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“There’s a difference. Oil isn’t refined to process personal information. Hollerith machines were invented for that very purpose—for the Census Bureau.”
“It was a big nothing! Harold J. Carter visited and left. He never came back.Nothingcame of it.”
Tom faced his father squarely and assumed a more challenging posture. “Let me ask you a simple question: When did it occur to you that the Nazis might use Hollerith machines against Jews?”
“I—I don’t know if it ever occurred to me.”
“Hitler’s election in 1933?”
“It never even crossed my mind in 1933.”
“The Nuremberg racial laws in 1936? Kristallnacht in 1938? Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939? The creation of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940? When, Dad?When?”
“I don’t know when.”
“You must know! When did it finally dawn on you that Hitler might use Hollerith machines against Jews?”
“What do you want me to say, Tom?” he asked, shouting.
“After our German subsidiary went from three hundred employees in 1930 tothree thousandin 1940? After the record profits of 1939?”
“I said I don’t know!”
“You do know! When did you know?”
“When it was too late!” he said, his voice booming. “All right? Is that what you want to hear me say? When it was toodamnlate!”
There was utter silence. Father and son were completely still.
The stage lighting changed. Kate glanced across the auditorium in her father’s direction. He looked back with an expression that asked the question Kate should have expected:
Is that what you think I am? A coward?
She wanted to explain, but she wouldn’t get the chance. At least not that night.
He got up from his seat and left before the final curtain.
Epilogue
Irving Bass died a happy man. His final world premiere was a sellout.
The reviews were not what they had hoped for, but if Kate had gained anything since her mother’s death, it was perspective. “An ambitious effort from a promising young playwright,” one critic wrote, “but a story too big for the stage.” Kate would never say Sean the Snake was right, but she was getting serious interest from Hollywood. “Send me ten pages,” an agent at CAA had told her. Thanks to Irving Bass, she didn’t have to ask what made a great ten pages.
Do you want to get to page eleven?
The big story was Jeremy Peel. He’d fallen from “boss of the boss”—Buck’s chairman of the board, to whom CEO Christian Gamble reported—to working for a foreign boss, better known as the Chinese Ministry of State Security. The man Patrick called “Liu” was identified as an agent of the Chinese state-sponsored cyberespionage group Red Apollo, acting under the direction of the Tianjin field office of the MSS. The DOJ cybersecurity audit, led by Noah, confirmed that Peel never did transfer the key code to the Chinese, though it was up to Swiss banking authorities to reveal how many millions Peel had taken before reneging on the deal. It was unquestionably Peel who had hired Javier to keep Patrick out of the country until the DOJ’s audit was over. It was Patrick’s theory that “Liu”—el jefe del jefe—then hired Javier to push him off the mountain and connect Peel to Patrick’s murder, placing him firmly and forever under the thumb of the Chinese government. The world would probably never know if Peel double-crossed the Chinese because he found patriotism, or becauseeven he couldn’t find a way to sneak Buck’s most secure code out the door without exposing himself as a traitor.
Strangely, what Kate considered the most important part of the story was, to everyone else, a nonstory. It brought to mind her research trip to see the Hollerith machine, Irving’s hundred-year-old aunt who’d survived the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald, and his warning about “Holocaust fatigue.” Social media was newer to the planet than Kate, or even Patrick, but already the world was suffering from Big Data fatigue.
“Privacy, schmivacy,”to coin an Irving-ism.
But Project Naïveté II wasn’t just another story about the loss of personal information. It was the CIA’s use of taxpayer dollars to fund Buck’s development of technology that capitalized on all that was wrong with social media. Its “stealth” scraping tool—the key code that Peel withheld from the Chinese—could scrape (read: steal) data from every imaginable source, without detection by Google, Facebook, or other platform that collected the data in the first place, and package all that disparate and disconnected information into a single and ever-evolving personal sentiment dossier on every American who didn’t live under a rock. Jeremy Peel showed how easily that top-secret technology could fall into enemy hands. Perhaps the wake-up call would come twenty years down the road—“Too damn late,” as Kate’s Watson had put it—when the president of the United States was eyeball to eyeball with a foreign dictator, world peace hanging in the balance, and America’s enemies could calculate that her tough talk was merely a bluff, thanks to the personal sentiment data they’d been scraping from her every encounter with both on- and off-screen technology since she was a child. Some members of Congress were calling for an investigation. Change was possible, but Kate wasn’t holding her breath.
One change was immediate: the stated manner of death for Kate’s mother was no longer suicide. Elizabeth Gamble was officially the year’s twelfth homicide victim in Fairfax County, Virginia.
“I think of her as a hero,” Kate told reporters. A hero with baggage.
The funeral service for Irving Bass was small, in accordance with his final direction. It was a cloudy day, which all agreed Irving would also have wanted, cold enough for conversations to vaporize in the air, but just warm enough for some of the fallen snow to begin melting. Kate was one of about a dozen invited guests at the mausoleum. Kate’s father was not invited, but as Kate walked to her car after the service, he was waiting on the shoveled walkway that led from the mausoleum to the parking lot.