“Yeah, I get that a lot,” said Julian as we entered his office. “Or at least from the few people who have actually been inside here.”
It wasn’t the massive terminals or the fact that Julian’s giant “desk” was made from the wing of an old Fokker Eindecker, the first German fighter plane. No, what had Elizabeth’s jaw nearly scraping the floor was the view. In an otherwise windowless room in a windowless warehouse, the four walls in Julian’s office, as well as the ceiling, were one seamless projection screen capable of carrying a live feed from any Internet, satellite, or LAN-based camera that Julian chose to hack into. At the moment we were floating in space above the earth. It was insanely cool.
“Russian satellite?” I asked.
“Chinese, actually,” he said. “A stealth beta launch of their Tiangong space station. It’s comical: their firewalls are like rice paper.”
Julian sat down behind a double row of screens and a single keyboard. His chair was the only one in the room. Again, he almost never had company.
“Thanks for doing this,” I said. “Especially on such short notice.”
“It wasn’t as short as you think,” he said. “The Eagle gave me the heads-up that you might be calling. He now thinks this is related to one of your past assignments.”
“It’s not,” I said.
“Are you sure?” Julian asked. “He’s convinced.”
“The Eagle still thinks we faked the moon landing,” I said.
“Well, if there was ever a guy who would know,” said Julian before making a few taps on his keyboard. Poof, we were no longer floating in space. Now the entire room was the rotunda of the National Archives Building, in DC. It was a live feed from one of the security cameras aimed at the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights. “So whose civil liberties will we be violating today?” he asked.
Julian plus whiskey always equaled a wicked sense of humor.
I glanced over at Elizabeth, who still seemed undecided as to how surprised she was supposed to act after Julian referenced my “past assignments.”
“Relax,” I told her. “I know you know.”
“You do?” she asked. “Wait, what exactly do you think I know?”
“Nice try,” I said. She was a born detective, seeing if she could get something more out of me.
“How would she know?” asked Julian. “You sure as hell didn’t tell her.”
“Apparently you’re not the only hacker in the world,” I said.
“No,” said Julian. “Just the best.” He meant it, too.
Then he proved it.
Chapter 72
“HERE—THESE are all the victims so far,” I said, handing Julian a list. Or so I tried to. He waved me off.
“I already created files on each and every one,” he said. “The only thing missing is some brilliant insight as to what we’re looking for.”
That was my cue.
“The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law,” I began. “The AP Stylebook, for short.”
Julian immediately raised a sarcastic finger. “One second,” he said. He poured himself some more whiskey. “Okay, Columbo, now I’m ready.”
I raised a finger, too. My middle one. That got a rare smile out of Julian. He loved busting my American chops.
I continued. “The AP Stylebook was first created in the mid-1950s as a language guide for newspapers, a way to establish uniformity of grammar, punctuation, and usage. It’s been revised annually, but it’s always been the bible for the news industry. Like any bible, it has its quirks, one of them being the use of the term innocent versus not guilty.”
“I always wondered about that,” said Elizabeth. “Papers always used to get it wrong.”
“You’re right, and they knew it, too,” I said. “For decades, newspapers would always write ‘innocent’ instead of ‘not guilty,’ not because they didn’t know the difference in the legal sense but because they were afraid of a disastrous typo.”
“What do you mean?” asked Elizabeth.
“If a writer or an editor or a typesetter left off the word not, suddenly the paper would be declaring someone guilty instead of not guilty,” I said.
“For real?” asked Julian. “This AP book says to use the word innocent simply to avoid that possibility?”
“For close to a half century, that’s exactly what it said,” I replied.
Julian took another swig. “Okay, but I’m going to run out of whiskey, Dylan.” Translation: What’s the point?
“The AP has since changed the rule. However, long before they did, there was a young reporter who refused to follow it. In fact, he made a big stink about it in the wake of the O. J. Simpson trial.”
“You’re kidding me,” said Elizabeth. “Grimes?”
“Exactly,” I said. “Back when he was just Allen Grimes, before Grimes on Crimes.”
“How did you know that?” she asked.
“I didn’t,” I said. “The Dealer said something on the phone with me, though. He said, This isn’t about the innocent.”
Julian nearly dropped his whiskey glass he was in such a hurry to return to his keyboard.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered. “That’s it, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said. “I believe it is.”
Chapter 73
I’D KNOWN Julian for ten years, approximately nine longer than necessary to understand exactly what he was doing at that very moment. Elizabeth, on the other hand, was still out in space. The dark side of the moon, in fact.
“What the hell is going on?” she asked.
“You and I looked at the criminal records of all the victims,” I said. “Some had been arrested, but not all of them. One or two had been convicted of petty crimes, but again, not all of them. We didn’t see a pattern, and we moved on.”
“There is one?” she asked. “A pattern?”
“I’m almost sure of it,” I said.
She raised an eyebrow. “Almost?”
“SARA will tell us,” said Julian without looking up from his keyboard.
Poof, we were back on earth again. Julian’s walls were now displaying direct feeds from the multiple screens on his desk, his entire office engaging in a game of This Is Your Life with each and every victim. Only this version of the game was unlike any other.
Elizabeth leaned over to me. “Who’s Sara?” she whispered.
I thought it was an acronym the first time Julian mentioned the name. Short for “search all restricted accounts” or something like that. Instead SARA—the program—was named for Julian’s older sister. “She was always such a bloody know-it-all when we were growing up,” he had told me.
That was the program, all right. The ultimate know-it-all.
In fact there was a rumor when I first met Julian that Steve Jobs had somehow heard about it and named Siri as a tip of the hat to him. Of course, neither Julian nor Jobs ever had a word to say about that.
I turned to Elizabeth. “Just watch.”
Julian’s walls were churning through an endless stream of pages, so fast that Elizabeth didn’t notice at first that this was more than simply a Google search on steroids. This was sealed court documents—city, county, state, and federal. This was unfiled depositions. This was the ultimate digital crowbar into the legal troubles of all the victims: Jared Louden, Bryce VonMiller, Rick Thorsen, Cynthia Chadd, Colton Lange, and Jackie Palmer.