“I wonder if I could do it if I tried.”
“I wonder if you could,” he echoed. “It’s not easy.”
“I didn’t think it was,” she said, staring into the distance.
“Why do you want to know all this?” he asked. Perhaps she’s coming around to my perspective a little too much.
She was jolted out of her thoughts and took just a little too long to respond. “Oh, no reason,” she said, with affected nonchalance. “Just curious.”
He looked at her with his head cocked, but kept to himself the thought, You’ll have to learn to do better than that.
CHAPTER 15
Boston, January 5
Diana Bloch locked the door to her office behind her and walked slowly and deliberately, perfectly balanced on high-heeled shoes, around her no-frills metal and glass desk. It was, as usual, empty except for a laptop computer. Paperwork? She had none. She kept whatever she could stored in her brain rather than on paper or electronically—the only way, really, to keep anything secret. The rest was hidden between layers of encryption in her hard drive.
She sat down, closed her eyes, and lay back in her chair; it hardly made a sound as it reclined. Goddamn, this is comfortable. Her one luxury, the thing she would not do without. She opened her eyes and stared blankly at the ceiling, and her brief respite was over. She looked down through the glass into the empty war room, dimly lit, just a round pool of light in the middle of the table, by which the chairs cast long shadows. Worries and responsibilities flooded back through well-worn trenches in her mind. It was overwhelming, and it was all she could do just to keep her head above water. You will figure it out, she told herself. You always do. This is just another crisis, and like all crises, you will weather it. But even she hardly believed it anymore.
She heard the footsteps on the metal stairs first, and then, through the glass, she saw them coming up. They still knocked the same way: first three times, faint and hesitant, then a loud and persistent knock by another hand. Sighing, Bloch said, “Come in!” The door opened, and standing there was Lincoln Shepard, breathless, with Karen O’Neal standing behind him.
“Boss,” he said, still at the door. “I think I got something.”
“You mean we got something,” said Karen O’Neal, elbowing her way into the office. O’Neal was their resident data analyst. Petite, lean, and half-Vietnamese, she’d been one of the wunderkinder of Wall Street quants—that is, quantitative analysts, people who did in-depth financial data analysis and came up with complex schemes to make a killing in the markets. O’Neal had been a little too creative and outside the box, though she would still insist that it was all perfectly legal. However, the SEC had disagreed. Bloch had offered her a deal similar to the one that she had offered Shepard. O’Neal had been a little more reluctant than Shepard, but it hadn’t taken long for her to come around.
“Anyway, it’s this program I’m perfecting,” said Shepard. “Based on Karen’s financial analysis.”
“He’s more like a scribe, really,” said O’Neal. “For my brilliant ideas.”
“I don’t care who’s the genius behind this,” Bloch said impatiently. “Just tell me what you found!”
“Well, you see,” O’Neal began excitedly, looking at Shepard then back at Bloch, “everything’s being tracked these days. Well, not everything, we’re actually quite far from the theoretical limit to how much data we can gather—” She picked up either on Bloch’s impatient stare or on Shepard’s elbowing. “Anyway, we have all this information available to us. Just terabytes of raw data. I’m talking tons. Everything from economic indicators to website page views to changes in weather. But data, by itself, doesn’t get you anywhere. It’s just a bunch of numbers on a page.”
“And that’s where—” began Shepard.
“Shut up and let me finish,” said O’Neal. “So we have all this data, but what do we do with it? Well, that’s where quantitative analysis comes in. Me. So, analyzing information—it’s all about finding connections, right? Specifically, those connections that no one has seen before. Those that no one has ever imagined even existed. Like how once someone thought to look at all the satellite pictures of cows, they found out that they all face either north or south when they eat. Or when they looked the length of a man’s index finger and found out that it has a connection to how aggressive he is. That kind of stuff. But the problem with that is that you have to imagine the connection before you test for it.” She was speaking so fast she was nearly panting by this point.