Clean

by Tom Lytes

  Barbara stopped the golf cart. There was an area of smooth mud, perforated with tiny holes that stretched out in front of them for a hundred yards before it became inundated with water. Marsh grass grew out of the surface, poking through. Along the top of the mud, thousands of tiny crabs reacted to Barbara and Peggy’s presence, running for cover into their tiny house holes.

  “This area will be submerged again soon as the tide comes up,” Barbara said, pointing to the water line.

  Peggy looked beyond the marsh, now, and saw the Sullivan’s Island Bridge, the City of Charleston and the Ravenel Bridge connecting Mount Pleasant to Charleston’s downtown, way off in the distance. There were boats speeding along the waterway, and one was pulling somebody on an inner tube. The sun was huge in the sky as it descended behind everything, casting a warm glow of light that made everything seem okay, everywhere.

  “It’s so beautiful here,” Peggy said quietly.

  “It is,” Barbara said. “People always think about the ocean side of the island because it’s more obvious, but back here is special too.”

  There was a noise and a scuffling sound several feet from them in a tall stand of marsh grass. It was hard to see exactly where it came from or what made the sound. While the view continued to create postcard worthy visages, Barbara and Peggy only had eyes for the areas of green marsh grass that seemed to be reacting to the noise. Peggy’s police training kicked into high gear.

  They heard the rustling sound again, and Barbara whispered, “Do you hear that?”

  “I do,” Peggy said. “It’s coming towards us.”

  It was at that moment when a fat chicken popped out of the tall grass. It was followed by a rooster that Peggy knew to be a Rhode Island Red, and another less distinguished looking hen with most of its feathers pecked off its back.

  “Chickens?” Peggy hollered in disbelief as she relaxed.

  She started to laugh, and after a few beats Barbara joined until they were both in hysterics. The chickens could have cared less. They continued past the two of them, eating the bugs that flitted in and around where the marsh met dry land.

  “Chickens in the marsh,” said Peggy. She mumbled almost inaudibly, “Ms. Bourgeaux…. She said to be attentive when I saw them. ‘Be aware of what’s really happening,’ she said.”

  “What? Who?” Barbara asked.

  “It was a woman I met who, I think, is a little psychic,” Peggy said as she thought about Ms. Bourgeaux, her dead shooter husband, and Finley. “She predicted this moment would happen.”

  Peggy pointed at the chickens, deep in thought.

  “What, this moment with the chickens?” Barbara asked as she looked after the birds.

  “Yes,” Peggy said. “When she told me about it, while I was in New York, a lot was happening— I didn’t even know what a marsh like this even was. Marshes in New England are fresh water and swampy. They aren’t anything like this.”

  “Oh, yeah, well,” Barbara said, “that’s odd that somebody would be able to predict you coming to the marsh and being startled by chickens.”

  “She does seem like a good psychic at this moment, I’ll give her that,” Peggy said.

  Barbara nodded, “Some people on the island keep their own chickens, just to eat fresh eggs. Wow, was I not expecting them to pop out of the grass like that just now. They scared me half to death.”

  “Yeah, me too,” Barbara asked. She turned in her seat and took off her sunglasses. “I looked you up on the internet, to see what you were investigating. After I read about the murders in your town, up there in New York, I connected what you said about investigating Leonard. Sitting at my desk, thinking, well, I never trusted him. What’s he involved with that would bring you all the way down here?”

  Peggy looked at the tail end of a chicken as it disappeared into the marsh grass.

  “I can’t discuss it right now,” Peggy said.

  Barbara didn’t hide her disappointment. Her lips pursed tight.

  “I was just wondering. Two people involved with the Town’s finance committee died in separate accidents over the past two weeks. One on a boat and the other accidentally ate poison. It just seemed odd because word around town is that something wasn’t quite right with the balance sheet with last year’s municipal spending. Those two guys signed off on it—”

  Her words trailed off and Barbara looked wistful.

  “Then you showed up—”

  “It might be related,” Peggy said quietly.

  “I thought so.”

  16

  Leonard knew getting things done could be messy. His own country was ruthless, and before they cast him out of their fold, he’d witnessed immeasurable harm to others in the pursuit of accomplishing grand goals. Maybe that was why they rid themselves of him. He knew too much but was impossible to kill. He didn’t even know his role in the mechanics of his country’s government when he was cast out. Was he a spy? A computer anarchist? He’d been called both. They’d suspected he’d have a way to spill secrets if he met an untimely death, so they kept him alive but ostracized. Leonard, or rather Vortmit, had made sure they worried about it.

  He took a bite of his sandwich and checked into the program. It was easy to get lost in the pages of names Clean monitored. It read like a phone book. A percentage of every page would be dead within a few months. Most of the time, people deserved what they got.

  Most of the time. Clean needed maintenance, and now was one of those times.

  Apparently, Clean was unaware how the words “caddy” and “gossip” could be used in the same sentence. For reasons Leonard couldn’t determine, the program killed seventy-two people who’d used the combination on social media since last Wednesday.

