by Kirk Russell
She did and I asked Ralin, “What happened? I just got your message. Are you okay?”
“We made it down, but it was scary. I looked up from my laptop when I smelled something acrid, and suddenly the cabin filled with smoke. There was a bitter taste to it. I’m disturbed enough to consider quitting the project.”
“Quit Indie over smoke on your flight home?” I asked.
“People are saying it’s very likely a bomb attempt.”
“That doesn’t mean it was for you.”
“A woman spit on me yesterday. A man jostled me in a restaurant. They recognize me and don’t like me because they’re afraid of AI. That bomb was in the luggage of someone on the plane. I’m not being protected the way I should be. I was followed again in London. I can’t deal with things as they are. I’m going to step back and think it over. I just can’t take it anymore. I’m on the edge of saying it’s not worth it for me to continue.”
“Where are you now?”
“About to board a flight to JFK and then San Francisco. I go from there to Las Vegas, but I may not go to the base. I may quit Indie. I don’t know what I’m going to do yet.”
“What can we do to help you?” I asked as Jace whispered, “Why is he telling us?”
“You can’t do anything. Alan’s death haunts me. I’m responsible somehow. I’m very down, and now this attempt to kill me . . . I have to go now to catch my flight.”
He ended the call a moment later and I said, “We should relay that on to Mara.”
Before we called Mara, he called us, and that was several hours later. We figured with Ralin in the air we had plenty of time, so we stayed focused on our search.
“MI6 reached out,” Mara said. “They told us that yesterday Ralin staged—as in faked—waiting at a bridge for an hour in London for Claire Henley.”
“How did they know it was staged?” I asked.
“It’s a bridge where they routinely meet each other. Henley wasn’t in London yesterday. Five days ago, she flew to Paris then Barcelona and on to Africa before flying to Rio. No one knows, but the suspicion is she’s meeting Ralin somewhere. But there’s a twist: Ralin’s plane made an emergency landing. The plane had filled with smoke—”
“We called him. He seems to think it was a failed bomb attack on him. He talked about stress and possibly quitting the project. He said Eckstrom’s death haunts him.”
“Why tell you?”
“My guess is the bomb scare shook him up.”
“All right, that’s probably it. How is it going with the buildings? Any luck?”
“Not yet.”
We put Ralin out of mind and worked a western section of Vegas. Our search ate up hours and then we were on the phone with Mara again.
“An update,” he said. “Ralin has landed at SFO and is on his way across the bay to Oakland. He’s going to catch an earlier Southwest flight to Vegas. As you said, he’s shaken up and believed the British Airways flight fire in the luggage compartment was a bomb attempt to kill him. We’re hearing that a laptop battery caught fire. Ralin called several reporters and a TV station before getting on a flight to San Francisco and told them he’d had a close call with a bomber targeting him. He went on a rant about being suspected but not protected and that his family is in danger. Agent Blujace, you there?”
“I’m right here and listening,” Jace said. “What’s his Southwest flight number?”
“I’ll get it to you and when he lands in Vegas, I want you two there to meet him. He knows you and seems to trust you, Grale, though I wouldn’t call that a compliment.”
I smiled at that. That was more like the old Mara.
When Mara signed off, Jace and I picked it apart. We couldn’t make much sense of diverting us to babysit an exhausted, paranoid Ralin. We kicked it around as we drove, walked buildings, and then headed to the airport. I called Kathy Tobias before we got there.
“I was just thinking about you,” she said. “What’s on your mind?”
“I’m thinking about Indie Base and Bismarck, who despite our warning is still encouraging his followers to go to the base and mind-meld with the AI.”
“DoD is also worried. They’re regrading old desert roads and augmenting the defenses and intercept plans. No one wants any injuries or more fatalities. I know you had a run-in with a DoD officer, but internally there’s a lot of concern about the four teenagers killed. As you pointed out, Indie had all the information needed to identify them and did identify them as Las Vegas–area high school students. There’s a new deflecting defense they’re trying out with high numbers of small drones.”
“How many large armed drones are there to defend the building?” I asked. “We’re looking for ballpark numbers to get a sense of what the AI defends versus what those at the base will man in an active attack.”
“There are twenty-six armed drones, and all but two are controlled by the AI.”
“What about the surface-to-air missiles?”
“AI.”
“Long guns?”
“AI.”
“What doesn’t it control?”
“Man-operated mobile fighting platforms. Anything mobile with an HE—human element—required to operate is under base security command, hence the roadwork. That includes several helicopters.”
“Any attack helicopters?”
“You’re thinking if they come at the building with all-terrain vehicles on graded roads and have a way to jam Indie’s communications, they might reach the building.”
“I’m wondering what we should be watching for outside the base.”
“Call Bob Wharton at DoD. He’s war-gamed a number of scenarios. He’ll know who can help coordinate with the FBI. I’ll let him know you might call. How would you attack the building, Grale?”
“By cutting the DoD budget in half.”
