The Breaker

by Nick Petrie

  “No,” Peter said. “No, no, no.”

  “Hey!” She whipped her pen at Peter in a wicked sidearm. It bounced hard off his forehead. “You are not in charge here, Marine. You are the support team. Got it?”

  Peter threw up his hands. “Do you not remember the guy with the assault rifle? Or the madman with the axe?”

  “Oh, I’m not worried about them, sweetie.” She gave Peter a brilliant smile. “Because you’ll be my bodyguard.”

  Peter sighed. “Fuuuuuck.”

  June turned back to Oliver. “Next item. Peter’s Iceland problem. I need full exoneration on all charges, overseas and domestically. Notes in all government files to the effect that he was charged in error. With official apologies.” She reached over and patted his arm. “And I’ll need that in writing, tonight. Agreed?”

  Oliver pinched the bridge of his nose. Suddenly he looked exhausted. June could have that effect on people. She was undeniably relentless.

  “Agreed,” he said. “But I can’t clear his record until after you are successful, because Mr. Ash must remain deniable throughout. No visible thumbs on the scale.”

  “Okay.” June picked up another pen and tapped it on her open notebook. “Now, about your security breach.” She flashed that incandescent smile again. “I really can’t do my job unless you tell me what was taken.”

  Oliver frowned. “You lack the necessary clearances for that conversation. But perhaps I can tell you a story.” He looked at June. “To reiterate, we are off the record. Not even background.”

  June nodded. “Yes.”

  26

  Oliver glanced at the antique schoolhouse clock June had hung above the kitchen door. The second hand ticked loudly, marking each moment rather than sweeping smoothly forward like a modern timepiece.

  “A young man in Budapest, very bright,” he said, “was given a toy robot for his birthday. A small thing, just eighteen inches tall, made for schoolchildren and only able to perform a dozen limited actions. A clumsy walk, for example, and a rudimentary dance based on the rhythm of music it heard.

  “The bright young man was disappointed by the toy’s inability to do anything interesting. During the day, he worked at a local cement factory, but he spent his evenings with a hobby group, a local electronics club. So he took the robot apart and made a new one from the parts. He incorporated a much larger circuit board, more sophisticated servomotors, and a suite of the real-world sensors that have become quite inexpensive in recent years. Accelerometers, distance sensors, touch sensors.

  “But even with these modifications, the robot could only follow very specific instructions. It was still just a toy,” he said. “So the young man took it upon himself to create a new kind of software language.”

  “That takes giant teams of people,” June said. “And years of development.”

  “Yes.” Oliver gave her a small smile. “Except nobody informed the young man of that fact. His new language was radically simple, quite robust, and elegantly designed, with a powerful cause-and-effect learning model at the heart of it. Using this software, the toy taught itself, with little help other than its own sensor inputs, to climb the curtains in the young man’s bedroom.”

  “Oh, shit.” June’s eyes were wide.

  “Yes,” Oliver said. “This seemingly elemental physical task requires a very complex, dynamic, and coordinated set of motions. The ramifications are significant. Cause-and-effect problem-solving across multiple real-time datasets is considered one of the keys to a truly self-learning general machine intelligence. It is an enormous leap, fully thirty years ahead of the most optimistic predictions. But it’s here now.”

  “I don’t mean to play devil’s advocate,” Peter said, “but why shouldn’t this technology be in the world? Who gets to decide? Who makes the rules?”

  Oliver gave him a mild look. “You haven’t seen what I’ve seen, Mr. Ash. It’s not all jet packs and moonbeams. Sometimes it’s a re-engineered bubonic plague designed for an undergraduate thesis. Sometimes it’s a video game so addictive that beta testers nearly starve to death. And sometimes it’s a machine intelligence with the potential to be able to flip a burger, paint a house, drive a truck, and do a thousand other jobs safer and cheaper and more reliably than a human being. Would you like massive unemployment and social unrest that makes the Great Depression look like a walk in the park? By all means, open the floodgates.”

  Peter had to admit that sounded bad. Like a fast-forward version of what was already happening. “So, what’s the process? Release the good stuff incrementally?”

  “Yes. At a pace that will allow society to adjust, rather than rupture. In the meantime, the Longview Group is developing it for strategic advantage.”

  Now Peter saw the whole game. When the tech saw the light of day, the American military would be miles ahead of the rest, with corporate America coming fast behind.

  June said, “What about the bright young man from Budapest? What’s he doing now?”

  “He agreed to come to Longview Labs. His work there would be classified, but he would have an ownership stake in all patents derived from his ideas. He would be well paid and well supported and otherwise free to live as he wished.”

  Somehow Peter didn’t think this story had a happy ending. “But?”

  “Unfortunately,” Oliver said, “he had published a video of his robot climbing the curtains. Another team arrived at his home at the same time as our people. We believe they were Russians. The young man did not survive. And we are not the only two nations seeking these advanced technologies. This is the new arms race.”

  Above the kitchen door, the clock ticked away the seconds, one by one.