  Leonard took another bite of his sandwich, pausing to look at the view out his window. A large boat carrying shipping containers of various colors was making its way to the harbor cranes for unloading. He wondered where it came from, China? Or his native Germany?

  He thought about the hours it would take to fix the programming behind Clean’s mistaken offense to “caddy” and “gossip” used together.

  “Worst things have happened,” he said, shrugging indifferently before finishing his lunch, “than collateral damage.”

  The mistakes Clean made wouldn’t interfere with his goals. The money he was making from Rhodes would tee up the next phase of his plans. Everything was coming together. He imagined the fall of Carson Palmer and Bobby Touro, and how he was creating opportunity.

  Peggy’s ride with Barbara ended back at the house, with Barbara promising to check on Peggy frequently.

  After waving goodbye and thanking her for the place to stay, Peggy found Saltines in the cupboards. It wasn’t long before she vowed to shop for food, and she added it to her current list of needed items which included a toothbrush, clothes, and open-toed shoes.

  Finley called, and Peggy grabbed the sleeve of saltines and planted herself on a plastic chair overlooking the water.

  “What do you have?” Peggy asked.

  “Couldn’t you think of a nicer greeting, Peg? I am helping you after all.”

  “That remains to be seen, and I’m still not sure I buy your stories, to be honest.”

  Peggy heard Finley exhale in exasperation.

  “What do I have to do?” he asked.

  “You’ll figure something out. What do you have on Leonard?”

  “I’ll come down there,” Finley persisted. “I’ll come see you. We can spend some time together. The investigation up here into the murders has hit a standstill for now, anyway.”

  Peggy didn’t respond, and she imagined Finley being with her, enjoying the view with his pasty white legs and white socks.

  “Leonard’s full name is Leonard Roberts,” Finley finally said. “He paid two-million dollars for the land alone at 1311 Middle Street and a builder filed a
permit for an almost three-million-dollar house. The assessor didn’t do him any favors and put a taxable value at close to six million based upon comparable sales.”

  “Okay, that matches up with what I’ve learned, more or less.”

  “Yeah, the next part is interesting,” Finley said. “Leonard Roberts worked at Microsoft in Seattle, starting pretty much when he came out of college. His LinkedIn biography shows brief stints at several start-up companies in tech after leaving the area a little while ago.”

  “All right, what’s the interesting part?”

  “You know I do a lot for the Bureau with computers, and maybe you didn’t know that we often work in partnership with the bigger tech companies to identify threats. Both to the country, and to our companies, especially as they become more international. Anyway, I spoke with Leonard Robert’s old boss.”

  “Wow,” Peggy said. It was startling to her how much reach the FBI had once they focused on finding out about somebody.

  Finley continued, “I found out he was a maverick, and not much of a team player. Microsoft fired him.”

  “For being a loner?”

  “No, not exactly. It sounds like he became distracted by side projects and consulting work with start-ups that hired him. The picture I got is that Leonard Roberts is the real deal, a guy who knows as much about computers as anyone. They kept him on for that, not because he was the nicest, most adjusted guy around.”

  “So, he was a genius loner?”

  “Cocky, too, apparently,” Finley said. “Now, listen to this. This is what I meant when I said what I learned was interesting.”

  “Okay,” Peggy said, playing along. “Tell me.”

  She went into the house and took a handful of change from a hand purse. Picking out a few dimes, she put them in the corner of the kitchen, the living room, and dining room. The floorplan made it tough to know when rooms ended and began so she planted dimes in other random nooks and crannies too.

  “Keeps the bad spirits at bay,” Peggy said, remembering Ms. Bourgeaux.

  “What?” Finley asked.

  “Sorry, nothing, go on.”

  “Leonard’s profile online, all his history, it’s only really able to be verified for the past thirteen months. That’s when his LinkedIn, Facebook and other online accounts became active.”

  “So, there’s a lot of information to be found about Leonard Roberts—”

  “A whole lifetime worth, but it didn’t appear until last year.”

  “Huh,” Peggy said, feeling more unsettled about her call with Leonard than ever. “What did the Microsoft guy say?”

  “He’d worked with Leonard for about a year. Leonard’s old boss died of a heart attack, so he can’t be questioned about what happened before that. For Microsoft, he did software programing and debugging. He was brilliant at it, but not entirely motivated. I asked about the side projects that derailed him at Microsoft.”

  “Wow, Fin.”

  “Yeah, so for a while, Leonard was pretty balanced, keeping everything together at work and maintaining a heavy schedule with side projects. He was working a lot but managing it. The biggest side project was for a non-profit out of San Francisco that tried to create a program that would perfectly match donors to non-profits by learning what their passions were. It would factor personality types and potential working relationships, things in common with various people at the non-profit. It sounded a little invasive, as far as personal information is concerned, but it had huge potential to raise money.”

  “That’s pretty ambitious.”

  “Yeah,” Finley said. “Evidently, Leonard got behind it, big time. He spent all his spare time working on it.”

  “Then something happened, I’m guessing,” Peggy said.

