with stainless steel handrails and stout, smooth wire stretched between them.
They reached a door on the second floor that had a security port next to it containing a red light. Myron said, “Before you go in, you need to power off your phones.”
Pine and Blum glanced at each other, looking puzzled, but they both complied with his request.
Myron bent down to the portal and put his eye to it.
“Retina scanner,” he said as the heavy portal clicked open.
“I can see that,” said Pine.
“No pun intended,” quipped Blum.
The space they entered was a good thousand square feet set out in a rectangle. There were no windows in the room. The flooring was soft and springy underfoot.
“Welcome to the world of cyborg finance with a dash of digital alchemy,” said Myron drily.
Pine touched the walls. They seemed to be made of concrete. When she asked Myron about it, he confirmed this and added, “With a layer of copper underneath. To block electronic signals.”
“Spies here in Macon County, Georgia?” said Pine.
“Spies everywhere,” replied Myron crisply. He pointed to the ceiling. “Satellites ringing the earth.”
She noted a sign on one wall. It was a series of odd numbers: 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 7, 9, 5, 3.
He saw her staring at it and smiled. “I like odd numbers over even, up to a point.”
“Okay,” she said, looking confused.
On a desk about the size of a large dining table was perched a row of supersized computer monitors. They were all dark at the moment.
He held up a white plastic card. “The system in the room senses the number of people present. If everyone doesn’t have a badge like this with the requisite clearances, the system knows there are unauthorized people in the room. So, the screens go black.”
“Intel agencies have the same sort of systems,” said Pine.
“I know. It’s where we got the protocols.”
“So you sit in here and work on…algorithms?” said Blum.
“Not just that. I also oversee security on the pipelines, go over procedures, that sort of thing. But yes, refining, tweaking, coming up with new platforms is something I spend a lot of time on. It’s heavy lifting, and there are long lead times. Coding is not easy. And bugs have to be worked out. And hackers come at us twenty-four/seven. The Russians, the Chinese, groups in India, the Middle East, fourteen-year-olds with a Mac looking to blow up the financial world, hell, everybody.”
“But if this place is sealed off from electronic spies getting in, how are you connected to the web then?” asked Pine.
“Proprietary,” replied Myron. “But I can tell you it’s an amalgam of hardened pipelines, and a stand-alone cloud-based infrastructure that is not available to the general public or anybody else.”
“Are you the only one who does this for Lineberry?”
“No, we have a whole department scattered around the world, but I’m the head one. I run the others, and it’s a group that has grown exponentially over time. Our IT is our most precious resource. Without that, we’re just a bunch of old farts playing at Monopoly. We communicate around the clock through the secure, encrypted-at-both-ends pipeline that I just alluded to.”
“Your wife said you don’t use phones or emails.”
“And I don’t have Alexa or Google assistant or any other spies in my house. And I don’t use a credit card. And I never surf the web. Ridiculous. Most people are suckers. They give up privacy for convenience.”
“I guess they do,” said Pine. “But it seems to work.”
“Oh, it does work, for the other side. They know everything. They know more about you than you even know about yourself. Why do you think Facebook and Google are so valuable? It’s not about posting cat pictures for your friends or being able to look up an answer to any question. It’s not about building a ‘community,’” he added derisively. “It’s not even about selling ads, although that’s how many of them make some of their income. It’s about the collection of data. Data about all of us. It’s the greatest scam ever perpetrated. And even now that we know it is a scam, people won’t give it up. They’re like drug addicts. You remember way back when people would always light up a cigarette, no matter what they were doing: driving, eating, sitting, drinking. Now what do you see everybody doing? Checking their smartphones. Young, middle-aged, and old. Cradle to grave. The world is hooked. Big Brother is getting fed terabytes of data every millisecond. And they don’t pay a damn