If a company thought they had found a star, they didn’t have the patience to wait for fancy credentials. So he had traded in a PhD—and the prestige of being introduced as Dr. Bram—for a multimillion-dollar salary.
Apple was aggressively pursuing a number of AI and AGI programs that were well advertised, but they were also working on a few that they couldn’t have kept more secret. Bram wasn’t allowed to share his work with anyone, or even reveal that the Apple facility he worked at had anything to do with AGI. There were spies behind enemy lines in Nazi Germany who hadn’t needed to maintain the level of secrecy that was required of David Bram. This was frustrating, but given that his work and pay were both highly stimulating, this was a sacrifice he was willing to make.
If anyone asked him what he did, he was most often able to smoothly deflect the conversation elsewhere. If he was pressed, he had studied up on highly technical advances being made in the area of smart phones, advances that were kosher to talk about, and pretended that he worked on these. Riley’s probing questions—not nosy but genuinely interested—had been so good he was forced to study harder to continue to lie convincingly.
But was he convincing? Was she so bright she could sense he lacked the depth he would be expected to have had this really been his life’s work?
Perhaps this was one of the reasons for her reticence. She knew that he was keeping a huge part of his life from her. How could this not contribute to her reluctance to commit to the relationship? How could it not raise a specter of mistrust?
Did the fact that he was Jewish play a role? He had brought this up, and she insisted she didn’t care. But would she tell him the truth if she did? Was he just a fun diversion until she found a Christian to marry?
The sun dropped its last inch below the Pacific, completing the daily spectacle that occurred just outside of Bram’s home. He wanted to take Riley’s hand and lead her back inside, but this smacked too much of romance and love, so he motioned for her to follow him instead.
He led her to the kitchen and poured them both goblets of red wine. “How was your dinner last night with your uncle?” he asked, managing to keep the hurt from his tone. He had tried to avoid bringing this up all day but couldn’t stop himself any longer.
Riley was very close with her uncle, Michael O’Banion, who had frequent business in San Diego and who liked to take her out to dinner whenever he was in town to catch up on her life.
Bram had no trouble with that. It was just that after almost a year of dating, even given Riley’s success in keeping their relationship casual, it wouldn’t have been crazy for him to meet her uncle. Outside of her colleagues at the animal shelter, Uncle Michael O’Banion was about the only person she ever spoke about.
If someone was important in Riley’s life, he was important in Bram’s life.
Only she had no interest in having them meet, even after Bram had pushed to join them for dinner as hard as he thought he could. He tried not to let this bother him, but it did.
Even though O’Banion was family and not a romantic interest, Bram was a little jealous of the closeness they seemed to share. But his real jealousy when it came to Riley wasn’t even directed at anyone human. Instead, it was directed at the entire canine species, whose members had never once failed to demonstrate Riley’s enormous capacity for love.
If only some of this love could be directed his way.
Bram was a huge dog lover, himself, but he was like Cruella de Vil when compared to Riley. She loved dogs for all of the obvious reasons—because who didn’t love dogs? But he had the feeling she loved dogs even more for not being human. That she found humanity fatally flawed and would much rather spend her time around a species with no hidden agendas, no capacity for cruelty.
But he couldn’t be too jealous. After all, he owed their relationship—despite it being more shallow than he would have liked—to this four-legged species.
Given that Riley hadn’t spent a day in college and they were in markedly different socioeconomic strata, on paper they should have never met, and it should never have worked if they had. But dogs had brought them together. Or, more specifically, Bram’s dog, Ash, a rollicking Australian Shepherd whom he had boarded often at the Helen Woodward Animal Center, where Riley worked.
While the organization focused primarily on finding homes for rescue pets, which it did thousands of times each year, it also maintained both equine and small animal hospitals, along with a kennel, which Bram had used since arriving in San Diego, never guessing this would help him meet the girl of his dreams.
Riley loved her job at Helen Woodward, and as far as Bram could tell, everyone there loved her. But as if her work at the Center wasn’t selfless enough, she had become a volunteer puppy raiser three years earlier for another San Diego organization, one that provided highly trained assistance dogs to people with disabilities, either Labradors or golden retrievers. Puppy raisers pledged not to get a dog of their own, but rather to focus their full attention on raising, loving, and socializing the puppy they were given, and bringing it to mandatory obedience training classes.
This wasn’t the selfless part. Labrador and golden puppies could melt anyone’s heart. The hard part was when the organization wanted them back, for further training and so they could enhance the lives of the disabled.
As sad as Riley was when she had to give up each temporary pet, she at least knew the dog would live a healthy and happy life helping others, and within a month she would get another puppy, beginning the cycle all over again.
Bram, on the other hand, was still suffering from the recent loss of his dog. Unlike Riley’s dogs, Ash wasn’t simply going off to college, but had passed away, just weeks earlier. Bram had decided to wait a month or two before beginning the search for his next pet, which would certainly be a rescue dog. Riley had given up her latest puppy for adoption just a week earlier, so this marked the first window since they had met when both were without dogs, although this window was sure to be short.
