Black List by Brad Thor Page B

do.
    Soon enough, his talents came to the attention of the powers that be at ATS. They could have offered him a token salary of a dollar a year and he would have jumped at it. He could see the organization’s potential. He could also see that their approach hadn’t been an accident.
    Toward the end of the vetting process, one of the board membersasked him about his work on the Nazi program that had gotten him fired from IBM. However they got their information, they were incredibly well informed.
    As Middleton answered their questions, he hedged his information; at least, until he realized that they were not unsympathetic to what he’d been doing. At that moment he realized how well suited they were for each other.
    ATS needed a man like him to run their operations, and he was bright enough to recognize a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity when it was offered. Up to that point, he had had no idea ATS even existed, but once he grasped the breadth and scope of what they had created, he realized that it was the very platform he had dreamed of.
    The education IBM had put him through was nothing compared to what he received the moment he began working with ATS. It was like having the doors of the Vatican’s secret archives thrown open wide. There wasn’t a single prominent American that ATS didn’t have a dossier on. The amount of information the organization had access to was stunning.
    When he asked why they had files only on prominent Americans and not on everyone, his initiation into the deepest, darkest circle of ATS began.
    In fact, ATS had every intention of building files on every single American. That was a large part of why he had been brought on board. They liked the work he had done, including the research that had gotten him fired from IBM.
    They believed the concept of the nation-state was destined for collapse, and they had every intention of helping it along. They believed that data was power. The more they collected, the more powerful they would become. Eventually, their goal was to assemble files not only for every American but for every single human being on the planet.
    At the moment, their focus was on the United States, and there wasn’t a single sphere of influence within it that ATS didn’t control. Who got elected, what laws were passed, what judgments came out of the courts, stock market performance, the price of commodities, who the U.S. went to war with and why, the rise and fall of outspoken voices across the political spectrum, reshaping what was taught in schools to Americanchildren… ATS had even successfully inserted themselves into theology and was influencing what was being preached in many churches. They had a honed, singular vision of the world upon which they were focused with absolute precision, and the greater their advancements in technology, the more able they were to reshape the country, and soon thereafter the world, exactly as they wanted it to be.
    It was like walking through your house in pitch darkness, confident you knew where all the furniture was, only to have someone flip on the lights and show you that everything, every single thing, was not at all where you had thought. Middleton had been sleepwalking his entire adult life. Only now had his eyes been opened. The depth of the deception was so amazing, so total, so complete that it was beyond even a man like Craig Middleton’s ability to describe. Everything he wanted, everything he had ever envisioned, was within his grasp. He was home.
    Though he was already out front on the power curve of leveraging data, his ATS mentors helped refine his skills and taught him many things he had never even considered possible, particularly when it came to influence operations. They demonstrated how to bring powerful figures to heel and keep them there.
    One of Middleton’s earliest and most ingenious contributions to ATS was the development of a software program to help screen for individuals ripe for leveraging. Similar to the program