The Broken Window (Lincoln Rhyme 8)

Amelia Sachs sat in Strategic Systems Datacorp's sky-high lobby and reflected that the shoe company president's description of SSD's data mining operation was, well, pretty understated.

The Midtown building was thirty stories high, a gray spiky monolith, the sides smooth granite flashing with mica. The windows were narrow slits, which was surprising given the stunning views of the city from this location and elevation. She was familiar with the building, dubbed the Gray Rock, but had never known who owned it.

She and Ron Pulaski--no longer in play clothes but wearing a navy suit and navy uniform, respectively--sat facing a massive wall on which were printed the locations of the SSD offices around the world, among them London, Buenos Aires, Mumbai, Singapore, Beijing, Dubai, Sydney and Tokyo.

Pretty big . . .

Above the list of satellite offices was the company logo: the window in the watchtower.

Her gut twisted slightly as she recalled the windows in the abandoned building across the street from Robert Jorgensen's residence hotel. She recalled Lincoln Rhyme's words about the incident with the federal agent in Brooklyn.

He knew exactly where you were. Which means he was watching. Be careful, Sachs. . . .

Looking around the lobby, she saw a half dozen businesspeople waiting here, many of them uneasy, it seemed, and she recalled t

he shoe company president and his concern about losing SSD's services. She then saw, almost en masse, their heads swivel, looking past the receptionist. They were watching a short man, youthful, enter the lobby and walk directly toward Sachs and Pulaski over the black-and-white rugs. His posture was perfect and his stride long. The sandy-haired man nodded and smiled, offering a fast greeting--by name--to nearly everybody here.

A presidential candidate. That was Sachs's first impression.

But he didn't stop until he came to the officers. "Good morning. I'm Andrew Sterling."

"Detective Sachs. This is Officer Pulaski."

Sterling was shorter than Sachs by several inches but he seemed quite fit and had broad shoulders. His immaculate white shirt featured a starched collar and cuffs. His arms seemed muscular; the jacket was tight-fitting. No jewelry. Crinkles radiated from the corners of his green eyes when that easy smile crossed his face.

"Let's go to my office."

The head of such a big company . . . yet he'd come to them, rather than having an underling escort them to his throne room.

Sterling walked easily down the wide, quiet halls. He greeted every employee, sometimes asking questions about their weekends. They ate up his smiles at reports of an enjoyable weekend and his frowns at word of ill relatives or canceled games. There were dozens of them, and he made a personal comment to each.

"Hello, Tony," he said to a janitor, who was emptying the contents of shredded documents into a large plastic bag. "Did you see the game?"

"No, Andrew, I missed it. Had too much to do."

"Maybe we should start three-day weekends," Sterling joked.

"I'd vote for that, Andrew."

And they continued down the hall.

Sachs didn't think she knew as many in the NYPD as Sterling said hello to in their five-minute walk.

The decor of the company was minimal: some small, tasteful photographs and sketches--none in color--overwhelmed by the spotless white walls. The furniture, also black or white, was simple--expensive Ikea. It was a statement of some kind, she guessed, but she found it bleak.

As they walked, she ran through what she'd learned last night, after saying good night to Pam. The man's bio, patched together from the Web, was sparse. He was an intensely reclusive man--a Howard Hughes, not a Bill Gates. His early life was a mystery. She'd found no references at all to his childhood, or his parents. A few sketchy pieces in the press had put him on the radar at age seventeen, when he'd had his first jobs, mostly in sales, working door-to-door and telemarketing, moving up to bigger, more expensive products. Finally computers. For a kid with "7/8 of a bachelor's degree from a night school," Sterling told the press, he found himself a successful salesman. He'd gone back to college, finishing the last one-eighth of the degree and completing a master's in computer science and engineering in short order. The stories were all very Horatio Alger and included only details that boosted his savvy and status as a businessman.

Then, in his twenties, had come the "great awakening," he said, sounding like a Chinese communist dictator. Sterling was selling a lot of computers but not enough to satisfy him. Why wasn't he more successful? He wasn't lazy. He wasn't stupid.

Then he realized the problem: He was inefficient.

And so were a lot of other salesmen.

So Sterling learned computer programming and spent weeks of eighteen-hour days, in a dark room, writing software. He hocked everything and started a company, one based on a concept that was either foolish or brilliant: Its most valuable asset wouldn't be owned by his company but by millions of other people, much of it free for the taking--information about themselves. Sterling began compiling a database that included potential customers in a number of service and manufacturing markets, the demographics of the area in which they were located, their income, marital status, the good or bad news about their financial and legal and tax situations, and as much other information--personal and professional--as he could buy, steal or otherwise find. "If there's a fact out there, I want it," he was quoted as saying.

The software he wrote, the early version of the Watchtower database management system, was revolutionary at the time, an exponential leap over the famed SQL--pronounced "sequel," Sachs had learned--program. In minutes Watchtower would decide which customers would be worthwhile to call on and how to seduce them, and which weren't worth the effort (but whose names might be sold to other companies for their own pitches).

The company grew like a monster in a science fiction film. Sterling changed the name to SSD, moved it to Manhattan and began to collect smaller companies in the information business to add to his empire. Though unpopular with privacy rights organizations, there'd never been a hint of a scandal at SSD, a la Enron. Employees had to earn their salaries--no one received obscenely high Wall Street bonuses--but if the company profited, so did they. SSD offered tuition and home-purchasing assistance, internships for children, and parents were given a year of maternity or paternity leave. The company was known for the familial way it treated its workers and Sterling encouraged hiring spouses, parents and children. Every month he sponsored motivational and team-building retreats.