Riley took a sip of wine and shrugged in response to Bram’s question about her dinner with Uncle Mike. “Honestly, it was pretty boring,” she replied, with all the believability of a woman savoring award-winning cheesecake while mercifully assuring her dieting friend that it really wasn’t that good. “You didn’t miss much.”
He thought about responding that his request to join them wasn’t about being entertained, but bit his tongue. He hadn’t expected the two of them to start spinning plates for his amusement, after all. The point had been to meet her uncle, regardless of how boring or scintillating the evening turned out to be.
“I did most of the talking,” continued Riley. “Mostly about the antics of beagles and bulldogs. Stories you’ve heard a thousand times before,” she finished with an incandescent grin.
Bram smiled back, even though he knew this was her way of dismissing the topic. “But they never get old,” he replied, rolling his eyes. He was about to let her off the hook and change the subject entirely, when his virtual assistant, Genie, beat him to the punch. “David, a visitor is approaching your door,” she said, her disembodied voice soft and pleasant. “Should I put him on screen?”
“Please do,” said Bram. There were dozens of monitors built into the walls around the premises, and the one closest to him changed from showing an image of a breathtaking mountain view to showing a determined-looking man preparing to press the intercom button outside of his front door.
Bram had borrowed the term “on screen,” from Star Trek, and had asked Genie to use it whenever appropriate, which made him feel like the captain of the Enterprise and usually brought a smile to his face. But this time it only brought sadness, as this visitor underscored Ash’s absence. Usually, it was a race to see if his dog or his digital assistant would be the first to alert him that someone was approaching his door, and the lack of barking was deafening.
The solicitor outside looked rugged and overly serious. Bram was in no mood to deal with him. It was past sunset, after all. He
turned to Riley and shook his head. “Are you up for pretending we’re not home?”
“It’ll be a tough challenge,” said Riley with a wry smile, “but I think I can manage. You know, classically trained Shakespearean actoooor that I am,” she said, hamming up the word actor so much that Bram couldn’t help but laugh.
Unfortunately, their inaugural performance of “we’re not really here” lasted all of ten seconds.
“I know you’re in there, Mr. Bram,” said the visitor after a few failed attempts to get a response. “I’m Special Agent Jeff Parker with the FBI, and it’s urgent that I speak with you.”
Parker swiped an icon on his phone and his FBI credentials now appeared on Bram’s 3D touchscreen monitor alongside his image. Bram’s security system crosschecked the ID with FBI records, which were available at a secure site for just this purpose, and confirmed that Jeff Parker’s credentials were legitimate.
Riley eyed Bram questioningly. “Anything you want to tell me about?” she asked, half joking and half serious. “You aren’t a criminal mastermind, by any chance, are you?”
Bram shook his head and looked totally mystified. “Not as far as I know,” he replied slowly.
14
Cameron Carr stood at the entrance to David Bram’s beachfront home and wondered what he would do if the man still didn’t let him in, despite his authentic FBI credentials.
Not that he had fully figured out what he was going to say or do once he did get inside.
Carr was still uncertain if he was making the right move. But he prided himself on being bold, and he rarely second guessed himself. Now was no time to start. Besides, he had already announced himself at Bram’s door, so the time for reconsideration was over.
Since Carr had left the Pentagon three days earlier he had made considerable progress on his mission, but not in the way the Secretary of Defense had probably expected.
Carr had worked as a spy in multiple countries, but he had done the bulk of his work in Russia. He spoke the language and had lived there for years. So when he learned that intel suggested Russia’s AGI programs had been sabotaged as severely as those in the US, beginning two years earlier, he knew exactly how they would react.
A lot more quickly and decisively than the US had reacted.
In the US, when standard intelligence gathering efforts had failed to identify the saboteur, it had taken the destruction of DARPA’s master supercomputer housed within Area 51 for the president and Troy Dwyer to finally decide to send a single operative on a scorched-earth mission to get to the bottom of this mess. The Russians, on the other hand, wouldn’t have been nearly so shy.
Assuming Russia wasn’t behind this, an assumption Carr decided he would make, at least initially, he was all but certain they had mounted a similar program, only a year or more before Dwyer had.
And that meant one thing: Major Marat Volkov.
Carr considered himself to be a realist when it came to his own abilities. He might pretend to be humble, but his survival depended on him having a clear-eyed sense of his own skills. He was very good at what he did. Certainly one of the top five operatives the US had recently produced.
But Major Marat Volkov was the best Russia had ever fielded. And no one else was even a close second. He spoke five languages, including unaccented English as eloquently as the most educated natives.
The man was both respected and feared around the world, nicknamed The Wolf in the international community, both for his predatory nature and ferocity, and also because his name was derived from the Russian word for this formidable creature.
For an operation this important, Volkov would almost certainly have been put in charge.
So why should Carr reinvent the wheel? Why not just cheat? Why brave a deadly, booby-trapped ancient Peruvian temple to retrieve a golden idol when you could just wait outside for Indiana Jones to emerge with your prize?
Dwyer had all but given Carr a license to kill, but only because he had known Carr would use it very reluctantly, if at all. Dwyer had raised this specter more to underscore the criticality of the mission than for any other reason.