  “Yeah, there was another volunteer working with Leonard, and somewhere along the way, he sold some of the technology the two of them were working on to an internet company out of The Cayman Islands. Leonard flipped out with anger. A viral marketing program that could ‘learn’ what somebody liked or wanted by monitoring their email, texting communications, online searches, and online purchases came from the software and Leonard rightfully thought he’d been screwed.”

  “Sounds like it. How could the program do that?” Peggy asked

  “Well, through artificial intelligence. Let me describe it in a different way. Pick a product or thing, anything,” Finley said.

  “Okay, how about a swimming pool.”

  “All right,” Finley said. “If Leonard’s program saw that you were talking about swimming pools online, it would do a property search for you and your known relatives to see if you owned a pool. If you didn’t, the program would start sending you ads for pool installers. If you already owned a pool, it would send you advertisements for pool maintenance supplies. The program would learn what types of advertising worked, given your age and location and other factors. It would get better and better at selling to you as it collected information.”

  “Is it legal to monitor information like that?” Peggy asked.

  Finley said, “That’s a shade of gray. I’m not sure where that line is drawn in legal terms.”

  “And how would the program find people?”

  Finley said, “It was totally viral, growing incrementally as people who were already in the program interacted with new people. The program systematically mined the contacts stored in phones and on personal computers for new people to monitor.”

  “Wow, that doesn’t seem right,” Peggy said. She was sitting back out on the plastic chair outside, having finished placing all the dimes she had in various corners. Finley kept on with the story.

  “It’s scary but pretty cool too,” Finley said. “Leonard’s boss said he took a look at the programming. Some of the early prototypes didn’t quite work. Honestly, it sounded like Leonard wasn’t disciplined enough to put the time into its success. There were some venture capital guys who were eager to get involved, but that isn’t unusual at Microsoft.”

  “Maybe when he felt ripped off by his partner, he found the dedication to fix the problems. If Leonard got it to work, I would imagine companies would pay a lot of money for something like that.”

  “Well that’s what happened, eventually,” Finley said. “Leonard quit shortly afterward. He was working on adapting it somehow, according to his old Microsoft supervisor. He’d become disillusioned with the non-profit. The Microsoft guy was a little scared of Leonard at the end.”

  “He said that?” Peggy asked.

  “Those were his words, yeah. Leonard kept talking about nightmares, things he’d done that he felt guilty about.”

  Peggy thought about Leonard’s house. It was expensive. The money came from somewhere. The story Finley was telling fit and might suggest how a smart computer program became involved with murder.

  “What happened to the partner? The one Leonard thought screwed him over?”

  “He disappeared.”

  “What—”

  “Yeah, Peggy, so be careful down there.”

  She asked, “From what the Microsoft guy said, do you think the program could be modified to decide if somebody was good or bad?”

  “Like collect information, and instead of using it to sell you stuff, it would judge you?”

  “Yeah,” Peggy said, biting her lip involuntarily. Leonard’s words replayed in her thoughts, “I wrote it— It’s a program called Clean. You are in danger….

  “I guess,” Finley said.

  “Holy shit,” Peggy said as she stood quickly, suddenly needing to move her body. Was it Leonard’s Clean program that sent her Snapchat messages? “Anything else?”

  “Yeah,” Finley said. “I guess Leonard and his buddy released a version of his marketing program that was selling stuff, and they lost control of it. The Microsoft guy was kind of freaked out about it. He kept going on about the m
oral responsibilities of Artificial Intelligence and the unregulated nature of the internet.”

  “Oh, wow, that’s not good, is it?”

  “No, not good,” Finley agreed.

  “What happened to that program?”

  “No idea,” Finley said.

  Peggy thought about what she heard. Was it possible that Leonard came up with a program that could commit murder?

  “One other thing,” Finley said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I guess the employee file is a little thin on Leonard. There’s some vague references to education in Germany and then an area of the old Soviet Union known more for Stalin’s prison camps then the scenery. I tried to run down information but couldn’t find anything.”

  “Is that usual, I mean to have unverified work experience and land a good job at Microsoft?”

  “I don’t really know, but Leonard was, is, a genius, apparently. I bet there’s a whole lot of companies that would look the other way if somebody like him became available to hire.”

  “I bet you’re right,” Peggy said, answering her earlier question all by herself. There was an excellent chance Leonard could invent a program that could coerce people to commit murder.

  She thought about the details of when she was blackmailed. It could have been a computer manipulating Snapchat, making sure she’d received ample motivation and instructions to kill her brother Doyle. And given what Ms. Bourgeaux claimed about the computer involvement in her husband’s contract to kill Floyd, it seemed plausible that Leonard’s program could be behind that too. Peggy looked down at her phone and found the screenshot that instructed her to kill her own brother. She deleted it.

  She said to Finley, “Well, maybe the program works, and only targets the people who actually should die.”

  “Do you hear what you’re saying?” Finley asked. “A computer decides something like life and death?”

  What had Leonard said to her? “You’re in great danger?” Peggy thought back to Leonard’s tone during that phone call. She thought she might understood the context of what he was saying now. Maybe he wasn’t able to control the outcome of his program’s decisions.