  * * *

  —

  June got up and poured herself a glass of water. “Okay, we get the picture,” she said. “Now let’s talk about the breach itself. I assume your security is top-notch. How did they get in?”

  “Our measures are excellent,” Oliver said. “But security is only as good as the people using it. Our systems administrator found an excuse to log on to our air-gapped server, copied our data onto some kind of flash drive, then left the premises. He was a former NSA admin with all the necessary clearances and a spotless record over twenty years of service.”

  “Somebody got to him,” Peter said.

  “More than that,” Oliver said. “Internal security discovered the problem within the hour and sent a team to his house. They found him dead in his living room, along with his wife and three children, none of whom had been to school for the last week. They were killed with a meat cleaver taken from a kitchen drawer. Their limbs were severed from their bodies.”

  “Jesus,” June said.

  “Indeed. Our working assumption is that the family was held hostage and tortured in exchange for the data. The hostage-taker was extremely careful. We have no witnesses, no fingerprints, no DNA, and no suspects.”

  Peter asked, “How did the hostage-taker know what to steal?”

  “That is a very good question. We are still looking into that.”

  June’s voice was quiet. “How old were the children? I want to see their faces.”

  God, she was tough, Peter thought. She would use the images of those poor kids as fuel in her hunt for their killer.

  Oliver knew it, too. He woke his phone and set it on the table where she could see it. “Their names were Andy, Erica, and Tim. Ages two, four, and seven.”

  She stared at the image for a long moment as tears ran down her cheeks.

  “Okay,” she said. The muscles stood out in her jaw and neck. “Okay.”

  27

  Now,” Oliver said, “I have told you what I know. Tell me what you have learned about the market shooting, and what’s happened since then.”

  Peter talked about how he and Lewis had gone looking for the gunman’s crazy electric bike. About the hipster bik
e shop, which had led them to Kiko’s Welding, which had led them to the custom bike-making class at the MakerSpace, where they met Spark.

  “Not only did she have a red Cardinals jacket in her workroom, Lewis saw an assault rifle’s receiver, a restricted part that she or someone else had probably made, sitting on her desk. Apparently she’s got a live-in boyfriend, very mysterious. When we tried to talk to her, she locked us out of her workshop, tore a vent hood off the wall, and escaped through the resulting hole.”

  Oliver said, “Did you get her information from the MakerSpace people? Address and phone?”

  “You mean after we kicked down the door to her shop?” Peter shook his head. “Our tour guide claimed they only knew her as Spark. They have an email address for her, but nothing more.”

  “I’ll look in the public databases,” June said. “If the name change is official, maybe I can find out what it used to be.”

  Oliver turned to June. “Peter said you were attacked today.”

  “A guy hit me with his car door as I was riding my bike to the paper. He tried to get me into his van, but I didn’t let him. Later in the afternoon, he apparently installed a pair of wireless cameras on our block so he could spot me on my way home. He tried to run me down in the street in front of my own house. I can only assume it’s about the market shooting. But that’s not the interesting part.”

  Oliver raised his eyebrows. “If that’s not interesting to you, I’d like to hear what is.”

  “I think I know the guy whose phone got taken.”

  “What?” Peter asked. “You didn’t want to lead with that?”

  She gave him that brilliant smile. “I didn’t know it meant anything until a few minutes ago.”

  She told them how she thought she’d recognized his face at the market, then spent her morning searching through tech stories trying to identify him, finally finding his photo as part of a startup story from eleven years ago. “He looks totally different now, but I’m pretty sure it’s him.”

  “What’s the name?” Oliver asked.

  “Vincent Holloway,” June said. “Good luck tracking him down, though. He seems to have vanished entirely. For a guy who made half a billion dollars eleven years ago, he’s done very little since. Zero social media presence, zero Internet presence. Doesn’t that seem odd in the tech world?”

  “Yes,” Oliver said. “I’ll check our files to see if there is a connection to my group.”

  “But you’ll talk to your spooky friends, right? You’ll find him?”

  “I will call in some favors,” Oliver said. “But I cannot go through my normal channels. No official fingerprints, remember?”

  Peter shook his head. “So we’re taking all the risks, but get none of the resources?”

  “I believe we’ve already had this conversation. Let me make sure you understand your task. You will destroy all evidence of our technology and deliver the culprits to me. Yes?”

  “Agreed,” June said.

  “It might not be that clean,” Peter said.

  “Understood.” Oliver looked at the clock again and stood up. “Unfortunately, I must leave. You’ve learned a lot in a day and a half. Keep at it.” He handed June a plain black phone. “You can reach me through this. Send me updates throughout the day. I’ll respond when I can.”

  Peter said, “I’ll walk you out.”

  * * *

  —

  The sky had cleared and the evening turned windy and cold. With little moon, the side yard was dark. They walked toward the garage and the driveway to the street.

  “I fully understand your reservations,” Oliver said. “Unfortunately, I have no way to dispel them except to ask you to have faith in me and in your country.”

  Peter still held the heavy Colt in his left hand. Now in a cool fury, he put his right hand between Oliver’s shoulder blades and shoved hard, intending to slam the other man face-first into the garage wall.

