Save Me from Dangerous Men (Nikki Griffin #1)(104)

I used a key on my key ring to open the padlock on the front door and we walked into a bleak grid of hallways, rolling garage-style doors set at intervals. The fluorescent lighting was spotty. Some of the light panels flickered and other patches seemed aggressive, as though they were cannibalistically leaching wattage from the sick ones. The walls were an ugly institutional green that had probably gotten a fresh coat of paint back around the first Gulf War. Oliver looked around suspiciously. “What are you showing me, anyway? You found something new?”

I stopped at one of the doors, unlocked it, and we stepped into a room that was twenty-five feet by ten feet. The room was filled floor to ceiling with books stacked in triple rows along cheap wood shelves, more books rising in vertical stacks set upon the topmost shelf. The books far exceeded the shelf space and the overburdened bookcases craned forward with excess weight. The walls of the storage unit were cement and so, rather than bolting the shelves to the wall, I had run restraining lengths of yellow nylon rope across the front of the shelves to stop them from tipping over. With the weight of the books pressed against them, the ropes were taut as guitar strings. More books were piled on the floor, rising in places to waist height and creating an overgrown jungle effect.

“What is this place?” Oliver wondered.

I sat on a mint-colored file cabinet against one wall, moving an open paperback copy of The Iliad to make room. “I run a bookstore, remember?” It felt strange having someone else in the room with me. I was used to being alone here. I liked it better that way, I was deciding.

Oliver shook his head impatiently. “The last thing we should be talking about is books. What did you learn? What’s being planned? Is it an attack like we thought? Who’s the target?”

“Right. An attack. What we talked about on the ferry—that the people in the photographs were some kind of terrorist cell, that there was some kind of attack being planned overseas. An attack that would happen tomorrow, November first. No one seemed to really know anything for sure, but everyone was guessing at the same thing. That was the part I didn’t like, actually.”

He was confused. “What do you mean, didn’t like?”

“I tend not to trust anything that seems too certain.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Someone recently reminded me of something I’d said once. That everyone makes assumptions, and the only question is if they’re right or not. Take this, for instance. Everyone seemed to assume that the people in the photographs were up to no good. Criminals, extremists, whatever. Even the FBI was convinced there was some kind of plot, and they hadn’t even seen the In Retentis photos. They were just guessing off the bits and pieces Karen Li had shared, assuming some kind of terrorism connection. Guesswork based on where Gunn was traveling and the fact that she’d told them something bad would take place on the first of November.”

“FBI?” He was startled. “What? Since when have you been talking to the FBI?”

“Come on, Oliver, don’t get coy at the eleventh hour. You have to know the FBI are actively investigating your company.”

“Fine,” he allowed. “I’ve heard rumors. But weren’t we right?”

I thought of the Egyptian blogger with the missing tooth. Jumping off a roof, leaving his wife and children behind. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The governments that Care4 has been dealing with—the places Gunn’s been visiting, the places in the photographs. Saudi Arabia, Chechnya, Egypt, Iraq … sure, they’re hotspots for extremism, terrorist activity. They also have something else in common.”

“Which is?”

“They all happen to be some of the worst violators of human rights in the world.”

Oliver took off his hat, sat down on a pile of books, and wriggled around, trying to get comfortable. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“I started wondering. What if we were coming at it from the exact opposite angle that we should be? What if none of the people in those pictures were bad guys after all? Flip the assumption. What if the bad guys were after them?”

He looked more confused than ever. “Why would they be?”

“Human rights and LGBT activists, anticorruption bloggers, journalists. In the States, maybe you get some nasty tweets aimed your way. In these countries?” I thought again of the man with the missing tooth. “You get pushed off a rooftop.”

“But if it’s not a pending attack, what is it?”

“Care4’s real business isn’t the cameras or the baby monitor stuff that your PR people hype. That’s common knowledge within the company. Practically everyone must know the surveillance game is your bread and butter.”

Oliver’s face showed no disagreement. “Like you said, common knowledge. But what does surveillance have to do with November first?”

“I’ll get there. For years the company has been pouring money into deep neural network research. Care4 wanted to become the first company in the world to create a surveillance system that wouldn’t just operate without needing any human control but one that could actively teach itself to get better at finding people.”

“I think I might know a bit more about that field than you do,” Oliver said mildly. His phone beeped from a pocket. He took it out, jabbed a quick reply, put it away.