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Paladin had been launched five years before by Steven Vance, a Silicon Valley CEO, and Ryan Malcomb, a brilliant tech guy who’d started and sold four companies before he turned forty. Vance and Malcomb’s most recent venture involved deep data mining using artificial intelligence.
Paladin’s ingenious algorithms, written by Malcomb, allowed the company to scour and sift through monstrous amounts ofinformation with astonishing speed. The system had yielded investigative targets of interest to various U.S. law enforcement agencies that increasingly looked to Paladin’s unique and accurate product.
A door opened on the other side of the weeping wall.
Sheila Farr, a short redheaded woman with a bowl haircut, exited wearing a blue puffy coat, jeans, and low hiking shoes. I’d met her on my last visit. She was the company’s chief legal counsel.
She smiled perfunctorily. “Dr. Cross, how good to see you again.”
“You as well, Ms. Farr,” I said.
The attorney led me back through the door into a series of familiar hallways kept cold enough to see your breath because of the huge banks of supercomputers that Paladin had churning day and night. We climbed three flights of an unfamiliar steel staircase to a nondescript door; Farr knocked and opened it.
The office we entered was almost identical to the one Steven Vance had received us in the year before, with glass walls, floors, and ceilings—a block of glass, really, suspended above a much larger workspace that teemed with activity. The bigger space was set up with clusters of desks and computers interspersed with screens hanging from steel cables.
The people down there ranged from the seriously buff to the somewhat nerdy, like Ryan Malcomb, who sat behind a glass desk in the sleekest, coolest wheelchair I’d ever seen. A lanky man with longish graying hair and a salt-and-pepper goatee, Malcomb wore a look of genuine interest as he used a joystick to bring the silver wheelchair around the desk to me.
“So interesting to meet you at last, Dr. Cross,” Malcomb said, brushing his hair back and giving me an elbow bump. “Stevenwas so impressed when he worked with you last year. He will be disappointed to learn he missed you.”
“Vacations are important.”
“So they are,” Malcomb said, gesturing me toward a couch and two chairs arranged around a glass coffee table with cups and a pot of steaming coffee waiting.
CHAPTER 43
THE COFOUNDER OF PALADINbrought his chair forward while his corporate counsel and I sat on the couch.
“I’ve never seen a wheelchair like that,” I said.
“Because it’s a prototype built for me by an old friend. Six independent wheels, remarkable suspension—it can do three-sixties in the parking lot.” Malcomb laughed and then leaned forward to pour our coffee with a slight awkwardness to his shoulder and arm movements and a tremor to his hands. But he performed the feat without spilling a drop.
“I still got the knack,” he said and laughed again. “You’re thinking,What exactly is wrong with him?Aren’t you, Dr. Cross?”
“Yes,” I said.
Malcomb smiled. “Muscular dystrophy. I was lucky and did not begin to develop symptoms until I was in my teens, because it is degenerative. I get very, very slowly worse.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.
He shrugged. “Everyone has challenges. I fight mine every bit of the way and remain happy because my mind is completely unaffected.”
“You wrote the algorithms that the supercomputers run?”
“I had a lot of help to get them where I wanted them,” he said with a slight wave at the bustling floors below and behind him. “Most of my engineers are far more sophisticated at the intricacies of looking for a needle in a haystack than I am. Steven and I had the vision, but they really wrote most of the code to achieve that vision.”
“The vision of finding commonalities and anomalies?”
“Among other purposes, that is correct,” he said, leaning forward again and tapping on the glass tabletop, which lit up like a large computer screen.
A bewildering stream of numbers, text, and images flooded the screen until Malcomb stopped it. “That’s what a huge data dump looks like when we get it,” he explained. “But then we pour it through our filters—our algorithms. Our digital sieves, if you will. We’re looking for crossovers and singularities, commonalities and anomalies, as you said, in the data we’re searching. In this case, the data is everything we could get on the six-block area surrounding each of the Family Man crime scenes.”
Malcomb tapped the tabletop once more and the data stream began again. A holographic keyboard appeared; he gave a command, and the avalanche of information spewing across the rest of the table became a series of thin trickles that entwined in several places.
Gesturing to those knots, Malcomb said, “There is your first commonality. In the hour surrounding each attack, cell phoneand mobile data service was spotty or interrupted in the six-block area.”
“How’s that possible?”
“A jammer of some kind, we believe,” he said.
