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“Good to know,” I said. “I believe Mr. Malcomb is going to see me today.”

She nodded and began copying my credentials. “Ryan’s office just called down.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“You can. Don’t know if I’ll answer,” she said, waiting for the copying to finish.

I pointed at the bulletproof glass. “Why the security box?”

“I’ll answer that one,” Riggs said, putting my credentials back in the drawer. “Mr. Vance says it’s probably overkill, but we handle sensitive information here and the company is getting known for its role helping law enforcement and Homeland Security. From a terrorist perspective, I guess we would be what you’d call a soft target.”

“Makes sense,” I said, taking my credentials from the drawer.

Riggs buzzed me into a larger, more welcoming reception area with a stacked-granite weeping wall. Beside the seeping fountain hung an understated logo, the word paladin superimposed over a faint number 12.

From my prior visit, I knew the company’s name and logo were references to French literature, where the twelve paladins, or “twelve peers,” were said to be the elite protectors and agents of King Charlemagne, comparable to the Knights of the Round Table in the Arthurian legends.

Paladin had been launched five years before by Steven Vance, a Silicon Valley CEO, and Ryan Malcomb, a brilliant tech guy who’d started and sold four companies before he turned forty. Vance and Malcomb’s most recent venture involved deep data mining using artificial intelligence.

Paladin’s ingenious algorithms, written by Malcomb, allowed the company to scour and sift through monstrous amounts of information with astonishing speed. The system had yielded investigative targets of interest to various U.S. law enforcement agencies that increasingly looked to Paladin’s unique and accurate product.

A door opened on the other side of the weeping wall.

Sheila Farr, a short redheaded woman with a bowl haircut, exited wearing a blue puffy coat, jeans, and low hiking shoes. I’d met her on my last visit. She was the company’s chief legal counsel.

She smiled perfunctorily. “Dr. Cross, how good to see you again.”

“You as well, Ms. Farr,” I said.

The attorney led me back through the door into a series of familiar hallways kept cold enough to see your breath because of the huge banks of supercomputers that Paladin had churning day and night. We climbed three flights of an unfamiliar steel staircase to a nondescript door; Farr knocked and opened it.

The office we entered was almost identical to the one Steven Vance had received us in the year before, with glass walls, floors, and ceilings—a block of glass, really, suspended above a much larger workspace that teemed with activity. The bigger space was set up with clusters of desks and computers interspersed with screens hanging from steel cables.

The people down there ranged from the seriously buff to the somewhat nerdy, like Ryan Malcomb, who sat behind a glass desk in the sleekest, coolest wheelchair I’d ever seen. A lanky man with longish graying hair and a salt-and-pepper goatee, Malcomb wore a look of genuine interest as he used a joystick to bring the silver wheelchair around the desk to me.

“So interesting to meet you at last, Dr. Cross,” Malcomb said, brushing his hair back and giving me an elbow bump. “Steven was so impressed when he worked with you last year. He will be disappointed to learn he missed you.”

“Vacations are important.”

“So they are,” Malcomb said, gesturing me toward a couch and two chairs arranged around a glass coffee table with cups and a pot of steaming coffee waiting.

CHAPTER 43

THE COFOUNDER OF PALADIN brought his chair forward while his corporate counsel and I sat on the couch.

“I’ve never seen a wheelchair like that,” I said.

“Because it’s a prototype built for me by an old friend. Six independent wheels, remarkable suspension—it can do three-sixties in the parking lot.” Malcomb laughed and then leaned forward to pour our coffee with a slight awkwardness to his shoulder and arm movements and a tremor to his hands. But he performed the feat without spilling a drop.

“I still got the knack,” he said and laughed again. “You’re thinking, What exactly is wrong with him? Aren’t you, Dr. Cross?”

“Yes,” I said.

Malcomb smiled. “Muscular dystrophy. I was lucky and did not begin to develop symptoms until I was in my teens, because it is degenerative. I get very, very slowly worse.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.

He shrugged. “Everyone has challenges. I fight mine every bit of the way and remain happy because my mind is completely unaffected.”

“You wrote the algorithms that the supercomputers run?”

“I had a lot of help to get them where I wanted them,” he said with a slight wave at the bustling floors below and behind him. “Most of my engineers are far more sophisticated at the intricacies of looking for a needle in a haystack than I am. Steven and I had the vision, but they really wrote most of the code to achieve that vision.”