  Oliver did an elegant twist and pivot, redirecting the force into a lateral move that brought him face-to-face with Peter, hands up and ready as if that had been his intention all along. “Mr. Ash—”

  Lewis flew out of the shadows like a guided missile and crashed the smaller man into the side of the garage.

  Peter heard the clapboards crack with the impact. Oliver’s knees buckled. Peter picked him up by the front of his long black coat and held him against the wall with his right forearm against Oliver’s chest and the gun barrel under his chin. He leaned in close enough to smell the other man’s minty toothpaste.

  “Let me make this clear to you, Oliver. I’ve done more than my share for my fucking country. I don’t care about runaway technology or whatever other game you’re playing. That’s not my department. I care about June.” He screwed the gun barrel deeper into the other man’s flesh. “If anything happens to her, and I mean anything, there is no place you can hide. I will track you to the ends of the earth. Do you fucking understand me?”

  Oliver’s face showed neither pain nor distress, only the same dispassionate calm he’d displayed the entire evening. In Peter’s experience, this was not just the sign of a national security professional, but also of a true believer. Peter didn’t like it.

  For true believers, it wasn’t about emotion or ego or career advancement. It was about doing the work, no matter the cost. No matter how many bodies piled up.

  That’s what made true believers so dangerous.

  Peter had been one himself, until the war beat it out of him.

  Now all he had left to believe in was people. His friends and family. The people he loved.

  The wind whistled cold through the trees.

  “I accept your terms, Mr. Ash.” Oliver’s voice was raspy from the pressure of the pistol. “I pledge to you now, of my own free will, that I will do everything in my power to protect Ms. Cassidy from harm, within the constraints of my own mission. If I fail in that, my life is forfeit. So help me God.”

  “Easy to say with a gun to your head. And that caveat, the constraints of your mission. Why the fuck should I trust you?”

  “Some say honor is an antiquated notion. But our word is all we have in this life. And how we cleave those words to deeds. I believe you understand this. Your actions indicate that you are a man with a profound moral center. You wish to do what is right.”

  Peter had to will himself not to pull the trigger then and there. “Asshole, you don’t know a goddamn thing about me.”

  Oliver’s eyes were the color of night. “Do you know what a black hole is, Mr. Ash?”

  “A collapsed star. A gravity well so powerful that even light can’t escape.”

  “Invisible to the naked eye, yet its gravitational field affects everything around it. Like a black hole, Mr. Ash, you reveal yourself through the nature of the events that surround you. And the quality of the people who give you their loyalty.” He glanced at Lewis, then gave Peter a skeletal smile. “I find that loyalty goes both ways, does it not?”

  He didn’t need to make the threat explicit. Peter was well aware of the danger his fugitive status posed to June, and to Lewis and Dinah and the boys. The wreck it would make of their lives.

  Honor was a sword that cut deep, no matter who swung the blade.

  Peter lowered the pistol and stepped back. “I will hold you to your word.”

  “I expect nothing less.” To his credit, Oliver didn’t roll his shoulders, which surely ached from the bruising impact with the garage, or brush the splinters from his coat. He merely said, “I look forward to news of your progress,” then turned to go.

  They watched as he walked across the neighboring lawn toward a black government Suburban idling in front of Dinah’s house, parked out of the way of the MPD evidence van.

  As the Suburban drove away, Lewis looked at Peter. “So we working for spooks now?”

  Peter felt th
e weight of it in his chest. “Not you, Lewis. Just me.”

  He heard a low rumble. It took him a moment to realize Lewis was laughing.

  “Shit, Jarhead. I ain’t staying home.” His tilted smile shone white in the night. “And I don’t know why you’re making such a damn fuss anyway. Not like June was ever gonna do anything different, once she got her teeth into this. Not you, neither.” He thumped Peter’s chest with his fist. “You think you want the simple life, but you’re still a goddamn Marine, looking for the next righteous reason to kick somebody’s ass.”

  The hell of it was, Lewis was right.

  The white static sparked and crackled, that high-performance engine shifting into gear at the prospect of action.

  Peter blew out his breath. “Okay,” he said. “What’s next?”

  28

  While Lewis set Mingus up with food and water in the backyard, then took his family to a hotel downtown, Peter and June left in the Subaru. They agreed that, although it was a reasonable read that Mr. Cheerful had been working solo and that losing his van would slow him down for a few hours, the safest move would be to assume nothing. Peter had insisted that June carry a small chrome .22 in her bag. She didn’t object.

  Peter took a winding route through the city, punctuated with abrupt turns and seemingly random detours through busy commercial districts and quiet residential neighborhoods, one eye on the rearview the whole time.

  As they passed the art museum, the car’s interior bright with ambient light, June gave him a funny look. “What,” he said.

  June licked the ball of her thumb and rubbed at a spot on his forehead. “You had a little blue ink right there,” she said. “From that pen I threw at you.”

  He smiled, pointed the little car toward the Hoan Bridge overpass, and stepped on the gas.

  She didn’t look away. “Are we okay?”