We both laughed, and I saw Jace smile.
“DoD has something they call ‘express vulnerabilities,’” she said, “vulnerabilities that are difficult to protect in multiple ways. One of those is that we don’t know how the AI will react in a simultaneous attack situation. It has war-gamed all of this internally millions of times, but it’ll be an actual attack that determines whether this truly is a new generation of AI. Speaking of which, there’s a high-level rumor that Indie has encountered something like itself in the Internet ether.”
“That’s spooky.”
“I don’t know if it’s that, but it’s worrisome. Let me ask the same question of you again: How would you attack Indie?”
“Asymmetrically. I’d try to cut off its ability to communicate with weapon systems.”
“You and me both,” she said, and we talked more, and then had a longer, quieter conversation about whether a known adversary would risk a sabotage operation to destroy Indie.
“I go back to the atomic bomb comparison,” she said. “Indie is game-changing technology on a large scale. If I were an adversary, I’d be doing everything I could to stop the United States from getting there first.”
“At the risk of starting a war?”
“They will have thought that through so that doesn’t happen.”
Our call ended just before Jace and I reached our next search site. We walked twenty-two more buildings with no more success that the prior walks. But we did cross this group off our list and were back on the road when Mara called and said, “Ralin’s Uber failed to arrive at Oakland Airport.”
“No one was tailing the Uber?”
“I don’t know what happened, but the Uber driver was redirected by Ralin to San Jose Airport. In San Jose he didn’t enter the terminal and we don’t know yet where he went from there. You two get on a flight to the Bay Area. Our best guess is that Ralin is with a former Stanford colleague or someone else he knew when he lived there.”
“What’s the point of both of us going
if the San Francisco office is engaged in the search?” Jace asked. “Grale knows him best, and we’re shorthanded here.”
“You both go.”
The way Mara said that didn’t leave any room. The message was clear: I don’t go anywhere alone. Mara didn’t want to say it, but for me it was an easy read.
“Get your gear and head to McCarran Airport,” he said. “I’ll text you as I learn more.”
40
I called Indonal as Jace and I headed to the airport. After all the years at Stanford with Ralin and Eckstrom, Indonal should know the names of Ralin’s friends. It turned out that he had more names than phone numbers. He offered to make a couple of calls, thinking that he’d have a better chance of getting an answer, so we took him up on that. He called back before we flew to Oakland with a tip he’d gotten from an unnamed professor of computer science who got it from a friend.
“Complicated,” I said.
“I know. But it fits. Anytime Mark feels screwed up or is trying to work through a problem with something we’re working on, he heads for water, a lake, ocean, whatever. It works for him. The professor I talked with knows someone who owns a house in Stinson Beach. Mark has borrowed it before. I think I’ve even been there.”
“But you’re not sure?”
“Not a hundred percent sure.”
“Could you find it?”
“I doubt it. It was a long time ago and a kind of barbecue thing at sunset, so it got dark pretty soon after I got there. I remember going through a security gate to get into the area with houses. It was toward the end of the beach and it wasn’t a big house, but it was a great spot, and the door from the main room opened onto kind of a patio and then it was just beach and ocean.”
“How sure are you about the security gate?”
“There was definitely a gate.”
“The professor didn’t give you an address?”
“He wouldn’t even say Mark was there.”
“But you think he communicated that?”
“Yes.”
“And you trust the tip?”
“Yes.”
“Keep your phone close.”
“Okay.”
Jace and I waited to call Mara until after we’d ridden the BART airport connector and had caught a train from Oakland to San Francisco and borrowed a car from the FBI office there. That kept us out of the East Bay commute traffic, and since Jace was known in the SF FBI office, getting a car was easy. Mara was harder. Mara was angry.
“You should have called me after you got off the phone with Indonal.”
“We didn’t need to talk it through,” I said. “And then we were in the air for an hour. It’s summer. We’ll still have daylight when we get there, but to maximize that we got on a BART train as soon as we were off the plane and made a beeline for the FBI office. Two SF agents are following us out to Stinson. They’ll be about a half hour behind us. The SF office was able to get us the code to get through the gate.”
“Where are you now?”
“Crossing the Golden Gate.”
“Once you’re through that gate at Stinson Beach, call me.”
“We’ll call you when we can or when we know something. But we’ll call you,” I said.
I ended the call and Jace asked, “Was it worth saying that last part? It’s going to light him up.”
“It will, but if you’re in the field you’ve got to push back. Otherwise, a supervisor will tell you how to investigate. You’re the investigator, not your supervisor. You’ve got to remember that. I’ve learned that the hard way.”
We crossed into Marin and took the Stinson exit and went partway up Mount Tam, and then down to Stinson Beach. We were lucky to have the San Francisco agents and an additional pair that followed them—we needed all the help we could get going house to house. We had Indonal’s description of a house right on the beach, although we couldn’t count on Ralin to answer the door.
