Hidden - Laura Griffin Page 0,65
farm?”
“Oh, no. That’s off-site. And it’s five acres.”
A man’s head was sticking up from behind one of the rows of servers. Seth quickened his pace. Was he worried about someone seeing them? They reached a door at the end of the corridor and Seth quickly unlocked it with another swipe of his card. They entered a concrete stairwell, and he led her up a flight. At the top he paused next to the door.
“Walk alongside me, but don’t talk.”
“Okay.”
Another swipe of his card, and he pushed open the door. Together, they stepped into a huge room with high ceilings. Bailey blinked at the brightness as they walked into a maze of cubicles. She looked up to see blue sky and wispy white clouds. It was a digital image projected onto the ceiling.
She hazarded a glance around. There had to be at least fifty cubicles here, but every one of them was empty with the exception of a workstation in the far corner, near the door. A man with a long brown ponytail sat in front of a screen. He wore bulky earphones and acknowledged Seth with a nod as they passed through the room. Seth headed for a smaller computer room, this one behind a panel of glass. Bailey followed him into it, and he closed the door behind them.
This room had only a dozen workstations. Seth walked to the end of a row and pulled over an extra swivel chair before sitting down. Bailey sat beside him.
“This is the inner sanctum,” he said. “A lab within a lab, you could say.”
“This is the area I saw yesterday? With the iris scans?”
“Correct. We came the back way.” He glanced at his watch, reminding her that they were on a clock here. He tapped the mouse, and the screen came to life. His hands flew over the keyboard as he filled in four separate blanks to log in.
A green screen appeared with the Granite Tech logo on it, along with an hourglass.
“He’s thinking,” Seth said.
“He?”
He smiled. “I call this one Hubert.”
Bailey set her purse on the desk, itching for her cell phone. She wanted to record this interview and take a picture of the room they’d just walked through.
“What’s with the fake sky?” she asked.
“Studies show working near a window is good for productivity. We can’t have windows in here due to security, so this is the next best thing.”
“The twenty-four-hour blue sky doesn’t get a little . . . grating after a while?”
“We have dusk around eleven. Then it goes into night mode for several hours, complete with constellations.”
“Why?”
“Something about the circadian rhythms.”
Another green screen appeared, and Seth entered two passcodes this time. “I read your series,” he said without looking up from the screen.
“Which one?”
“The exposé about the police officers. The vice squad.”
She’d had a feeling that was the one he meant. Last summer she’d written a series uncovering a scheme in which several officers were taking payoffs from drug dealers in order to look the other way. Two officers lost their jobs. Meanwhile, Bailey and her co-author got nominated for a journalism award. The other reporter ended up landing a job at the Los Angeles Times, and Bailey was tapped to cover the crime beat full-time.
“It wasn’t the entire squad,” she told Seth, not sure why she felt the need to defend the police department. “Just two officers, and they were fired after an investigation.”
Seth lifted an eyebrow. “You know what they say about bad apples.”
The computer screen switched to a water background with various icons on it.
“Okay, here we are.” He checked his watch again and cast a furtive glance over his shoulder. Then he scooted forward in his chair.
“This is it. Granite Tech’s crown jewel.” He clicked open a file. A cascade of numbers appeared on the screen. “It’s called Ruby.”
Bailey watched as the numbers scrolled. “Is it a spreadsheet?”
“A database.” He looked at her.
“A database of what?”
“Several years ago, we embarked on an effort to amass the largest faceprint database in the world.”
“Faceprints.”
He nodded. “Each unique record is represented by a numeric code. We have more than a billion records.”
Bailey looked at the screen. “I would think the FBI would have the biggest database. Or NSA.”
“You’d think, wouldn’t you?”
“Are you saying—”
“No, you’re right. Of course they do. But ours is private. That’s key.” He leaned back in his chair. “All that stuff Lucinda told you about background checks and document security? That’s crap.” He nodded at the screen. “This is the engine driving our business.”
“Faceprints?”
“Think