sites the candidate thought he was surreptitiously surfing?
The file opens. The grainy movie starts to play. It’s an image of the candidate himself, from mid-breast up. His hair looks tousled, the slick look distinctly absent; he’s got stubble, wears a white V-necked shirt. He’s facing the camera but seemingly not aware of it. He’s looking a few inches below at something that has him rapt. He doesn’t blink. He swallows hard.
On the right of the movie screen, there’s an information box. It shows a time stamp, indicating this home movie was shot about five months ago, just before 2 A.M. And there’s a web site: Barebackbabes.
No, I realize, not a home movie. The candidate didn’t realize he was being observed.
“No way,” I mutter.
I scroll back through a couple of other candidates from across the country. Most have similar movie attachments, 95 percent at least. “No fucking way, Fred,” I repeat. “How?”
I look at the laptop, near the top, the innocuous little opening that houses a camera, standard in most computers these days, used for Skype or video conferencing or whatever. “Jesus, Fred.”
But better to confirm what I’m looking at than do a wild conclusion leap.
Less than two minutes later, I’m back at the alley behind Pastime. I poke my head in and ask one of the regulars playing pool in the back if she might tell Nat I’ve got his laptop. Not long after, Nat appears. I give him his laptop.
“Pickwick is back,” he says.
“Hearty?”
“Who?”
“The big guy from before.”
He nods. I think over why he might be at the bar, even though we’re not supposed to meet for another twenty hours.
“Is this guy a source?” Nat asks.
“Not yet.”
“Is he following you?”
I don’t answer but shrug in a way that suggests affirmation.
“You have a cell phone, Z?”
“I nod.” Not mine. Fred’s.
“You might want to turn it off,” Nat says. “It’s an easy way for someone to track you. They triangulate the signal, et cetera, et cetera.”
“I miss being subject to a good old-fashioned physical stakeout.”
He laughs. “Cell-phone surveillance is standard operating procedure for the 21st-century bad guy or cop. They can track you to a general area, within about three hundred feet, but not to a precise location . . .” He pauses. “This sounds serious.”
I think about it. Maybe Hearty figured I’d be back here at some point and he wants to keep the pressure up. Or maybe this tough guy and his henchman tracked Fred’s phone. So they know I’m in the area. I feel Fred’s phone in my pocket. It’s got a sticky smudge along the bottom. Blood.
“Tell Pickwick you just saw me out back and I’m reachable on Fred’s phone.”
“Fred?”
I look away and exhale, lightly shaking my head. Not talking about it.
“You want me to call the cops?”
“I got this.”
He cocks his head, takes it in. “You want someone to ride shotgun?”
“You’ve got a pregnant gal. How’s she holding up?”
“Pauline. Polly. She’s showing. She’s tired as hell but I can’t wipe the grin off my face.”
“You looking forward to having a kid?”
“You’ve got no idea, Z.”
I love the look in his eye. I wonder if I’d have ever felt like that if I knew I was going to be a dad.
“You need a head start—before I give a heads-up to that thug?”
I shake my head.
Nat says: “I’m not sure what his medical condition is, but he’s got one. It’s going to cost him agility, leave him short of breath. Aim for the kidneys.”
It seems like he’s mostly joking. But I’m taking the counsel to heart. I head back to my car. I feel the sordid thumb drive in my pocket. I’m a tinderbox.