And he didn’t. We were at a house with no car or cars parked out front and were down to a few houses left that fronted ocean. I walked around the side for a look. I was checking for a patio or deck facing the beach. Someone outside wouldn’t necessarily hear a door knock with the heavy surf.
Ralin was there when I came around the corner, facing the ocean with one foot up on a low rock wall. He didn’t see me, and I didn’t want to startle him. I looked for Henley, didn’t see her, and then waited for Jace.
“Dr. Ralin,” I said and he turned and looked at me as if he didn’t recognize me. When he did, his face fell. Jace called the SF agents to give them an address. Before they arrived, we confirmed Ralin was there alone. He’d picked up a rental car at SJC. That car was in the garage. He said he planned to stay here four or five days.
“I need the break,” he said. “I have to have it and it’s none of your business. Thank you for your interest, but leave me alone.”
“Is anyone joining you?”
When I asked that, he just stared and I glanced at Jace, who then repeated the question.
“Is that why you’re here?” he asked.
“You were due into Las Vegas on a flight you didn’t show up for. That led to a search for you.”
“Well, you found me. Congratulations, now leave me alone.”
“Is anyone else staying here with you?”
“No.”
It was hours before he told us. When he did, it was in a faltering voice as if he was piecing together fragments.
“Claire was going to join me at the airport in San Francisco. Her flight got in earlier. I had my carry-on bag and was going to call her as I got outside. Then we’d go get a car and come here.”
I pretty well knew from his face what happened but asked anyway.
“She called,” he said, “to say good-bye. She didn’t get on her plane to the States and said she would never see or talk to me again and not to look for her. She wouldn’t say why. She said, ‘Forget about me. Forget you ever knew me.’ I don’t know what to do with that. We’ve talked about the future so much, I just don’t understand.”
We listened, we questioned, and then Jace stepped away and called Mara. I heard the back-and-forth. It struck me as one of those situations where you could overthink it. The simplest answer was that Henley was the spy the intelligence services claimed she was and had gotten all the information she was likely to get or was extracted for other reasons. My guess was, extracted for other reasons.
Ralin was head over heels in love with her and had just told us they’d made plans for their future together, but he wasn’t a fool. If Henley was a spy and her organization had extracted her to avoid an espionage arrest, he’d get it. Right now, he was just shocked. He didn’t know what to make of it.
The next morning, we flew home with a heartbroken Ralin. His last words as we dropped him off were “I’ve been a fool.”
“Maybe you caught a lucky break,” I answered.
Every human being is a contradiction, but my thoughts weren’t on Ralin. I did keep turning over the timing of Henley’s extraction. Was there a message in that timing? I kept circling that. Maybe it was as simple as she’d done all she could and the risks outweighed any future benefits. Or there was a darker answer—that they knew an operation was coming that would lead to her arrest. Could it mean an attack on Indie Base was about to happen?
41
August 12th
We sat with Mara for an hour summarizing what we’d learned from interviewing Ralin. Mara listened but looked distracted as it didn’t matter anymore.
“You did great work on short notice,” he said. “DoD called to thank you both. Let’s move on to what’s happened since you left here.”
“We saw a news clip this morning of chain-link fencing being pulled down,” I said. “And aerial shots of the vehicles parked along the shoulder of 95 North.”
“
All kinds of people have made it onto the base and gotten arrested. It’s a mess. The perimeter of that base is so big and so much of it is so remote . . . well, you know all this. What you don’t know is Bismarck may be there. The AI is using drones to get clear images of the faces of the trespassers. Something north of eighty-five percent have been identified. One of them may be Bismarck. I’ll show you what they sent us. They know the general area that the individual believed to be Bismarck is in. I’m debating sending you out there to help look for him. If he’s arrested, we do the handoff with DoD and you take charge of him.”
“Yeah, we’ll go,” Jace said and Mara held up a hand.
“Hold on, let’s talk this through. It’s 111 degrees out there. Soldiers are doing rescues as well as arrests. Some people walked onto the base in flip flops, shorts, and T-shirts, no water. It’s nuts. What you two know, or Grale does, is that the AI is going to locate them all and probably identify ninety-five percent of them. The problem is the half-mile inviolable line. They’re using bullhorns and loudspeakers to warn the trespassers, and no one has gotten close yet, but they’re worried. Some of these trespassers made it up and over the ridge to the east and are working their way down, which takes us back to Bismarck.”
“I’m not following,” Jace said, but I could see where this was going.
“They want Bismarck to call his followers off by warning them they can’t cross that half-mile line. Grale, will he do that? Do you have an opinion? At the base, they’re asking and hoping you can help convince him. They want to avoid any more fatalities. You two would be going out there with that mission, but you’d be driving into complete chaos. They say they’re getting it under control but we’ve got one of our spotter planes up this morning. They see trespassers everywhere.”
“What’s their estimate?” I asked.
“Four hundred plus people, including a handful of children and people without water walking in flip flops. There will be heatstroke deaths.”
“And they know the general area Bismarck is in?”