Читать книгу Damaged Hearts - Jan St. Marcus - Страница 11

I rarely take my GT3 RS to work or meetings. Driving it always puts me in a great mood, but I don’t want to be smiling like a dumbass in front of the ultra-serious people at Pantere & Associates. Everyone there is kind of nice to me on the surface, but I can feel resentment coming from many of them. Sal Pantere, my pseudo-boss and owner of the company, is always really nice, but some of his senior people don’t really know about my deal, and they seem pretty jealous of my relationship with their boss. And I guess they feel like I haven’t paid my dues or something like that. There’s no way for them to know that the contract I’m working under is not really for Pantere & Associates. It’s through Pantere & Associates and connected to another company altogether. And even that company is not really my boss. I’m actually a mathematician and computer programmer. I work in secret for NSA developing and maintaining these complex algorithms to help them with their super-secret spy shit. That’s not too technical, but unless you have at least a master’s degree in advanced mathematics and a TS/SCI security clearance from the US government, there’s no chance you’d understand.

When I was an undergrad, I developed an algorithm that I later sold to a huge credit card processing company to help them detect fraud (that’s the short version of the story). I spent about a year as a consultant with them, helping fine-tune the algorithm and was paid enough to set me up with my beach house and my first Porsche. That was five years ago. Then I get approached by these nice men who refused to give me a business card when we talked. We met a bunch of times, and then finally they offered me a job at NSA. Okay, funny side-story about NSA. The letters stand for National Security Agency, and they are responsible for securing, monitoring, and surveilling electronic communications for the United States. You have probably heard of Echelon, the super-secret satellite and computer program that purportedly captures and monitors every phone call, email, and text message all over the world, right? Well, I can’t say whether or not it’s really a thing, but if it were a real thing, my algorithm would be able to help them sort through the billions . . . no, trillions . . . of pieces of data collected every day more efficiently.

Back to the side story: So back in the 1950s, when CIA was created, there’s this story about how the agents of CIA never said the CIA. It was always just CIA, and someone asked why that was. After all, prefacing the name with the word “the” seems natural, right? “I’m with the FBI” seems more natural than “I’m with FBI,” right? So one of the guys who founded CIA answered that question by saying, “You don’t say the God, right? It’s just God.” That story is really funny if you work at CIA. It’s really obnoxious and arrogant to everyone else. But that’s the whole point. People at CIA don’t give a rat’s ass what other people think. I don’t have a comparable story about why people who work at NSA use the same idea about not including the in front of the letters, but they do. So these guys were NSA, and they pursued me mercilessly for about six months before we had the meeting. This was where the head of the agency flew out in a private jet and basically told me that my country needed me and I would be a selfish piece of shit if I turned them down. And he also kind of made some veiled threats about how much “better” my life would be if I were with them as opposed to the “difficulties I might face” if I didn’t.

I was this twenty-two-year-old kid who recently became a slight millionaire, living in a pretty cool beach house and doing consulting from home most of the time and, all of a sudden, I’m pressed into government service. But I didn’t go easily. I made them match the consulting fees I was getting from the credit card company, and I got some other perks (which I can’t really talk about—but let’s just say that I’ll never get audited by the IRS). But one thing they were really super-serious about was the fact that nobody could know that I worked for NSA. So they devised this scheme where they would roll my contract up with one company they already worked with and they would subcontract that work through a second company so that neither company really knew what I did. Pantere & Associates is the second company in the scheme and once every few weeks, I have to go to their offices to report on the progress of my “projects” so they can put it in their reports to the “other” company. It’s really a complete farce because I haven’t ever reported anything other than a percentage of work completed and a percentage of work remaining and an estimate of the time required to complete the contract. The rest of the meeting is spent with other contractors and subcontractors detailing their work status. But, it’s part of the contract and I have to go, and it would really piss off the people there if I didn’t take it seriously. So walking in there with a huge smile would be adding insult to injury. And that’s why I don’t usually drive my Porsche into the office.