An Absence of Light

He learned from her that she had spent nearly twenty-five years with the government, all of it in various intelligence branches, traveling to hot spots around the globe, first with army intelligence and then with “various other” agencies throughout her career. She said she was considering retiring and had thought that Houston would be a good place. They talked about the city in general terms, and she told him enough about her life for him to understand that she was a very unusual woman.

Eighteen months later he received a telephone call from her saying she was in town, that she had bought a home and why didn’t he come by to see her. When he did, he discovered her three-house compound and learned that she had retired only from the federal government, not from the business. She already had been in Houston six months and had all the work she could manage, solely by word of mouth, free-lancing special operations for practically every agency from whom she used to draw a salary.

The age of the personal computer had brought about a sea change in the private investigation and intelligence business. Now anyone who could afford a modem could enter the voyeuristic world of “databanking” where a subterranean network of information resellers, known as superbureaus, had assembled in a limitless number of categories every fact imaginable about most American citizens. Every time an individual filled out an information form, whether he was registering for a free prize at his local grocery or answering a “confidential” medical record form at his doctor’s office, he was providing data that in all likelihood eventually would be purchased by an information reseller. Bank records, medical records, insurance records, personal data, credit records, everything was fair game in the information reselling business where practically nothing was protected by law. And virtually everyone who collected information-including doctors, bankers, and creditors-would eventually sell it The fact was, in the United States today, the individual had no way of controlling information about himself. For a price, everyone’s privacy was for sale.

This ongoing boom in information had been a boon to the burgeoning private investigation business, so much so that anybody and everybody was doing it Now anybody could do a skip trace, search for a missing person, check the background of a job applicant, check criminal history records, track down an old girlfriend, check out a competitor’s financial status and credit standing, locate anyone’s address, telephone number, bank account, and medical records. The data was so easy to obtain that it was like picking it up off the sidewalk.

A surprising number of these agencies had even turned their investigation businesses into huge corporate entities like Kroll and Associates of New York (with branches all over the world), Investigations Group Inc., of Washington, and Business Risk International based in Nashville, whose annual gross incomes were in the tens of millions. These high profile agencies often specialized in money chasing for corporations and even for foreign governments. They provided credit assessments of corporate acquisition targets, conducted forensic accounting studies, collected environmental research, and investigated computer crimes, all logical criminal extensions of a modern, technological age.

Heraclitus, and a good number of wise and observant men after him, had remarked on the constancy and inevitability of change. It was now axiomatic, and anyone who ignored the importance of evolution did so at their own peril. But as the world entered the closing years of the twentieth century, few of those sages could have imagined the neck-snapping speed at which change would one day occur. Only human nature, with its abundant and ineluctable follies, continued to defy the philosopher’s wisdom.

There was one other way in which all investigative and intelligence work had changed during the past several decades. Now that the Computer Age suddenly had given private investigation the means to be enormously profitable, the budgets of literally hundreds of agencies-and corporations who had their own competitor intelligence divisions-outstripped those of many budget-stressed law enforcement agencies. Because of this, the private sector could offer much larger salaries to experienced officers and agents, and as a result private investigative and intelligence agencies were aswarm with ex-police officers, ex-DEA agents, ex-FBI agents, ex-CIA officers, and personnel from practically every agency in the government’s vast intelligence community.