Save Me from Dangerous Men (Nikki Griffin #1)(108)
He nodded. “Surveillance, Nikki, was the last thing we needed you for.”
“So why expose your company to this kind of risk? Why not just make money by selling your system to countries who would actually have used it to make their populations safer? Why deal with the worst of the worst?” Pulling the .357 from the file cabinet and killing Joseph would take less than a single second. If he tied his shoe. If he blew his nose. If he got an eyelash in his eye. None of those things happened. Joseph’s eyes never left me.
Oliver drummed his hand against his thigh impatiently. “Don’t you get it? You practically answered your own question. Do you not understand that my company has made an extraordinary and unprecedented technological advance? Our system will fundamentally change the way we live. How can you not see that?” His normally forgettable voice had taken on a new quality and his eyes shone. “To know where people are, to be able to locate them anywhere—can you not see how limitless that power is? A child strays away from his mother—feed a photograph of his face into the system and he’s found, probably within seconds. A criminal goes on a rampage—police find him instantly. A child molester wanders near a playground, a convicted bank robber shows up near a bank, and real-time alerts are triggered. And the system keeps getting smarter, learns to recognize new things, teaches itself at an exponential rate. Eventually far faster than a human could ever learn. Crime can be virtually eradicated—but not just crime. Think of public health! Someone walking around with influenza, exhibiting symptoms of some highly contagious disease—they can be taken away for treatment or quarantine before they infect others. A drunk driver could be recognized and stopped before he ever gets in his car. All the chaos and unpleasantness of the world can be addressed and fixed.” He took a breath. “Are you starting to see what I mean, Nikki?”
“What does that have to do with a dictatorship murdering a journalist?”
Oliver’s voice smoothed out, became patient, as though he was explaining things to a child. “We’re addressing problems on a global scale. For this to work we can’t pick and choose. You can see that. We need our network to spread everywhere, all over the world. It’s useless if we can only see here and there. The more it sees, the more it learns, the faster it teaches itself. We don’t have the luxury of cherry-picking who we work with. You think we want clients to abuse our system? Of course not. But what we created has to be allowed to take root, and if you want to call a tiny handful of people growing pains, so be it.”
“Innocent people,” I pointed out.
“You know how many lives we’ve already saved?” Oliver retorted heatedly. “Far more than the number being threatened, I promise. And there are some very high-up officials in our own government and military who have shown themselves to be extremely receptive and supportive of what we are doing.”
“Assholes in government, there’s a shocker,” I observed drily.
“Come on, Nikki! We turn a blind eye to far worse every day! You know how many dictatorships, how many human rights abuses, our country looks away from, ignores, every day, in the interests of national security?”
I leaned back comfortably and used the penknife to trim at a hangnail. “It feels so good being right.”
He wasn’t done. “Like I said, you were too good. We never thought you’d find out so much so fast. That was the only thing that surprised us—well, that, and how personally you took the Li woman’s death. We didn’t understand that. You barely knew her. She didn’t matter—certainly not to you, of all people.”
“She did, though. That’s the thing. She mattered a lot to me.”
Oliver’s face lost its animation and grew disinterested. “No point in splitting hairs. We need to wrap things up. Actually, the biggest surprise to me was that you were foolish enough to get trapped here tonight. Such a basic mistake, and at such a crucial moment. I had grown fond of seeing your resourcefulness in action, truth be told. I expected more from you. I still can’t figure out why you allowed yourself to be so careless when it mattered most.”
“Maybe you should have asked yourself that an hour ago.”
“Huh?” He peered at me, bewildered. “It’s doesn’t matter. We’re here.”
“Exactly. We’re here.” I slowly reached for the open book on the file cabinet. “Don’t worry, it’s a book,” I called to Joseph as his gun inched up. “It can’t hurt you.”
I moved the book aside, revealing a little white object that looked like a golf ball.
“Look familiar?”
Oliver’s face changed. “That’s not—”
“When Gunn gave it to me, the day he hired me, I didn’t know what to do with it. So I just left it sitting in my office. Then, later, I could never figure out one thing. When Joseph and his friends grabbed me at the bookstore, they didn’t walk in randomly. They waited until after I had gone upstairs and settled in. The timing seemed too perfect. But they didn’t know someone else was hiding in the store, downstairs. Like they could only see into my office on the second floor. And on the ferry, you seemed surprised that I had Karen’s photographs, but not that surprised. Not as much as I would have thought. Because I had looked at the photos in my office. I realized that this little sucker had been streaming live audio and video the whole time. Gunn gifted me a Trojan horse. The oldest trick in the book, and I fell for it.”