“I don’t suppose the usual will do,” he said.
“I don’t suppose it will.”
“Double, then.”
“Deal.”
Grillo hung up. He accessed his banking app and transferred $10,000 from his work fund to the woman’s numbered account at a discreet Dutch bank in the Cayman Islands. He sent a copy to a secure address he’d set up for Bobby Astor.
Grillo fished out his third Sherman. As he flicked the Zippo and brought the flame toward the cigarette, he saw his contact emerge from the building. He replaced the unlit cigarette in its box, entered the deli, and headed to the refrigerated foods section in the rear. A minute later a portly, bald African-American dressed in khakis, button-down shirt, and club tie sidled up next to him.
“America’s greatest hope,” said Grillo.
“Fuckin’ A,” said Jeb Washburn. “Bring it.”
“There is such a thing as dry cleaning.”
“I appreciate that coming from a man who’s wearing my annual salary. Those Ferragamos you got on?”
“You noticed.”
“I noticed they run six bills in the Bloomingdale’s shoe department.”
“That’s why I left our government’s service.”
Washburn picked up a package of sliced ham and pretended to look for the sell-by date. “You better be careful, or you’re not going to be around to enjoy those fancy Eyetalian loafers, Mr. Grill-O. You’re barking up some very dangerous trees.”
“What can you tell me?”
Washburn put down the ham. “About Palantir? A little and that’s already too much. Let’s get out of here. I don’t like being penned in like this.”
Grillo and Washburn left the deli and headed down 61st. Foot traffic was light, and the steady stream of cars passing enabled them to speak without fear of being overheard.
“Like I said,” Washburn began, “I only know a little, and that’s all I want to know. Don’t suppose you want to tell me what this is about?”
Grillo shook his head.
“Fair enough,” said Washburn. “All right then, here it is. Palantir’s some kind of far-out software platform that collects information from about a trillion sources off the Internet and analyzes it for possible threat scenarios.”
“Sounds like a straightforward data-collection tool.”
“Nothing straightforward about it. It started as one of the crazy-assed projects financed by DARPA, but at some point the government lost control of it.”
DARPA. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. “Did DARPA cut the funding?”
“On the contrary. They wanted to double-down. It was better than anything they expected.”
“Better?”
“More powerful. It was too good at what it did.”
“And that is?”
“Predict future events. A real-life Eight Ball. You remember that thing you shake and wait for the answer?” Washburn stopped and pulled Grillo into a doorway. “It was Afghanistan that did it. Palantir’s mandate was to upload and integrate all our intel over there and see if it could tell us what was going to happen. We’re talking everything from combat after-action reports to local police chiefs’ threat assessments, provincial reconstruction team reports, Agency intel—everything. Palantir just vacuumed everything up.”
“And?”
“It worked,” said Washburn. “That was the problem.”
“I don’t follow.”
“It started predicting when and where attacks would take place, the probability of Afghan troops rebelling against us, transport choke points. It was too much.”
Grillo had served a ten-month tour in the AfPak theater as a company commander with the Fifth Marines. Hellmand Province. It had been a bloody summer. “We could have used something like that.”
“Don’t you see, man? Palantir wasn’t just looking at today and tomorrow. It was looking at next month, next year—and it told us we were going to lose. That did not go over well at the Pentagon. No siree, Bob. The four-stars over in Virginia were not keen on a top-secret, multimillion-dollar experimental software platform that predicted that the United States of America didn’t have an ice cube’s chance in hell of winning that conflict. They had serious blood and treasure invested.”
“But you said DARPA wanted to double-down.”
“Sure, DARPA did. They’re a bunch of mad scientists. Not a soldier in the lot. It was the men with the scrambled eggs on their covers who wanted to shut it down.”
“What happened?”
“That was the end. Goodbye, Palantir. Whoever created Palantir disappeared. Went off the grid.”