Fifty Degrees Below

‘What?’

She said, ‘Tell me this. Why did you follow me into that elevator?’

Frank had not known she had noticed that. ‘Well! I … I liked the way you looked.’

She nodded, looked away. ‘I thought so.’ A tiny smile, a sigh: ‘Look,’ she said, and stared down at her hands. She fiddled with the ring on her left ring finger.

‘What?’

‘You’re being watched.’ She looked up, met his gaze. ‘Do you know that?’

‘No! But what do you mean?’

‘You’re under surveillance.’

Frank sat up straighter, shifted back and away from her. ‘By whom?’

She almost shrugged. ‘It’s part of Homeland Security.’

‘What?’

‘An agency that works with Homeland Security.’

‘And how do you know?’

‘Because you were assigned to me.’

Frank swallowed involuntarily. ‘When was this?’

‘About a year ago. When you first came to NSF.’

Frank sat back even further. She reached a hand toward him. He shivered; the night seemed suddenly chill. He couldn’t quite come to grips with what she was saying. ‘Why?’

She reached farther, put her hand lightly on his knee. ‘Listen, it’s not like what you’re thinking.’

‘I don’t know what I’m thinking!’

She smiled. The touch of her hand said more than anything words could convey, but right now it only added to Frank’s confusion.

She saw this and said, ‘I monitor a lot of people. You were one of them. It’s not really that big of a deal. You’re part of a crowd, really. People in certain emerging technologies. It’s not direct surveillance. I mean no one is watching you or anything like that. It’s a matter of tracking your records, mostly.’

‘That’s all?’

‘Well – no. E-mail, where you call, expenditures – that sort of thing. A lot of it’s automated. Like with your credit rating. It’s just a kind of monitoring, looking for patterns.’

‘Uh huh,’ Frank said, feeling less disturbed, but also reviewing things he might have said on the phone, to Derek Gaspar for instance. ‘But look, why me?’

‘I don’t get told why. But I looked into it a little after we met, and my guess would be that you’re an associational.’

‘Meaning?’

‘That you have some kind of connection with a Yann Pierzinski.’

‘Ahhhhh?’ Frank said, thinking furiously.

‘That’s what I think, anyway. You’re one of a group that’s being monitored together, and they all tend to have some kind of connection with him. He’s the hub.’

‘It must be his algorithm.’

‘Maybe so. Really I don’t know. I don’t make the determinations of interest.’

‘Who does?’

‘People above me. Some of them I know, and then others above those. The agency is pretty firewalled.’

‘It must be his algorithm. That’s the main thing he’s worked on ever since his doctoral work.’

‘Maybe so. The people I work for use an algorithm themselves, to identify people who should be tracked.’

‘Really? Do you know what kind?’

‘No. I do know that they’re running a futures market. You know what those are?’

Frank shook his head. ‘Like that Poindexter thing?’

‘Yes, sort of. He had to resign, and really he should have, because that was stupid what he was doing. But the idea of using futures markets itself has gone forward.’

‘So they’re betting on future acts of terrorism?’

‘No no. That was the stupid part, putting it like that. There’s much better ways to use those programs. They’re just futures markets, when you design them right. They’re like any other futures market. It’s a powerful way to collate information. They out-perform most of the other predictive methods we use.’

‘That’s hard to believe.’

‘Is it?’ She shrugged. ‘Well, the people I work for believe in them. But the one they’ve set up is a bit different than the standard futures market. It’s not open to anyone, and it isn’t even real money. It’s like a virtual futures market, a simulation. There are these people at MIT who think they have it working really well, and they’ve got some real-world results they can point to. They focus on people rather than events, so really it’s a people futures market, instead of commodities or ideas. So Homeland Security and associated agencies like ours have gotten interested. We’ve got this program going, and now you’re part of it. It’s almost a pilot program, but it’s big, and I bet it’s here to stay.’

‘Is it legal?’

‘It’s hard to say what’s legal these days, don’t you think? At least concerning surveillance. A determination of interest usually comes from the Justice Department, or is approved by it. It’s classified, and we’re a black program that no one on the outside will ever hear about. People who try to publish articles about idea futures markets, or people futures markets, are discouraged from doing so. It can get pretty explicit. I think my bosses hope to keep using the program without it ever causing any fuss.’

‘So there are people betting on who will do innovative work, or defect to China, or like that?’

‘Yes. Like that. There are lots of different criteria.’

‘Jesus,’ Frank said, shaking his head in amazement. ‘But, I mean – who in the hell would bet on me?’

She laughed. ‘I would, right?’

Frank put his hand on top of hers and squeezed it.