But Volkov, on the other hand, was surely being his typical, ruthless self. The fact that the saboteur was still at large spoke volumes about just how tough this case really was. Because if Marat Volkov needed to kill a dozen innocent children to get the hint of a lead, he wouldn’t hesitate to do so.
So even if Volkov’s skills were no better than Carr’s, and even if the major had not been given a head start, the Russian was likely to end up well ahead of him. So why not just steal the fruits of the major’s labor? If he could locate Volkov and learn what avenues he was pursuing, he could catch up in a hurry.
And there were two highly placed double agents in Moscow that Carr had personally turned who could point him in the right direction, which, for this case, could be anywhere on the globe.
When Carr had pulled on this thread, he couldn’t have been more surprised and delighted to learn that the esteemed major was in San Diego, California. Right in his own backyard.
Carr had managed to catch up with Volkov just that morning, but not before the Russian, with a three-man team in tow, had killed a male guest at the downtown Sheraton hotel in cold blood. Volkov had folded the man’s body inside a large duffel bag and had wheeled it down to his car, as though he was leaving for a morning round of golf. The body was then taken from his trunk to an incinerator and disposed of.
If Carr hadn’t found Volkov and been given the authority to use the US military and intelligence apparatus as though they were his personal playthings—re-tasking a satellite to conduct around-the-clock surveillance of the Russian—no one would have ever known that this murder had taken place. As it was, they had only caught this after the fact, when the man’s body was being disposed of.
When facial recognition had failed to determine the victim’s identity, Carr had immediately called in a team of experts, who had managed to trace Volkov back to the man’s room, only to learn that the guest had checked in under a false identity. DNA and fingerprints found in the room were a match to previous guests and hotel staff, except in one case, where a DNA sample didn’t match any DNA on record.
So far all roads seemed to dead-end.
But while Carr had yet to learn the identity of this link in whatever chain Volkov had constructed, after the murder, a street camera had filmed fragments of a conversation between Volkov and his men, and lip-reading software was able to divine the Russian words he had spoken with ninety-nine-percent accuracy.
While the camera had missed large chunks of the conversation as various pairs of lips came into and out of view, it was clear the major was planning to raid the Del Mar home of one David Bram. The home had state-of-the-art security, and while this wouldn’t prove much of a deterrent to someone like Volkov, he wanted to plan the raid out carefully, just to be sure he hadn’t missed anything and that no mistakes were made.
He and his team—which included Captain Sergei Greshnev, one of Volkov’s comrades who Carr knew well—would study the security and hone their plan, meeting outside of Bram’s home at eight p.m. to carry it out. Which meant that Carr had beaten them to Bram’s home by almost ninety minutes.
Carr had the right authority codes to turn the Director of National Intelligence himself into his personal errand boy, so he was able to run deep background checks on both Bram and a woman named Riley Ridgeway, who spent many nights with him, at the highest priority level possible.
And the result of this probe was exactly what Carr had hoped it would be. Because David Bram worked at an Apple facility that American intelligence had confirmed conducted secret AGI research for the company, and the man played an important role in this research.
Bingo. Hard to imagine this could just be a coincidence. The likelihood that Bram was a key link in Volkov’s chain was very high.
Which had led to Carr’s dilemma. Should he continue to observe and follow Volkov from afar? Or should he intercede now, c
hancing that Bram was the Russian’s prized football and that an interception now could change the game forever, not only allowing Carr to catch up on Volkov’s many months of work, but perhaps leapfrog past him. Despite all of Indy’s hard work in the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, his rival, Rene Belloq, had ended up with the golden idol and Jones had been left empty-handed.
It all hinged on Bram’s importance. If he was a minor player, then Carr’s interception would prove largely fruitless and would show his hand too early.
In the end, the deciding factor was that Volkov was now operating on US soil, giving Carr an enormous home field advantage. Without this, Carr would have chosen to continue to trail Volkov and gather any breadcrumbs he left behind. But with the field tilted so strongly in his favor, a gamble like this could prove decisive.
Bram had better be worth it. The moment Carr revealed his presence to the major, the situation would change in a hurry.
Not that Carr wanted to hinder the Russian too much. They were pursuing the same initial goal, after all, learning who was behind the sabotage. The problem was that Carr knew their goals would diverge from there, turning them into fierce competitors.
Carr would want to find the person or people responsible and stop them.
Volkov, on the other hand, would want to find those responsible so he could do whatever was necessary—using threat, punishment, or reward—to press them into service for Mother Russia. He would force them to use their superior skills to continue to bring down the programs of every other AGI initiative in the world, while Russia continued apace, guaranteeing that they would get there first. Even the slowest runner could win a race when all the other entrants had been crippled.
But as he thought about this, Carr realized that America would probably do the same, look the other way and try to turn a liability into an asset. The US hadn’t hesitated to press a number of brilliant Nazi scientists into serving America’s interests after World War II. With stakes this high, it would be easy to justify. This put his mission in an entirely different light, and was something Carr would need to consider further at another time.
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