The Broken Window

beginning.”
    “Do you have any thoughts? Maybe any employees with a troubling past? Violent?”
    “It’s been a few years. And I never thought anybody was particularly dangerous. Though, I’ve got to say, despite the big happy family façade Sterling likes to put on, I never really got to know anyone there.”
    “What about these individuals?” She showed him the list of suspects.
    Geddes looked it over. “I worked with Gillespie. I knew Cassel. I don’t like either of them. They’re caught up in the whole data-mining curve, like Silicon Valley in the nineties. Hotshots. I don’t know the others. Sorry.” Then he studied her closely. “So you’vebeen there?” he asked with a cool smile. “What’d you think of Andrew?”
    Her thoughts jammed as she tried to come up with a brief summary of her impressions. Finally: “Determined, polite, inquisitive, smart but . . .” Her voice petered out.
    “But you don’t really know him.”
    “Right.”
    “Because he presents the great stone face. In all the years I worked with him I never really knew him. Nobody knows him. Unfathomable. I love that word. That’s Andrew. I was always looking for clues. . . . You notice something odd about his bookshelves?”
    “You couldn’t see the spines of the books.”
    “Exactly. I snuck a peek once. Guess what? They weren’t about computers or privacy or data or business. They were mostly history books, philosophy, politics: the Roman Empire, Chinese emperors, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Stalin, Idi Amin, Khrushchev. He read a lot about the Nazis. Nobody used information the way they did and Andrew doesn’t hesitate to tell you. First major use of computers to keep track of ethnic groups. That’s how they consolidated power. Sterling’s doing the same in the corporate world. Notice the company name, SSD? The rumor is he chose it intentionally. SS—for the Nazi elite army. SD—for their security and intelligence agency. You know what his competitors say it stands for? ‘Selling Souls for Dollars.’ ” Geddes laughed grimly.
    “Oh, don’t get me wrong. Andrew doesn’t dislike Jews. Or any other group. Politics, nationality, religionand race mean nothing to him. I heard him say once, ‘Data have no borders.’ The seat of power in the twenty-first century is information, not oil or geography. And Andrew Sterling wants to be the most powerful man on earth. . . . I’m sure he gave you the data-mining-is-God speech.”
    “Saving us from diabetes, helping us afford Christmas presents and houses and solving cases for the police?”
    “That’s the one. And all of it’s true. But tell me if those benefits are worth somebody knowing every detail about your life. Maybe you don’t care, provided you save a few bucks. But do you really want ConsumerChoice lasers scanning your eyes in a movie theater and recording your reactions to those commercials they run before the movie? Do you want the RFID tag in your car key to be available to the police to know that you hit a hundred miles an hour last week, when your route only took you along roads that were posted fifty? Do you want strangers knowing what kind of underwear your daughter wears? Or exactly when you’re having sex?”
    “What?”
    “Well, innerCircle knows you bought condoms and KY this afternoon and your husband was on the six-fifteen E train home. It knows you’ve got the evening free because your son’s at the Mets game and your daughter’s buying clothes at The Gap in the Village. It knows you put on cable-TV porn at seven-eighteen. And that you order some nice tasty postcoital takeout Chinese at quarter to ten. That information is all there.
    “Oh, SSD knows if your children are maladjusted in school and when to send you direct-mail flyers abouttutors and child-counseling services. If your husband is having trouble in the bedroom and when to send him discreet flyers about erectile dysfunction cures. When your family history, buying patterns and absences from work put you in a presuicidal profile—”
    “But that’s good. So a counselor can help you.”
    Geddes gave a cold laugh. “Wrong. Because counseling potential suicide victims isn’t profitable. SSD sends the name to local funeral homes and grief counselors—who could snag all of the family as customers, not just a single depressed person after he shoots himself. And, by the way, that was a very lucrative venture.”
    Sachs was shocked.
    “Did you hear about